For those who didn’t know yet: Christmas is more than holiness and good songs. Christmas has humor, glamor and cool legs. There is Christmas loneliness, Christmas anxiety and Christmas joy. Christmas wears a green glitter dress, a beekeeper suit or a crooked tie. Christmas is sung about, accompanied by a rock band, expressed in dynamic dance steps, and driven around in a sleigh.
This all happens in the almost two-hour revue of Renée (vocals/cello) and Loes (vocals/guitar) Wijnhoven, or Clean Pete. These musical twins, known for their elegant music and intertwined singing, have summarized Christmas love annually since 2018 in a Christmas show with guests and a 25-member choir.
It was shown last Saturday in the Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven, where everything was correct except that the stage seemed too wide for the decor of four illuminated Christmas trees.
Three glitter elves
Clean Pete sings his own songs and translations of well-known songs. The opening was respectable, with a black-clad choir and Loes as conductor of semi-religious songs. But this turned out to be the intro to a well-measured derailment. Three glittering elves do voluptuous choreographies to the surf version of ‘In Excelsis Deo’ with Anne Soldaat on crunching guitar, Loes sings sighing about Santa Claus (“Santa Claus, darling, don’t keep me waiting here tonight”). And riverdance-like dancers in red velvet dresses dance stately, while their footwork sounds like galloping horses.
Loneliness was told in a funny and realistic way by singer/guitarist Mark Lohmann, who sang a duet with Loes. Lohmann turned out to have written his part of their duet during a panic attack in the toilet: a choppy, overcrowded text about the “toilet of my discomfort”.
He offered a counterbalance to the sweetness of the Utrecht singer/songwriter Judy Blank in a sleigh and the beautifully played ‘Irish’ composition of Renée’s cello. During the performance of Australian performer Bumble B. Boy (Tom Harden), the Christmas atmosphere even degenerated into a cacophonous, chaotic light show, and Santa Claus was knocked down by a man in a beekeeper’s suit.
In reconciliation, Renée delivered a moving sermon about music as a religious experience, and that “music has won over God,” as church father Augustine feared in the fourth century. Also in this musical era, she advocated solidarity in her song ‘Pietà’, especially when it is “pain that binds us”.
After this moment of reflection, the showpieces ‘Fairytale of New York’ (The Pogues) and ‘Merry X-Mas Everybody’ (Slade) with swaying choir, jumping sisters and wild musicians were an exuberant reward.
A version of this article also appeared in the December 18, 2023 newspaper.