Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert
29 April 2008The latest Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert took place on Saturday at Christ Church in Northampton. We started with the 'Swedish Rhapsody No. 1' by Hugo Alfven - a strange mixed bag of a piece with a very well-known jaunty main theme. It contains some lovely moments - occasionally sounding very like Dvořák to me - but doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind what it wants to be - slipping too often towards the twee. We then tackled the lovely 'Violin Concerto' by Erich Korngold: a lush, tuneful work with many of the qualities of Korngold's best film scores (and showing how he influenced many later film composers - I think John Williams must have been a fan). But also a fiendishly difficult piece with constantly changing time signatures. Although it had gone very well in our final afternoon rehearsal, the performance was a bit hair-raising - particularly in the slow movement - and it is a great credit to the soloist, Thomas Gould, that he didn't catch the orchestra's nervousness and managed to pull us through to the finale. As we embarked on Sibelius' 'Symphony No. 1', our nerves were soothed by an assured opening clarinet solo by Naomi Muller and I think we gave an effective account of the symphony. It was very interesting, having played a couple of Tchaikowsky symphonies recently, to be immersed in Sibelius - a complete contrast in styles and, particularly, in orchestration. The Sibelius symphony is like a jigsaw puzzle where you need all the parts before you can see the whole wonderful picture.
posted by Robin Simpson @ 2:49 pm
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