Cultural Dessert

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

15 March 2022

Saturday’s Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert was both a glorious celebration of being back together in person for live music-making on a grand scale, and a reflection of our lockdown experience. In 2020, unable to meet as normal, the NSO experimented with online rehearsals using Jamulus (open source low latency software). Each week a small group of us played through orchestral repertoire together online. There were plenty of frustrating technical issues and the sound quality was not wonderful but, in the height of lockdown, it was a really enjoyable and rewarding experience (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK4JrGDc7AA). As it was impossible to assemble a full symphony orchestra on Jamulus we were limited to playing orchestral pieces for which our Music Director, John Gibbons, had a piano transcription so he could fill in the missing parts. One of the works I most enjoyed playing on Jamulus was ‘Symphony No. 2’ by Sergei Rachmaninoff - a huge romantic masterpiece. It was a particularly emotional experience to be sitting in my dining room, with headphones on, playing the achingly beautiful slow movement with friends across the Internet, during such a strange and unsettling period in all our lives. 

When we were finally able to return to face-to-face orchestra rehearsals in 2021, albeit with social distancing and other safety measures, we started by playing through a series of shorter pieces each week. One of the works John Gibbons selected for these first tentative steps to bring the orchestra back together was Carl Nielsen's ‘Helios Overture’ - a lovely evocation of a day - from sunrise to sunset - on a Greek island. 

Last Saturday, in the third concert of our 2021-22 season, the NSO played both the ‘Helios Overture’ and Rachmaninoff’s ‘Symphony No 2’ at St Matthew’s Church in Northampton, together with the ‘Piano Concerto No 2’ by Dimitri Shostakovich. I was really looking forward to the concert but wary that this was going to be an ambitious and exhausting programme. To make sure we would be able to cope with the sheer stamina needed to get through the hour-long symphony, and being particularly nervous that it was still all too possible that we might lose some players at the last minute with positive tests for Covid-19, I assembled seven horn players rather than the usual four, enabling us to share the pieces between us. Fortunately all seven horn players were able to take part in the concert, though we did lose several other members of the orchestra because of Covid and had to find some late replacements who did a fantastic job. This meant we were able to play the ‘Helios Overture’ with seven horns doubling up the four parts, which I thought sounded wonderful (though I may be a little biassed!). 

I didn’t play in the Shostakovich concerto but I really enjoyed listening to a stunning performance by the pianist Maria Marchant. Shostakovich wrote the concerto for his teenage son Maxim to play and it’s a very playful, personal piece with a particularly gorgeous romantic second movement. It was an emotional concert in many ways, starting with the Ukrainian national anthem and with Maria Marchant playing a Ukrainian folk song as her encore. 

Rachmaninoff’s ‘Symphony No 2’ provided a rousing romantic finale, featuring a beautiful clarinet solo by Naomi Muller. It was great fun to perform the symphony as part of a large orchestra in front of a packed audience, in contrast to the experience of playing it in a small group, each isolated in our own homes. 

Our next NSO concert, on 21 May, features the ‘Symphony in D minor’ by Cesar Franck - another of the pieces we played on Jamulus. I’m really looking forward to it.

Labels: Concerts, Music

posted by Robin Simpson @ 4:31 pm