Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert
24 May 2022
Our Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert last Saturday was dedicated to the memory of Luke Roskams, a long-time member of the orchestra who died suddenly and unexpectedly in April 2021. Luke was a violinist who played for many years with the Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera before moving to Northampton. Our concert featured Luke’s son Benjamin Roskams playing Max Bruch’s ‘Violin Concerto No. 1’ - a gorgeously romantic work that felt particularly poignant. Ben had previously played Bruch's 'Scottish Fantasy' with us (reviewed here in June 2015) and the ‘Romantic Fantasy’ by Arthur Benjamin (reviewed here in February 2019) and it was great to have the opportunity to hear him again. It was a stunning and very moving performance. We started the concert with another emotional piece, the orchestral rhapsody ‘A Shropshire Lad’ by George Butterworth - a young English composer who was killed by a sniper at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 at the age of 31. It’s a beautiful pastoral piece in the style of Vaughan-Williams, which we last played in a NSO concert in 2014 (reviewed here in October 2014). Our performance on Saturday featured some wonderfully delicate playing by the violas and clarinets. We started the second half of the concert with Samuel Barber’s haunting ‘Adagio for Strings’ - a piece that has become increasingly used in memorium. The concert finished with one of the works we played during lockdown in the NSO online rehearsals using Jamulus (open source low latency software), the ‘Symphony in D minor’ by Cesar Franck. This symphony was incredibly popular with audiences in the early twentieth century but then fell out of fashion and is now rarely performed. It’s a very likeable, tuneful piece and our performance featured impressive solos by Jo Bell on cor anglais, Rowena Bass on harp and Ian Jones on horn. It was a lovely concert.
posted by Robin Simpson @ 4:19 pm
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