Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert
25 October 2022
Last Saturday I played in the first Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert of the orchestra's 2022-23 season - a wonderfully varied programme which attracted a packed audience to St Matthew's Church in Northampton. The concert opened with 'An American in Paris' by George Gershwin, which NSO last played in 2010 (reviewed here in April 2010). Hearing the piece again also brought back happy memories of Christopher Wheeldon's brilliant stage adaptation (of the Vincente Minnelli film) in London in 2017 (reviewed here in April 2017). It was a bright, cheerful performance with a great trumpet solo by Terry Mayo and a perfect lugubrious tuba solo towards the end by Nick Tollervey. We followed this popular work with another perennial favourite, Sergei Rachmaninoff's 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini', with the Ukrainian pianist Dinara Klinton. Dinara previously played with the Northampton Symphony Orchestra in 2017 when she dazzled in the ‘Piano Concerto for the Left Hand’ by Maurice Ravel - a performance that no-one who was at the concert will ever forget (reviewed here in November 2017). Famous for the slow, lush, romantic 18th variation, the 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini' is a challenging piece to pull together, full of fast variations with flurries of piano notes punctuated by precisely placed orchestral stabs. So it was worrying when we discovered, during our final rehearsal on Saturday afternoon, that our pianist's train had been delayed and she might not arrive in time to run through the piece with the orchestra. We started to play it through without the piano solo and, while we were playing (and unseen by conductor John Gibbons) Dinara Klinton ran up the central aisle of the church, threw herself onto the piano stool and instantly joined in the music, just in time to launch into a cadenza - without having removed her backpack from her shoulders. She gave a stunning performance in the concert, taking much of the piece at a dramatically fast pace and lovingly playing with the tempo (and our expectations) in the slow passages. It was a privilege to be accompanying her. We finished the concert with 'Symphony No 9' by Ralph Vaughan Williams - celebrating the composer's 150th anniversary this month with his final symphony. It's a serious, dramatic work, not very well known and not the easiest piece to understand, but it really grew on me as I got to know it over the past couple of months. And it was interesting how much better it seemed to work in performance than rehearsal - perhaps needing the additional concentration and pin-drop silences that you only get in a live concert. Among many fantastic solos, the stand out moments for me were Dan Newitt's gorgeous flugel horn solo in the second movement, the violin solo by orchestra leader Emily Groom and the distinctive saxophone passages, excellently played by Eva Jennings and Vicki Reamsbottopm. It was a great concert which felt like our most complete performance for some time.
posted by Robin Simpson @ 4:01 pm
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