Cultural Dessert

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

2 July 2024

For a horn player, the chance to play one of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner is a rare treat. During my time as a member of the Northampton Symphony Orchestra I’ve now been lucky enough to play the first horn part in three Bruckner symphonies: No 6 (reviewed here in March 2015), No 4 (reviewed here in February 2020) and No 7 which we performed at St Matthew's Church in Northampton last Saturday. Bruckner’s 7th symphony requires at least 8 horn players rather than the usual 4: for our performance there were 10 of us, including 3 former NSO members and 2 friends from Milton Keynes Sinfonia. Four of my colleagues played the Wagner tubas which feature in the wondrous slow movement and the dramatic finale. Their beautiful second movement quartet was particularly splendid, with Ian Jones’ melody gently soaring above the gorgeous harmonies. Bruckner 7 is a big work, comprising more than an hour of abstract orchestral music with no story to guide the listener through it. But it’s not difficult to listen to if you immerse yourself in it. As with all Bruckner’s symphonies there is beauty, glory and brilliance, tempered by humility and moments of unexpected gentleness. NSO conductor John Gibbons cleverly shaped our performance, resisting the temptation to over-romanticise by pulling the tempos about (as many recordings of the symphony do) and maintaining a steady pulsing momentum that let the music’s emotions reveal themselves. John managed to draw a stunning performance of this mammoth, challenging piece from the orchestra, with the endings of each of the four movements creating magical moments of breath-holding silence. The NSO as a whole seemed to rise to the challenge - even those players who are not such Bruckner fans - but, as I said after both of my previous experiences of playing Bruckner symphonies with NSO, mostly it was about the horns!

The NSO horn section for Bruckner Symphony No 7

The concert opened with Alexander Borodin’s ‘Prince Igor Overture’ which features some of the same tunes as the better-known ‘Polovtsian Dances’ and included a brilliant clarinet solo by Naomi Muller and a lovely horn solo by Ian Jones.

We also played Amy Beach’s ‘Piano Concerto’ with the amazing young pianist Julian Chan. The concerto, which was premiered in 1900 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with the composer as the soloist, was the first piano concerto written by an American woman. It’s a big, dramatic, romantic piece in four movements that deserves to be much better-known. Julian Chan, who joined us last year to play Saint-Saens’ ‘Piano Concerto No 5’ (reviewed here in February 2023) learned the Amy Beach concerto specifically for our concert but gave the impression it had been in his repertoire for years. The lush sprawling piano chords of the lengthy first movement, the gentle clockwork perpetuum mobile piano notes throughout the second movement and the Chopinesque playfulness of the fourth movement were all brilliantly executed. It’s a lovely concerto - and it was a wonderful concert to mark the end of Emily Groom’s tenure as the orchestra’s leader.

Emily joined NSO in 2021, leading the orchestra in our first concert following the Covid-19 lockdowns in October 2021. Her many contributions to our concerts have included beautiful violin solos in 'Symphony No 9' by Ralph Vaughan Williams (reviewed here in October 2022), Rimsky Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade’ (reviewed here in February 2023) and Beethoven’s ‘Romance for violin and orchestra No. 2 in F major’ (reviewed here in July 2023). Many thanks Emily and all best wishes for the future.

Labels: Concerts, Music, NSO23-24

posted by Robin Simpson @ 10:27 am