NSO Play Weekend - Shostakovich 'Symphony No 4'

1 September 2025

Shortly after I joined Northampton Symphony Orchestra (NSO), in 2000, the orchestra ran a great one-day workshop with members of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on 'An Alpine Symphony' by Richard Strauss. I have since taken part in several similar workshops organised by Milton Keynes Sinfonia (reviewed here). These 'play-days' provide the opportunity to tackle a work that the orchestra would not normally be able to perform in a concert - because of its scale, complexity and the additional players needed. They are also very sociable occasions, bringing together the orchestra and guest players to practice, eat together and chat, usually finishing with a full performance of the piece. 

 

Last weekend the NSO ran its first Play Weekend - a two-day workshop on Dimitri Shostakovich's 'Symphony No 4' - for which we gathered a massive orchestra of 120 people. Like most of my NSO colleagues I have played the much more famous 5th Symphony several times (most recently with NSO, reviewed here in November 2016) and a few of Shostakovich's other symphonies but I had never even heard the 4th before. In 1936, when Shostakovich's opera 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' (described by Pravda as “muddle instead of music”) was banned, apparently at Stalin's behest, the composer assumed it was only a matter of time before he would be forced to surrender his life. His 'Symphony No 4', which was then in rehearsal for its first performance, was quickly withdrawn. Instead Shostakovich produced 'Symphony No 5', subtitled ‘A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism’ - a stunningly powerful symphony that appeared to conform to the Soviet state's requirements for triumphalist music (though with many cleverly concealed elements that provide a cynical sting in the tail). The 4th Symphony didn't receive its premiere until 1961. [The Origin Story podcast recently produced an episode on 'Shostakovich and Stalin – The Composer and the Dictator' which gives an overview of Shostakovich’s life in a clear, accessible way - reviewed here in August 2025.]

 

'Symphony No 4' is a long, complex piece. At first it feels brutal, angry, strident and quite difficult to listen to. But as I have got to know it better over the past few weeks it has really grown on me. It's a fascinating work full of contrasts and contradictions, with moments of gentle beauty, lyricism and playfulness alongside its terrifying sheer power. Beginning to appreciate its homage to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, and Shostakovich's reverence for JS Bach, helped me make more sense of its structure and themes. Above all, you need to think about the context of Stalin's Soviet Union to understand both the angst and the occasional whimsy of the music and I was grateful to have read 'The Noise of Time' by Julian Barnes (reviewed here in March 2016) which outlines how Shostakovich found himself a reluctant collaborator with Stalin's regime.

 

The NSO Play Weekend attracted guest musicians from far afield, including players from Newcastle, Norwich and Shrewsbury and one of my fellow horn players who was visiting the UK from Kentucky. It was wonderful to be part of a powerful section of 9 horn players. It was also lovely to see several former NSO members rejoining us for the weekend. I found it a really enjoyable experience - a great mixture of challenging music-making, alongside excellent food and a very friendly atmosphere. Congratulations to everyone involved in organising the weekend - a huge and complicated event which was ingeniously designed and went incredibly smoothly. 

 

There were so many outstanding performances across the orchestra it would be risky to try to name them all for fear of missing some. I particularly enjoyed the 'ticking clock' percussion at the end of the middle movement, the great use of duetting tubas, and the double sets of timpani at the climax of the last movement. But the standout for me was our principal bassoon Sian Bunker, returning to the orchestra after a break, who sounded fantastic in the symphony's many bassoon solos.

 

Our full performance of the symphony on Sunday afternoon felt truly epic and emotional. Being part of such a huge collective endeavour - as one member of a team of 120 people - was very special. NSO Conductor John Gibbons expertly guided us through an impressive rendition of the piece which may have included a few mistakes but avoided any major pitfalls and held together well through its full 65 minutes. Afterwards many of the wind and brass players admitted they were holding their breath while the strings played the impossibly challenging lengthy frantic fugue passage, but it went amazingly well - a real triumph of concentration and counting.

 

The climax of the final movement was a thrilling moment of brilliance but its quiet surrender to the gentle melancholic ending of the symphony was truly stunning. In 'The Noise of Time' Julian Barnes talks about Shostakovich's use of the musical instruction 'morendo' (dying away), pointing out that "few composers finish their lives with a major chord played fortissimo". The long silence that John Gibbons held, following the final quiet chord of the 4th Symphony, was poignant and devastating. I felt proud of what we had achieved, in awe of Shostakovich and utterly exhausted. I can't wait for the next NSO Play Weekend.

 

 

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

7 May 2025

Last Saturday's Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert featured Prokofiev's 'Symphony No 7', which I first played in 1988 as a member of the Manchester Youth Orchestra. Despite having not played the symphony in the intervening years I was amazed, when we started rehearsing it in March 2025, how well I remembered it. There was a rigour to the youth orchestra approach that means I can still remember subdividing the beats to determine the precise lengths of particular notes. Prokofiev's final symphony feels like a companion piece to his first. 'Symphony No 1 (The Classical Symphony)' was completed in 1917 in the style of Haydn and Mozart, and 'Symphony No. 7' (completed in 1952, having been commissioned by the Children’s Division of State Radio and described as a ‘Children’s Symphony’) has a similar clean simplicity. Prokofiev writes beautiful, catchy tunes and the seventh symphony has plenty, with its obvious joyfulness and passion sitting alongside darker poignant moments. He is also a clever orchestrator and, while our NSO performance included many brilliant solos from across the orchestra, this is a symphony in which the stars are the tuba (Nick Tollervey), the piano (Georgina Neil) and the harp (Chris Clarke), all of whom were outstanding. 

Shortly after I joined the NSO in 2000, at one Wednesday rehearsal I was amazed to walk into the room to see Rachel Chapman, who I had played with in the Manchester Youth Orchestra. I didn't know that she had recently moved to Milton Keynes and she didn't realise I was living in Bedfordshire. We were delighted to be reunited and have played together in NSO for nearly 25 years. Saturday was Rachel's final NSO concert as she is moving to the Lake District, and it was lovely to finish our years of playing together with a piece we had both played in the youth orchestra so many years ago. At the end of the symphony, when conductor John Gibbons, asked the trumpets to take a bow, Terry and Stephen deliberately remained seated to allow Rachel to take the applause alone. She has been a really important long serving member of the brass section and was a brilliant Chair of the orchestra. She will be much missed but we hope to see her again as an occasional guest player.

We started Saturday's concert with the'Overture' by the female Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz. Written in 1943 in German‑occupied Warsaw this is an understandably serious piece of music, with an insistent rhythmic underpinning that suggests a determined resistance, and hints of a brighter future on the horizon. It was a timely reminder of the dark days of the war, in the week when we are marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day.

The first half of our concert also featured Dvorak's 'Violin Concerto' which I didn't know before we started rehearsing it. Dvorak's 'Cello Concerto' (which we last played with NSO in November 2018) is a gorgeous piece, incredibly popular and often performed, and I was looking forward to something similar. Initially I was quite disappointed: the Violin Concerto just doesn't sound like Dvorak as we know him from his symphonies or the Cello Concerto. But when I began to see the similarities between this concerto and Beethoven or Brahms - and started to think of Dvorak building on these composers as Prokofiev did on Haydn and Mozart - the concerto really grew on me. It also helped to have an amazing soloist to show us the excitement in the piece. Sharon Zhou gave a thrilling performance which always sounded like she was playing with a smile.

At a time of so much angst, horror and uncertainty in the world, John Gibbons was determined we should end our concert on an upbeat note. 'Overture: Brighton Beach' by the contemporary British composer Paul Lewis is a ridiculously jolly seaside postcard that evokes the south coast resort in all its guises. In the middle section the wind, brass and percussion form a military band playing ‘Sussex by the Sea' on the pier. This leaves the string players unusually under occupied and it was lovely to see many of them enjoying their day on the beach with knotted hankies on heads, reading newspapers and wearing water wings. It was lots of fun and the piece was clearly a big hit with our audience in Christchurch, Northampton.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

4 March 2025

To prepare for each of our Northampton Symphony Orchestra concerts I usually practise at home by playing along with recordings. Often, while I am trying to get grips with a piece I haven't played before, I find that the available recordings are all too fast to keep up with. Even when I have learned my part it can be difficult to match the pace of a professional orchestra. But usually NSO conductor John Gibbons finds a speed that allows us to give a good account of the composer's intentions, without pushing the orchestra beyond its limits. In our concert at the Spinney Theatre in Northampton last Saturday, however, I think our piano soloist Anthony Hewitt actually played much of Ravel's 'Piano Concerto in G major' faster than any of the recordings I had been using. It was an incredibly exciting performance which the orchestra just about managed to keep up with. The concerto is an amazing piece, which NSO last played in 2008 with Lucy Parham (reviewed here in November 2008). It’s fiendishly difficult, with complex rhythms and bluesy melodies that sound very like Gershwin. The slow movement is a beautiful gentle waltz, which opens with almost three minutes of unaccompanied solo piano and then features a gorgeous extended cor anglais solo, exquisitely played in our performance by Harriet Brown.

All three works in Saturday's concert, while very different in style, were linked by elements of dance and syncopated rhythms. 'The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra' by John Adams is a companion piece to his 1986 opera 'Nixon in China'. Playing John Adams' minimalist style is a very particular challenge for an orchestra, requiring incredible concentration and counting not to lose your place in the repetitive patterns of notes. It came together really well in the performance which I think was the best the orchestra had played the piece.

We concluded the concert with Rachmaninoff's brilliant late orchestral work 'Symphonic Dances'. Everyone I have spoken to who knows the 'Symphonic Dances' seems to love the piece. I hadn't played it before but it has been really enjoyable getting to know it over the past eight weeks. Rachmaninoff incorporates echoes of the music of Stravinsky, Tchaikowsky and Copland as well as referencing many of his own other works. The lush romantic harmonies I associate with the Rachmaninoff symphonies and piano concertos are present, but here marshalled into a driving rhythmic framework. And his melodies are achingly beautiful, particularly the second movement's wistful Viennese waltz and the breathtaking alto saxophone solo in the first movement, beautifully played by Graham Tear. The finale, with its jigsaw puzzle of syncopated cross-rhythms built to a stunning climax which was a fitting end to a thrilling concert.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

17 December 2024

For the past 25 years the Northampton Symphony Orchestra’s annual Christmas Cracker concert has, for me, marked the start of the festive season. This Sunday afternoon family-friendly event is always huge fun and this year’s concert, at the Spinney Theatre in Northampton last Sunday, attracted a large, enthusiastic audience. Alongside a few Christmas carols and Leroy Anderson’s ‘Sleigh Ride’ we always include a narrated piece. This year’s choice, Iain Farrington’s ‘The Scary Fairy Saves Christmas’ was new to most of us but incredibly enjoyable. The words, by Craig Charles, written in rhyming couplets, are dark, mischievous, witty, occasionally controversial and very funny - assembling a cast of goblins, elves, witches and dwarves to create a bleakly comic version of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. Our performance, narrated by William Thallon, went extremely well, with conductor John Gibbons co-ordinating the complicated joins between music and narration in this long piece very effectively. The rest of the programme included ‘A Christmas Dance’ - Frank Bridge’s lovely interweaving of the folk dance ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’ (which is mentioned in Charles Dickens' ‘A Christmas Carol’) with ‘Auld Lang Syne’. And, following our recent performance of  JS Bach’s 'Toccata and Fugue' arranged by Stokowski, on Sunday we played another piece from 'Fantasia', ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ by Paul Dukas. This is a notoriously difficult piece (particularly as it is so well known) but I think our performance was very impressive, featuring brilliant performances by the bassoonists, Sian Bunker, Tim Hewitt, Heather Pretty and Frank Jordan. We always include some film music in the Christmas Cracker and this year we concluded the concert with selections from the ‘Harry Potter Children’s Suite’ by John Williams. This kept William Thallon busy as he both played the iconic celeste theme and read new verse introductions to each of the movements, written specially for the concert by Frank Jordan. The movements from the suite featured the different sections of the orchestra in turn (with excellent recorder playing by Graham Tear and Helen Taylor and dramatic violin solo by Richard Smith in ‘Diagon Alley’), before bringing us all together in ‘Harry’s Wondrous World’, introduced in Frank’s words:

So as the season casts its spell,
We wish you joy and hope as well.
May Christmas shine, bright and true,
With magic and wonder surrounding you.
Merry Magical Christmas!

The NSO Horns at Hogwarts

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

20 November 2024

Back in the summer, when I told a group of my friends who have rarely or never been to see me play in the Northampton Symphony Orchestra, that our next concert was going to include Holst's 'The Planets', they all immediately booked tickets, months in advance. And they were not the only ones who wanted to see this particularly popular piece of classical music: our performance sold out weeks ago and we amassed a waiting list of 80 people hoping for returns. On Saturday evening our packed audience, huge orchestra and women's chorus meant there wasn't a spare seat in Christchurch, Northampton. The first half of the concert started with Leopold Stokowski's arrangement of the 'Toccata and Fugue' by JS Bach - famously conducted by Stokowski alongside Mickey Mouse in 'Fantasia'. We then played the 'Four Last Songs' by Richard Strauss - one of my favourite pieces of music - with the excellent Northampton-based Irish soprano Alison Roddy (who sang Hamilton Harty’s setting of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ with NSO last year, reviewed here in June 2023). Alison gave a stunning performance and the orchestra’s leader Richard Smith played the achingly beautiful violin solo in ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ wonderfully. I had previously played the 'Four Last Songs' with the City of Peterborough Symphony Orchestra (twice), Milton Keynes Sinfonia and Northampton Symphony Orchestra but Saturday was the first time I have played the first horn part with its gorgeous solo in 'September'. This was a nerve-racking and emotional moment for me as it brought back memories of the last time we played the 'Four Last Songs' with NSO in 2010 (reviewed here in November 2010) when the horn solo was played beautifully by David Lack in his first appearance with the orchestra for 18 months after treatment for cancer. Dave died in 2014 and is still fondly remembered and much missed. 'The Planets' by Gustav Holst is in the top ten most popular requests from BBC Radio 4’s ‘Your Desert Island Discs’. It's a piece many of us grew up knowing: my Mum and Dad had a LP of 'The Planets' which my brother and I used to play over and over when we were little. We last performed 'The Planets' with NSO at the Derngate in Northampton in 2011 (reviewed here in June 2011). Every performance feels like a very special occasion. The piece requires a vast orchestra (including two harps, two timpanists, organ and quadruple winds) plus a women's chorus whose ethereal wordless harmonies drift us off into outer space at the end of the final movement 'Neptune'. I thought our performance on Saturday went incredibly well. Conductor John Gibbons kept us from wallowing in the weightier moments, maintaining a brisk delicacy to many of the movements that demonstrated how well written and orchestrated this popular piece is. Getting to know 'The Planets' again over the past few months I can see its influence on so much of the best film music. This was the first time I have played the first horn part in 'The Planets' and I enjoyed playing the exposed solos at the beginning of 'Venus'. There were brilliant solos from across the orchestra (too many to mention them all but I was particularly impressed by Peter May's tenor tuba solo in 'Mars'). And the women from the Northampton Bach Choir provided a chillingly beautiful delicate moment to finish an amazing concert. We livestreamed our performance of 'The Planets' to give those who hadn't managed to get tickets a chance to see it and you can watch the recording at: https://www.youtube.com/live/hfZlcSSB1AQ?si=NhFFuVbqccyOFEzU (wind forwards to 21 mins).

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

19 July 2024

The Northampton Symphony Orchestra Friends Concert is always a lovely end-of-season party. Last Sunday the NSO gave Callie Rich, Callie Scully, Ian Jones and me the opportunity to reprise our performance of the 'Konzertstück for four Horns' by Heinrich Hübler which we first played with the orchestra in our concert in Grantham last year (reviewed here in November 2023). It’s a fun piece and we really enjoyed ourselves. The concert also featured a brilliant young flute soloist from Northamptonshire Music and Performing Arts trust playing the first movement of the ‘Flute Concerto’ by Carl Nielsen - a fiendishly difficult piece beautifully performed, which also included impressive solos by Kate Bradshaw on bass trombone and Christine Kelk on clarinet. We opened the concert with ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ Overture by Otto Nicolai and also played the Intermezzo from 'Fennimore And Gerda' by Frederick Delius which featured lovely solos from Helen Taylor (flute) and Harriet Brown (oboe). We finished with Hamish MacCunn’s ‘The Land of the Mountain and the Flood’ concert overture. It was a very enjoyable concert and a lovely way to say thank you to the Friends of the Orchestra at the end of our 2023-24 season.

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.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

12 May 2024

When we last played the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Northampton Symphony Orchestra, accompanying Lucy Parham in 2007, I wrote here (in November 2007) that the piece always reminds me how nervous I was playing the exposed horn solos in the first and second movements as a teenager with the Didsbury Symphony Orchestra in 1983, accompanying Peter Donohoe, and how relieved I was this time to be leaving those solos to the NSO Principal Horn David Lack. Now that Dave is sadly no longer with us, last Saturday it was my turn again, for the first time since 1983. Our NSO concert, in. St Matthews Church in Northampton, featured the brilliant young Russian soloist, Victor Maslov. There is a wonderful video on YouTube of Victor playing the Grieg Piano Concerto 15 years ago at the age of 11: https://youtu.be/ITJZEN2B87Y?si=5ZVVXUsn_tNwSV8t The 2024 version was even more spectacular: it was a genuinely thrilling performance by one of the most exciting soloists we have accompanied in recent years. Victor seemed to be playing this most famous of concertos neither in a lush romantic style nor in a disciplined classical approach, instead managing to make it feel much more contemporary - a fascinatingly inquisitive modern take on a work that can feel over familiar - but without losing any of the passion. In contrast to my teenage self, this time I found the short horn solos really enjoyable and I was pleased with how they went. But mine was a minor contribution to an incredible performance that will live long in the memory of everyone who was there. Victor Maslov's encore, a short Prelude by Scriabin, was delicate and mesmerising. It was a challenge for the NSO to follow this in the second half of the concert but Brahms' 'Symphony No 4' is a work that deserves to stand alongside the Grieg concerto. It's a lovely piece that demonstrates how Brahms continued and developed Beethoven's symphonic style - built on meticulous syncopated rhythms, driving chord progressions and controlled power. Brahms 4 is one of my favourite symphonies. This was the first time I had played it for more than 25 years but I was surprised how well I still knew the horn parts. It's a lovely symphony, incredibly satisfying to play, in which every note feels carefully crafted. NSO conductor John Gibbons shaped a beautifully controlled performance which was incredibly moving - with Graham Tear's gorgeously measured flute solo in the last movement exemplifying this. We opened the concert with the 'Froissart Overture' by Edward Elgar and also played Laura Rossi's witty musical journey through Italy, 'Jailhouse Graffiti' which was commissioned by John Gibbons to celebrate an April Fools prank he and Laura played on the Ealing Symphony Orchestra in 2005.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

5 March 2024

Last Saturday I played in a Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert which featured a rare performance of the First Symphony by Sir Arnold Bax. The early 20th century English composer was a committed Hibernophile, passionate about Ireland, Irish culture and the Gaelic language. He wrote poetry in Gaelic and named his children Dermot and Maeve. Bax was deeply affected by the 1916 Easter Rising and the execution of Irish rebel leaders by the British Army, but felt unable to speak out as he was then Master of the King's Music. His 'Symphony No 1', completed in 1922, while not publicly connected to the events in Ireland, reflects his anger and grief. As a programmatic work about the armed suppression of protest and rebellion it made for a fascinating comparison with our performance last year of Shostakovich's 'Symphony No 11:The Year 1905' (reviewed here in June 2023) and the 'Peterloo Overture' by Malcolm Arnold (reviewed here in October 2019). Bax's First Symphony is scored for a massive orchestra, including hecklephone (bass oboe), sarrusophone (or contrabassoon), bass flute and two harps. It's a brutal, angry piece, punctuated by some surprising moments of gentle beauty. It took me some weeks of practice to begin to appreciate the music but it really grew on me and I thought we gave a impressively coherent and moving performance of the symphony. Our concert also featured the 'Violin Concerto No 2' by Prokofiev - a stunning performance by Joo Yeo Sir. Both Bax and Prokofiev went out of copyright on 1 January 2024 so I suspect there will be more performances of works by both composers this year. We opened the concert with Bernstein's 'Symphonic Dances from West Side Story' - last performed by the Northampton Symphony Orchestra in 2008 (reviewed here in March 2008). 'West Side Story' is a challenge for any orchestra - both because of its complex syncopated jazz and Latin rhythms, and because it is so well known. As we settled our nerves, took a deep breath and launched into the opening bars, conductor John Gibbons immediately halted the performance and dashed off stage, having forgotten to bring with him the police whistle whose shrill blast halts the Jets and Sharks at the end of the Prologue. Amused and relaxed by this intrusion, the orchestra started again and gave an exciting and slick account of Bernstein's score - featuring a brilliant percussion section, amazing work by Terry Mayo on trumpet and a beautifully controlled flute cadenza by Graham Tear, providing a haunting moment of stillness after the mayhem. It was a wonderful concert, enthusiastically received by a sold out audience at Christchurch, Northampton.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

13 December 2023

The Northampton Symphony Orchestra's Christmas Cracker concert always attracts an enthusiastic family audience, but this was the first year I can remember us selling out the Spinney Theatre at Northampton School for Girls. It was very exciting to take to the stage on Sunday afternoon to see more than 500 faces looking back at us. This was a triumph for the NSO Committee and orchestra members who delivered a very effective marketing campaign - and for our conductor John Gibbons who planned and delivered an extremely family-friendly programme. We played a mixture of traditional seasonal tunes (including Morton Gould's innovative arrangement of 'Jingle Bells' and Leroy Anderson's 'Sleigh Ride'), Christmas carols, film music (from 'Frozen' and 'Mary Poppins') and two narrated pieces featuring our compere David Birch. 'Sugar Plum on the Run' by Lior Rosner tells the story of what happened to the Sugar Plum Fairy after the events of 'The Nutcracker' - and provides an excuse for a miscellany of variations on Tchaikovsky's 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy'. We sandwiched Rosner's piece between movements from the actual 'Nutcracker Suite'. But our younger audience members seemed most excited by our performance of 'The Gruffalo' - Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's tale set to music by Philip McKenzie. Like Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf' this narrated piece features specific instruments of the orchestra as each of the main characters, with the piccolo (Graham Tear) as the mouse, E flat clarinet (Naomi Muller) as the fox, cor anglais (Harriet Brown) as the snake, French horn (Ian Jones) as the owl and the contra bassoon (Frank Jordan) as the Gruffalo. Each year the orchestra's transformation during the interval into a sea of santa hats, reindeer antlers and fancy dress gets sillier and sillier - and I think we looked particularly splendid on Sunday. But silliness does not come without risk: I had wrapped a long piece of tinsel around my French horn and just as we were approaching the climax of 'Frozen' I removed my third valve slide to empty it out in order to be ready for the big tune and managed to get a tiny strand of tinsel stuck in the exposed pipe, which prevented me from replacing the slide. As panic began to set in, I managed to play my next entry without using the third valve and then rapidly removed all tinsel and got the slide to fit back in without missing a note. Fortunately I  don't think anyone noticed my near disaster - but I will be steering clear of all tinsel in next year's Christmas Cracker concert!

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

21 November 2023

In 2019 Northampton Symphony Orchestra performed at Clifton Cathedral in Bristol (reviewed here in November 2019) - our first trip away from Northamptonshire since I joined the orchestra in 2000. This had been intended as the first in a series of annual weekends away for the orchestra but our plans were curtailed by the pandemic. Last weekend NSO was finally on tour again, spending two days in Grantham where we performed a concert at the Church of Saint John the Evangelist in Spitalgate. The concert was part of a programme of fundraising to support more community activities at the recently reopened church, which has just secured National Lottery funding to launch a Community Fridge - a space that brings people together to share food, meet up, learn new skills and prevent fresh food from going to waste. Our host was the church's Director of Music, the soprano Helen Winter, who helped to organise the concert, brought her choir, the St John's Winter Singers (plus guests from other local choirs) to perform with us, and sang two amazing solos with the orchestra herself. We travelled to Grantham on Saturday morning, rehearsed in the church in the afternoon and had a meal together on Saturday evening, ahead of the concert on Sunday afternoon. With some people unable to join us for the weekend, it was a smaller orchestra than normal and our Music Director, John Gibbons, did a great job of arranging many of the pieces for the available forces. The concert included music by Delius, Vaughan Williams, Wagner, Fauré, Mozart and Mascagni. Orchestra member Hilary Glanville gave a stunning performance of the 'Pastoral Fantasia for Viola and String Orchestra' by Northampton's William Alwyn - a beautiful, haunting piece with echoes of Delius and Vaughan Williams. But the highlight of the concert (for me at least!) was the 'Konzertstück for four Horns' by Heinrich Hübler which featured the NSO horn section - Callie Rich, Callie Scully, Ian Jones and me. Hübler was a horn player who performed in the premiere of Schumann's 'Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra' and was inspired to compose a similar piece. Hübler's Konzertstück is slightly easier to play than the Schumann and more evenly shares the melodic lines amongst all four solo horns. We were very pleased with our first concerto performance together and it seemed to go down well with the enthusiastic audience at St John's. We are looking forward to playing the Hübler concerto again at the NSO Friends concert in July 2024. Our Grantham concert was a lovely occasion, featuring a wide variety of musical styles and some beautiful, delicate playing by the orchestra, including wonderful woodwind solos by Graham Tear, Sarah Mourant and Christine Kelk. Although we were a little under-rehearsed I think this just made us concentrate more carefully in the concert which was one of our best performances for a long time. We had a really enjoyable weekend in Grantham: it was nice to spend time together as an orchestra, with plenty of great conversation over food. Many thanks to Helen Winter, John Gibbons and Callie Rich for organising everything.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

26 October 2023

The last time the Northampton Symphony Orchestra played Sibelius' 'Symphony No. 1', in 2008, I was impressed by the assured opening clarinet solo by Naomi Muller (reviewed here in April 2008). Performing the symphony again, in the recent NSO concert at St Matthews Church in Northampton on 14 October, Naomi’s reprise of her unaccompanied solo was even more stunning. And rediscovering the intricacies of the symphony after 15 years reminded me how much I like the music of Sibelius. The first symphony marked his move away from programmatic music that tells a particular story and brilliantly demonstrates the captivating power of ‘absolute’ or abstract music - creating a beautiful, powerful and emotional sound world that is uniquely Sibelius. Our NSO concert opened with the ‘Polonaise from Eugene Onegin’ by Tchaikovsky and featured the original version of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Variations on a Rococo Theme’ with the wonderful ‘cello soloist Florian Arnicans. We also played two works by Malcolm Arnold - his orchestral arrangement of the ‘Tango in D’ by Isaac Albeniz and his ballet music for the one-act dance-drama ‘Rinaldo and Armida’. I particularly enjoyed getting to know this rarely performed dramatic and tuneful work.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

21 July 2023

On Sunday 9 July I played in the Northampton Symphony Orchestra’s annual Friends Concert - a Sunday afternoon bonus concert for the Friends of the Orchestra which provides an opportunity for us to play a range of shorter and lighter pieces. This year’s programme included ‘The Gold and Silver Waltz’ by Franz Lehár, Franz von Suppè’s ‘Isabella Overture’ and the musical joke ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ by Johann Strauss II. We also featured a young clarinet soloist from Northamptonshire Music and Performing Arts trust playing the first movement of Weber’s ‘Clarinet Concerto No 2’ and NSO leader Emily Groom played the beautiful ‘Romance for violin and orchestra No. 2 in F major’ by Beethoven. The strings of the orchestra played Elgar’s ‘Serenade For Strings’ and we performed the ever popular ‘Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave)’ by Mendelssohn. It was a lovely way to end our 2022-23 concert season.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

21 June 2023

Northampton Symphony Orchestra conductor John Gibbons and the NSO committee have been doing a wonderful job in making each of our recent concerts feel like a significant event - not just another orchestral concert but a truly special occasion. Last Saturday’s NSO concert certainly fell into this category as we provided a rare opportunity to experience a live performance of Dimitri Shostakovich’s epic ‘Symphony No 11: The Year 1905’. Written at the time of the 40th anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolution, Shostakovich negotiated his troubled relationship with the Soviet authorities with typical ambiguity by appearing both to celebrate and undermine the anniversary, creating a programmatic work focussing on the failed 1905 revolution. In January 1905 a peaceful protest outside the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg turned into a massacre with the Imperial Guard killing around 1,000 protesters. The symphony has the feel of a film score, following the events of that tragic day from peaceful calm to brutal slaughter. It is an incredibly exciting piece of music, with huge dynamic ranges that really need to be heard live. The relentless energy of the final movement, driven by a deafening array of percussion instruments, conjures up the onslaught of Soviet tanks, perhaps suggesting much later military interventions. Our NSO performance of this amazing work was thrilling and owed much to an excellent percussion section (Keith Crompton, Nathan Burt, Matt Butler, Delwyn Calcraft-Jones, Tina Kenny and Huw Morgan). Also memorable was the incredibly moving unison melody played by the entire viola section in the slow third movement ('In Memoriam'). I was pleased to get my brief quiet solo horn fanfare out of the way at the beginning of the first movement and I was in awe of Terry Mayo who had to produce the same solo fanfare on trumpet repeatedly throughout the symphony. But I have even more respect for Harriet Brown whose substantial cor anglais solo comes almost at the end of the final movement and who must have had nerves of steel to play this gentle lament so beautifully after having to wait through the whole of the thunderous, emotional symphony for this moment of gentle reflection. This video gives a really interesting overview of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony: Shostakovich: How to Compose a Massacre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU7a1b4yE-Q We opened the concert with the ‘William Tell Overture’ by Rossini, with a gorgeous cello solo by Corinne Malitskie. And the concert also featured a rare performance of Hamilton Harty’s setting of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by John Keats (from which F Scott Fitzgerald took the line ‘tender is the night’). It’s a lovely piece, brilliantly sung in our concert by the Irish soprano Alison Roddy. Hamilton Harty’s orchestration creates a Wagnerian feel with elements of Elgar and Richard Strauss. It is another great piece of music I have enjoyed getting to know by playing it. You can listen to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ performed by Heather Harper with the Ulster Orchestra conducted by Bryden Thomson at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVVoWOjWKTM

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

26 March 2023

Saturday's Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert was the first in the 130 year history of the orchestra to consist entirely of works by female composers. The 'Women of Note' concert at Christchurch in Northampton was an exciting evening: it has been a really enjoyable process for the orchestra getting to know unfamiliar repertoire and exploring the stories behind the pieces and their composers. All the works we played deserve to be better known so I have included links here to recordings by other orchestras.

We started the concert with the suite 'Penillion' by the Welsh mid-twentieth century composer Grace Williams - a lovely piece that draws on the eisteddfod tradition of improvised penillion singing, usually accompanied by harp. This four movement work for full orchestra features a prominent role for the harp, but the faster second and fourth movements also feature Eastern European and Spanish influences. Listen to 'Penillion' by Grace Williams, played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIU2vT0tJ5Y

Errolyn Wallen's 'Triple Concerto', for a trio of violin, viola and accordion, accompanied by string orchestra, is an entertaining, genre-defying piece written in 2018 for the Kosmos Ensemble. It was exciting to see Kosmos perform it with the NSO - featuring Harriet Mackenzie on violin, Meg-Rosaleen Hamilton on viola and Miloš Milivojević on accordion. And Kosmos brought the house down with their encore of Astor Piazzolla's 'Libertango'.  You can watch Kosmos playing Errolyn Wallen's 'Triple Concerto' with Worthing Symphony Orchestra in 2018 at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdR7oM2BYPw

The second half of the concert opened with 'Turbulent Landscapes' by Thea Musgrave - a suite in which, like Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition', each movement is inspired by an artwork, in this case paintings by JMW Turner. Each movement also features one member of the orchestra as a soloist. I wrote here previously (in February 2023) about the significant challenge of playing the solo horn part in the third movement, ‘Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps’. It was a nerve-wracking experience, particularly having to stand up to play it, but I think it went pretty well. The other soloists within the orchestra sounded fantastic: Nick Tollervey on tuba, Sarah Mourant on oboe, Terry Mayo on trumpet, Robert Reid on bass clarinet, Paige Johnson on piccolo, and Naomi Muller on clarinet. These solos were not like the short solo passages we often have to play within a symphony: here each movement is almost a mini concerto, and I know from my own experience how much time each of my fellow soloists must have spent preparing for the concert. 'Turbulent Landscapes' was a really challenging work to play but I think our performance was very impressive and I've really grown to like this unusual, programmatic work. You can listen to Thea Musgrave's 'Turbulent Landscapes' performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, while looking at the relevant Turner paintings at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnokpA37ieY

At last year's Edinburgh International Festival I saw the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, performing Florence Price’s ‘Symphony No 1’ (reviewed here in September 2022). This symphony, premiered in 1932, was the first work by a Black woman composer to be performed by a major US orchestra. We finished our NSO concert with Florence Price's Concert Overture No. 2 - one of several of her works that might have been lost had it not been discovered among Price’s affects in an abandoned Chicago residence where she lived toward the end of her life. You can listen to Florence Price's Concert Overture No. 2  played by the BBC Concert Orchestra at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk4ST2sGDvI It's an enjoyable weaving together of several well known spirituals and was a lovely way to end what felt like a very special concert. As one audience member said on Facebook: “If you missed this, you missed a fantastic evening. I knew none of the pieces and only one of the composers (Florence Price) and yet I'd rank that as one of my best orchestral evenings ever. Wonderful.”

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

8 February 2023

The composer Malcolm Arnold - who, as I never tire of telling people, played trumpet in the Northampton Symphony Orchestra as a schoolboy in Northampton - wrote the music for many films. These included ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ - a 1965 British war film directed by Anthony Mann based on the true story of the Norwegian heavy water sabotage during the Second World War. Like many films of its era, the music commissioned for the soundtrack became the property of the film company and the parts used by the orchestra during the recording were routinely destroyed afterwards. The music from ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ had therefore never been performed live, until the Malcolm Arnold Festival decided to attempt to resurrect this classic film score. In 2017 John Gibbons was asked to reconstruct the music and spent several weeks in a cottage in the West of Ireland listening to the film over and over again to piece together the orchestral score. This was a painstaking process of detective work and careful listening - aided by a deep understanding of the way Malcom Arnold orchestrated his symphonies. John was also fortunate to discover a note in Malcolm Arnold’s archive which told him the key of the film’s main theme (as the running speed of cine film can vary, so what you hear is not always exactly the pitch the music was performed). John’s concert suite of the music from ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ was performed at the Malcolm Arnold Festival in 2017 and this week it got a second performance by the Northampton Symphony Orchestra at our concert in St Matthew’s Church, Northampton, conducted by John Gibbons. It was fascinating to talk to John about the process of arranging the music into a piece that would work as part of a concert - which involved changing the order of some of the main themes to make more sense as a single piece of music, rather than simply following the plot of the film. The music includes a typically stirring heroic Malcolm Arnold tune, lots of tension-building dissonant chords, the whole orchestra whistling innocently and a German marching band - which featured some stunning tuba playing by Nick Tollervey. It was great fun to play ‘The Heroes of Telemark’, particularly having recently watched the film on BBC iPlayer - and exciting to be part of this rediscovery of a classic film score. Our concert also featured the lovely ‘Piano Concerto No 5’ by Saint-Saens, brilliantly played by Julian Chan. We finished the concert with ‘Scheherazade’ by Rimsky Korsakov. This is the third time I have played ‘Scheherazade’ with the Northampton Symphony Orchestra (I reviewed our previous performance here in March 2012) and I don’t think it is recency bias to say this was the most complete of the three performances. The wind and brass solos were all wonderful - with Sian Bunker (bassoon), Naomi Muller (clarinet) and Graham Tear (flute) all truly outstanding. And the solo violin part was played beautifully by Emily Groom, with the haunting final high harmonic note floating, almost inaudibly quiet but somehow catching your ear throughout the closing orchestral chords. It’s a thrilling piece to play - particularly the rapid fire final movement which feels physically exhilarating to be part of. It was a thoroughly enjoyable concert.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

14 December 2022

The Northampton Symphony Orchestra’s Christmas Cracker concert has become a much-loved annual fixture in the calendar which always feels to me like the start of Christmas. I can remember when it still felt daring for members of the orchestra to don santa hats and reindeer antlers for the second half of the concert. These days the whole event feels like a massive fancy dress party - for the orchestra and the audience. This year we were playing Dan Welcher’s narrated piece ‘Haleakala: How Maui Snared The Sun’ - a Polynesian folk tale that tells the story of how Maui captured the sun and caused the summer and winter seasons - so the orchestra’s dress code was Christmas jumpers or Hawaiian shirts. As I don’t own either of these I started searching online and found a wonderfully garish Hawaiian shirt, decorated with tiny French horns. I shared this with my fellow horn players who loved the idea of us all wearing matching shirts. Sadly we then spotted that these shirts would be coming from the United States and wouldn’t be delivered until after the concert. By this time we were all hooked on the idea and determined to make it happen. Rather brilliantly, Callie Scully bought some cheap, fairly plain Hawaian shirts from Asda and printed a series of transfers of French horns which she painstakingly ironed onto the shirts for all six of us. Some of the horns ended up being blue or pink because the transfers quickly used all her yellow printer ink, but we liked the somewhat psychedelic mixture of colours. Callie brought the shirts to our penultimate rehearsal but didn’t bring them into the hall, as we didn’t want the rest of the orchestra to see them until the concert. So at the end of the rehearsal we went out to Callie’s car in the car park where she handed out the shirts - covered by bin bags to keep them secret - and, at Josh’s suggestion we all then split in different directions! This excellent example of ingenuity and everyday creativity was a great success and the horn shirts attracted much praise at the concert. ‘Haleakala’ is a really effective piece of storytelling, excellently narrated for us by John Griff, with the orchestra creating some fascinating filmic audio effects. And I got to start the whole piece by blowing a conch shell which created a beautiful resonant note. Our recent Christmas Cracker concerts have featured lots of film music, alongside the usual festive tunes. This year was a bit different with the programme including an eclectic mix of classical pieces. Our Artistic Director, John Gibbons, had come up with the idea of conjuring up a Christmas stocking, stuffed with oranges (Prokofiev’s suite from ‘The Love for Three Oranges’) and a toy train (‘Pacific 231’ by Arthur Honegger) - though I think he may have run out of ideas at that point. Nevertheless it was a lovely concert at the Spinney Theatre in Northampton: it was wonderful to have a large audience and the welcome return of mulled wine and mince pies for the first time since the pandemic.

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.

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.

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.