Month: August 2014

Imaginative programme of too rarely played masterpieces from Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Frances Robinson

Orchestra Wellington: Marc Taddei (conductor) and Jian Liu (piano)

Haydn: Symphony No. 83 in G minor, The Hen
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G
Stravinsky: Song of the Nightingale
Rimsky-Korsakov: The Golden Cockerel

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 9 August 2014, 7:30 pm

This imaginative programme by Orchestra Wellington was an opportunity to enjoy a selection of colourful works heard all too infrequently on concert stages here. Haydn’s The Hen Symphony was performed with appropriately modest orchestral forces for which Orchestra Wellington is admirably suited. The opening Allegro Spiritoso sparkled with clean vigorous playing of exemplary precision that allowed inner voices to speak through beautifully clearly. The contrasting central episode was beautifully judged by Taddei, as were the dynamic contrasts and pauses of the following Andante, where his tempo shaped and enhanced the transparent artistry of the melodic lines.

The Minuet was undertaken at a tempo that would have been well beyond even the sprightliest pupils of any Baroque dancing master, but it bounced along with appealing grace providing one ignored its origins in the dance (a somewhat questionable approach in my view). The Finale bears the designation Vivace which is best interpreted as lively or sprightly, but the hectic tempo imposed by Taddei was such that the wonderful, brisk triplet rhythms simply could not be enunciated cleanly and effectively. It was disappointing to have such an invigorating reading of this symphony somewhat clouded in this way.

Soloist Jian Liu gave a riveting performance of Ravel’s delightful Piano Concerto in G major, and he was supported by some spectacular playing from the orchestra. In the opening movement Ravel has crafted some exquisitely balanced conversations between the pianist and various instrumentalists. The Allegramente designation means simply cheerfully, merrily, but hectic tempi in the fast sections often obscured Ravel’s remarkable skill and artistry as an orchestrator. By contrast, those episodes that call up the world of Louisiana blues were wonderfully languid and seductive, particularly in the hands of the brass and woodwind (with imaginative use of the French bassoon by Preman Tilsen.)

The soulful simplicity of the opening piano melody in the following Adagio was beautifully expressed by Liu, and was deliciously savoured by the winds as they picked it up one by one. Full breadth of tempo allowed the wandering tonalities and modal overtones of the orchestration to be genuinely explored. But sadly the signature cor anglais melody of this movement sounded strangled by nerves, whereas it deserves to ooze out with rich seductive warmth over the lacework of the piano part.

The Finale is certainly marked Presto, but as in the first movement, Taddei’s frenetic tempo unjustly obscured Ravel’s spectacular mastery of complex orchestral resources. However, no player appeared to flinch at Taddei’s demands, and Liu’s technical mastery was quite spectacular, with mind-blowing solo work from first bassoon Tilsen deserving particular mention. But in fact Ravel’s extraordinary skills were robbed of their true exposure by such a tempo, whereas he, and the audience, most surely deserved better.

Stravinsky’s symphonic poem Song of the Nightingale is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s oriental fairytale of the same name. Right from the first notes of the spectacular opening outburst the players were clearly revelling in the extraordinary colour and complexity of the writing. But the initial tempo was just too hectic to allow Stravinsky’s amazingly intricate colour palette to be properly appreciated, degenerating rather into a frantic muddied melange .

Things improved markedly in the following episodes where Taddei gave the instrumentalists a chance to show off both the vigorous and poetic qualities of the work. The somnolent and subdued sections were sensitively crafted to create a  truly evocative air of mystery and oriental fantasy, and the final retreat of Death’s threatening presence from the striken Emperor’s bed chamber left a breathless hush over the hall.

Six months before he died in 1908, Rimsky-Korsakov completed his opera score for Golden Cockerel based on Pushkin’s 1834 fairytale. It was immediately banned by the Tsar’s political censors for its satirical political overtones, and this orchestral suite was only later was compiled from his work by Glazunov and Steinberg (the composer’s son-in-law). It is an outstanding showcase for the amazing skill, colour and complexity of orchestration that Rimsky-Korsakov had exactingly honed over his lifetime.

The opening scene depicts Tsar Dodon at home in his opulent palace, followed next by his unsuccessful venture onto eastern battlefields to defeat imagined threats from a neighbouring potentate. These two movements were given a most evocative reading that did full justice to the rich colours lavished on the orchestral canvas. The potentate was in fact the Tsaritsa Shemakhan, whose seductive powers overcame Tsar Dodon in the third movement, where dancing melodic lines were artfully shaped in contrast to the energetic central section. The brass had a marvellous field day with all the pomp and ceremony of the ensuing wedding ceremonies which they tackled with great drama and intensity. And the orchestra readily transformed  the mood into the dark, sombre foreboding that presaged the Tsar’s  unfortunate demise at the hands of the triumphant magical cockerel.

The whole work gave a wonderful opportunity to appreciate not only Rimsky-Korsakov’s extraordinary powers, but the technical mastery and musicianship of Orchestra Wellington’s musicians. Full marks too to conductor and management for offering a most imaginative programme of lesser known works. Those Wellington concert goers who opted for a cosy evening at home on an inhospitable winter’s night missed out on a  real treat.

 

Masters of whole worlds: Mozart and Mahler with the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
MOZART – Violin Concerto No.4 in D Major K.218
MAHLER – Symphony No.9 in D Major

Simone Lamsma (violin)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, 8th August, 2014

What to play at a concert along with a Mahler Symphony? It’s a question that has diverted promoters, critics and musicians themselves over the years, and the various possible solutions seem often to complicate further rather than clarify matters.

It isn’t so much the actual music that’s the problem – it’s the awkward length of Mahler’s symphonic conceptions that makes programming with other pieces something of a challenge. At least the composer’s First and Fourth Symphonies aren’t so problematical due to their shorter durations – each can easily accommodate a “normal” first half of, say, an overture followed by a concerto, within a concert.

Not so the other Mahler symphonies, all of which are that bit too lengthy to allow anything pre-interval along the lines of the above, though, apart from the longest of them, the Third Symphony, not quite of the length that normally takes up a whole concert. Having said that, two of the works – the “Resurrection” (No.2) and the “Symphony of a Thousand”(No.8) are such spectacles in themselves that on that count they’re often played “alone” – in each case the sheer “size” of the experience comes from other considerations beside the music’s time-span.

The work featured in tonight’s concert, the Ninth Symphony, though perhaps less viscerally spectacular than either of the above, has the kind of gravitas that can make it a stand-alone piece as well. The conductor of tonight’s performance, Edo de Waart, said in an interview a day or so before the concert that he usually performed the Ninth on its own, as he felt it would overshadow anything else that’s played. If something else was chosen to be performed at the same concert it would have to be “strong”.

Perhaps Mahler himself gave a kind of “guide-line” with a remark he reportedly made to Sibelius when discussing the nature of symphonic form – in response to Sibelius’s professed attraction to the form’s “severity and logic”, Mahler exclaimed that “symphony is like the world – it should embrace everything!”.  I certainly thought that on this occasion the choice of the Mozart Violin Concerto (K.218 in D Major) presented by Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma was appropriate – it seemed to me to fulfill at once that “all-embracing” aspiration valued by the composer, while presenting two uniquely characterful works with their own clearly-defined boundaries.

As it turned out, the Mozart concerto was given a delightful performance by Simone Lamsma, her bright, silvery entry banishing for the remainder of the performance a slightly wiry-sounding beginning to the work from the NZSO strings, and her energy and élan nicely countering an initial impression of petiteness. I thought her passagework most characterful, her accented notes given plenty of emphasis, bringing out a “layered” quality to the music.

The cadenza developed these perspectives further, getting very physical and gutsy playing, the sequence sounding more like Beethoven’s voice in places than Mozart’s! We then got a heavenly “andante cantabile” at the slow movement’s beginning, the soloist’s floated notes exquisite-sounding, her silvery discourse sensitively accompanied by the ensemble, and, in conclusion, capped off by a cadenza for the violin which occasionally broke into what sounded like birdsong.

Not to be outdone in effect, the finale took us through poised, gavotte-like steps by way of introduction, and then whirled us into an allegro, the exchanges between the two sequences continuing throughout the movement. And such an exuberant cadenza! – demonstrating to us the soloist’s brilliant fingerwork, and leavened in places by pure, elevated tones. After this came a lovely, “dying fall” kind of finish to the work of the “that’s all, folks!” variety, not unlike what the composer had also done in his previous violin concerto – all very piquant and charming.

And so to the Mahler – it was true, as Edo de Waart had pointed out, that this work was perfectly capable of standing alone in concert – but having the Mozart concerto first up we felt more “tuned in”, at one by this stage with the ambience of the listening-spaces, and with the throes of our day-to-day existence put well aside, ready to face Mahler’s symphonic retelling of his life’s most profound “dark night of the soul”.

The conductor had said when interviewed that “one needs a top orchestra” for this work, so I think he would have been thrilled with the NZSO’s response to his direction throughout the symphony – certainly his demeanour at the end and his ready acknowledgement of the players indicated his wholehearted appreciation of their efforts. Each of the movements here had a surety of impulse, touch and expression, the structures clearly outlined, the emotions unlocked and ready for we listeners to square up to.

Those enormously cataclysmic first-movement climaxes which characterise the composer’s despair in the face of his all-too-pressing mortal sickness and imminent destruction were here delivered directly and swiftly, growing from the musical textures rather than over-laden, or imposed from outside – obviously the “line”, the shape and coherence of the music was important to de Waart, something not achieved lightly, but integral to the flow. I felt it was more “musical” than “psychological” in the conductor’s hands, concerned less with emotional extremes and more with soundscapes, making the throes of despair more of a human than a personal problem, with its own set of resonances.

In this the conductor was supported by a plethora of superbly-wrought orchestral detail, the occasional brass “blip” like “spots on the sun” (as someone said once about the great pianist Alfred Cortot’s wrong notes!), playing whose richness and variation of colour and texture fully realised Mahler’s love for the world and his agony at the thought of having to relinquish life so peremptorily. The word “leb’wohl” (farewell) readily came to mind in tandem with the two-note theme that dominated the music.

Both middle movements were strong on “attitude”, the Landler/Waltz by turns good-naturedly bucolic and sentimental at the beginning, with the quicker waltz-music taking on an almost manic aspect in places, before everything ground almost to a halt, leaving the rustic tune to run its course, here nicely tossed about the orchestra before cheekily ending with a piccolo phrase.

Set against this drollery was the harsh Rondo-Burleske, here a tightly-coiled set of poses and  rapier-like thrusts, purposeful and almost business-like in its insistence and cruelty. Whatever savage humour could have been lurking around corners and in alcoves, de Waart’s splendidly-maintained focus gave it no chance, though the claustrophobic mood was relieved by a trio-like section featuring a nostalgic, splendidly-played trumpet solo.

The frenetic, abyss-bound final pages of the Rondo, brilliantly delivered, were succeeded by sounds which seemed wrung from tissues of pure emotion by the strings, playing at first in octaves and then generously flooding the textures with warmly-impassioned harmonies – conductor and players here made this moment work as profoundly as I’ve ever heard it presented. But even more impressive were the work’s final few minutes, here played with such rapt beauty and concentration as I’ve rarely experienced anywhere in a concert hall – string phrases and sound-impulses that suggested all too palpably a farewell to life, a leave-taking whose silences continued to sound for what seemed like ages afterwards – for all of us present, very much the stuff of legends.

This performance’s dedication, announced before the concert, to the recently-deceased Franz-Paul Decker, for many years the NZSO’s Music Director, had no more appropriate voice than that final movement of a work that had been one of Decker’s greatest interpretative achievements. The old maestro’s shade would have sighed contentedly in tandem with those beautifully-realised, seemingly-endless silences to which we were all so very privileged to be able to lend our  presence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anniversaries, celebrations and NZ premieres – NZSM Orchestra at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
PASTORAL ELEGY
Music by Gade, Villa-Lobos, Vaughan Williams

NIELS GADE – Overture “Hamlet”
(Vincent Hardaker – conductor)
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS – ‘Cello Concerto No.2
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Symphony No.3 “Pastoral”
Inbal Megiddo (‘cello)
Alicia Cardwgan (soprano)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
NZ School of Music Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday, 6th August, 2014

I thought this an exceptional concert in every way! – innovative repertoire choices were thrillingly and memorably supported by skilled and strongly-focused, committed playing from all concerned.

Each piece as presented had its own world and voiced its own particular character – partly the result of stylistic and contextual differences, but also  indicative of the extent to which these musicians were determined to get to grips with things, and put across the music’s differing flavours, colours and feelings.

I’d never before encountered either the Niels Gade overture or the Villa-Lobos concerto (the performance of the latter by ‘cellist Inbal Megiddo was, in fact, the New Zealand premiere). Gade may have been thought conservative in musical outlook by his contemporaries and by subsequent posterity, but I thought his “Hamlet” Overture fully worthy of Shakespeare, as regards the music’s beauty, dignity, energy and theatricality.

Conductor Vincent Hardaker and his players deftly nailed the “cat-like tread” mood of the opening, preparing the ambiences for the intense, dramatic urgencies that grew, spectre-like, out of the textures. Though not strictly following the play’s action, the music portrayed a good deal of the drama’s significant moods and character interactions.

A telling example of this came with the strings’ very Lisztian melody depicting the beautiful but ill-fated Ophelia’s love for the Prince, and the music’s gradual disintegration as the girl’s madness and death drew near, lyricism undermined and eventually overlaid by repeated turbulence and purposeful strength. A final ‘cello solo then sounded over rich brass chordings, suggesting some kind of valediction being played out, the tragedy grimly resolved. I enjoyed it all, music and playing, immensely.

After this things were somewhat re-aligned – from Shakespearean tragedy the focus morphed into Latin American intensity and exuberance. This was accompanied by a change of conductor and the introduction of a soloist to perform Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Second ‘Cello Concerto. It was Kenneth Young who took the podium, and we also welcomed Inbal Megiddo, Head of ‘Cello Studies at the School of Music, as the concerto player.

To hear Megiddo perform this work was to experience the next best thing to a direct link with its composer, as she had studied the concerto with its first performer, Aldo Parisot, for whom Villa-Lobos actually wrote the work. Megiddo described that experience for her as “exhilarating”, and expressed the hope that she might be able to convey something of that same feeling in her performance for us, by way of dedicating her efforts to her “teacher, mentor, collleague and friend”. I can only report that she certainly made good her intention in spadefuls!

From the work’s first chord, with the music’s upper registers straightaway reaching for the stars, we in the audience were galvanised anew, as much by the playing as by the music itself – the writing seemed to possess a kind of “top echelon” quality, something of an edge which constantly tingled and thrilled. We heard marvellous exchanges between soloist and orchestra, with the former’s rhythmic verve readily communicating itself to the young orchestral players, encouraging them to take up the spirit of the music’s frequent syncopated figures and impulses dancing along the ‘cello-strings.

The folky-sounding second-movement Modinha, a Brazilian love-song genre, featured a beautiful ‘cello melody, with an intensely-laden heart-on-sleeve dance-like accompaniment. Still, the music seemed always to have a slight “edge”, an astringency which put paid to any feeling of its emotion cloying, Hollywood-style. A Scherzo, dance-like and mixing the exotic with the “folky” brought forth more exciting playing – in places intense and gutteral, at other times airborne and melismatic – from Megiddo, with conductor and orchestra splendidly responding to her energies with sharply-syncopated tutti sequences.

What the cellist herself described in the notes as a “virtuosic cadenza” was here excitingly and full-bloodedly played, with wonderful near-the-bridge timbres, triple-stopping and resonant open strings, some spectacular glissandi launching us into the world of the work’s finale. Here, ‘cellist and orchestra had a terrific time with a four-note theme that was tossed about like a straw man in a blanket to exhilarating effect, right up to the sheer abandonment of the coda, complete with its breath-snatchingly abrupt ending!

After the Villa-Lobos work’s ferment of whirlwind energies and arresting sonorities it seemed on paper entirely appropriate for the concert to feature by way of contrast a piece entitled “A Pastoral Symphony”, moreover one written by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the composer of that quintessential English-landscape piece “The Lark Ascending”. Thinking about the juxtaposition of the two pieces made me recall a conversation some years ago with a friend who had visited London for the first time – he told me that after encountering the overwhelming grandeur and magnificence of St.Paul’s Cathedral he simply had to go back to his lodgings and lie down for a while.

True, the Villa-Lobos concerto, for all its engagingly vigorous and heartfelt qualities, wasn’t exactly grand, stupendous and cathedral-like! – but neither was the Vaughan Williams Symphony a mere exercise in English pastoral evocation (as a fellow-composer of Vaughan Williams’ dismissively remarked, concerning the work – “like a cow looking over a gate”!)  Whatever restorative qualities the symphony possessed applied to its own set of tensions and tragedies embedded within its contexts, those of its composer’s wartime service with the Medical Corps in France, a scenario fraught with death and loss. The composer, in fact referred to the work as a “War Requiem”, the Mahlerian second movement of the work with its bugle calls (played on a natural E-flat trumpet, and echoed by a natural horn) and anguished strings particularly underlining this idea.

Elsewhere, the music sang, danced and echoed with evocations of landscapes and people’s lives darkened by war and stained with blood – each movement wrought its own kind of ravaged beauty, the language and atmosphere one of lament rather than conflict and carnage. Ken Young kept the music’s pulse flowing throughout, to the work’s great advantage in this case, as tensions were made palpable by the playing’s urgency and tightly-wrought figurations. In the first movement, for example, the flowing themes were never allowed to settle, the music’s aspect having an almost haunted air, with memories of what had gone before “charging” the textures with tragedy.

The orchestral playing was, I thought, impressively focused, poised and suitably alert at all times, the textures and colours having the right mix of beauty and astringency. The winds at the beginning had tuning problems most obviously in their ensemble passages, but their individual work was outstanding throughout, with many a beautiful solo turned as the work proceeded. The brass chimed in with rich resonances when required, their ensemble capping the climaxes beautifully in places. And the work of the strings was a joy to experience, from the players’ most sensitive nuances to the most earnest and full-blooded climaxes. Conductor and players caught the ebb and flow of it all, the beauties and the sorrows.

The second movement’s nostalgic brass calls (the trumpet offstage, as indicated) came off splendidly, ably supported by contributions from the solo viola,’cello, and clarinet – but the work from the strings was again wondrous, phrases so sensitively and unerringly delivered, the players obviously right into the music’s world. Young aimed for and got a telling contrast of mood with the swiftly-delivered third movement, the tempi quicker than I’d ever heard previously – but it worked brilliantly, completely avoiding the somewhat heavy-footed quality sometimes encountered in performances of this movement. It also had the effect of sharpening the players’ responses to the movement’s elfin-textured coda, impulses striving for the greatest possible contrast with what had gone before in the bucolic scherzo.

Another off-stage “effect” in this work came with the final movement, the voice of a soprano at the very beginning and at the end. The singer’s disembodied tones have an ethereal effect, her wordless line a part-lament, part-incantation, which the strings repeat fervently at the movement’s climax – a stunning, breath-catching moment, as on this occasion. Soprano Alicia Cadwgan’s voice was ideally placed, not quite pure-toned enough at the outset of the first solo, and rushing a phrase mid-way through – but sounding far more at ease with her return at the end, floating her last few notes beautifully and hauntingly. As far as “capturing” the particular character of the movement mattered, Young’s direction and the orchestral playing was I thought, beyond reproach.

In the silence that followed we sat and allowed the resonances to fade as the tones had done, and pondered the music’s effect. I couldn’t help at that moment recalling various descriptions of the work which I’d read via my first, youthful hearings of recordings, comments which, even at that latter stage seemed to concentrate more upon the composer’s depictions of the “Corot-like landscapes” in France, and scarcely remark upon the music’s darker context of war’s grim realities. Perhaps a certain distancing wrought by time was necessary for people to re-examine the work’s and its composer’s circumstances – appropriately so, of course, as the anniversaries of that particular conflict presently loom disturbingly from out of time’s mists, carrying their warnings!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unexciting, lowpowered NZSO programme under Alexander Shelley yields riches after all

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Shelley

Shakespeare in Music

Korngold: Suite from incidental music for Much Ado and Nothing
Mendelssohn: Three pieces from the incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Walton: Henry V suite (arranged by Muir Matheson)
Strauss: Symphonic Poem Macbeth

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 2 August 7:30 pm

The one programme in the NZSO’s 2014 season that looked problematic when I first scanned the offerings last year was this one. No soloist, no well-known conductor, no crowd-pulling music centre-piece.

So I was not surprised to see one of the smallest audiences for the NZSO that I can remember.

However. The music, all of it, was enjoyable and Alexander Shelley proved, as he had with the National Youth Orchestra last month, an engaging and energetic conductor. I’d heard him interviewed by Eva Radich on Upbeat during the week and was interested in his enthusiasm and ideas for engaging younger people in the enjoyment of classical music.

He spoke about each of the works on the programme, pertinently, with a wit and charm that could hardly have bothered anyone (though I often hear what I consider churlish complaints about musicians who presume to tell the audience things that they think they already know or, if they don’t know, don’t want to).

Korngold’s incidental music for Much Ado was for a Max Reinhardt production of the play in Vienna when the composer was 21, about the same time that he wrote Die tote Stadt. The claim in the programme that Korngold had won the admiration of Mahler struck me as unlikely, though I was aware of comments on the prodigy’s genius from others. After all Mahler died in 1911 when Korngold was only 13.  But the truth is more amazing, as the boy had been introduced to and played for Mahler in 1906, aged about 9!

The five pieces (out of a total of 14) gave immediate evidence of the composer’s theatrical flair and his predisposition for a Hollywood career which came in the 1930s. They were colourful, charmingly orchestrated, opening with a big chirpy tune, depicting the spunky Beatrice, and then a romantic tune more suitable to Hero and Claudio (according to the programme note). The next piece depicted the Bridal Morning, gentle and delightful with prominent flute and cello. And so it continued, each piece strongly characterised, and immediately engaging. The suite is scored for small orchestra: no basses, with single woodwinds, trumpet and trombone and just two horns, harp, piano and percussion.

The last section is Masquerade, a hornpipe, which is familiar – not what is heard in the British Sea Songs, the BBC Proms fixture on the Last Night, nor one of the Hornpipes in the Water Music. But a great little number, splendidly played. The music was a hit in post-ww1 Vienna and deserves to be heard occasionally today: in RNZ Concert’s Cadenza or their early morning programme, for example; and they now have an excellent recording thereof.

The orchestra played the Overture, the Scherzo and the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music. I’d wondered whether the normal principals – Leppänen, and the two Joyces – viola and cello, who were absent for the Korngold would reappear for the rest of the concert, but the sub-principals remained, including Donald Armstrong as Concertmaster.

The Overture danced with sparkling clarity and brilliance through the elfin-like opening bars, and the following tutti was especially enlivened by bell-like flutes, in fact the woodwinds were having a particularly fine evening, specially evident in the Scherzo; and throaty trombones restored the Wedding March from its manifold mutilations to its proper splendid celebratory character.

Though I do not usually warm to the bombast, heroics and bluster of Walton, and not Belshazzar’s Feast  either, it was either the fine orchestral playing or a sudden awakening on my part to the composer’s gifts that made me enjoy, even admire, the music he wrote for the war-time film of Henry V. The Passacaglia was especially attractive, with remote touches of Tudor music, of Gluck, of Grieg… I couldn’t really nail it. The battle scene was obviously a brilliant accompaniment to bowmen’s battles and cavalry charges. It struck me that there must have been something in the water between 1897 and 1902 (when Korngold and Walton were born) that led to such instinctive film music composers.

Finally, the least known of Strauss’s tone poems, Macbeth: I’d long thought it must have been his first as it has seemed less memorable, burdened with too much thick orchestration, and a biggish melody that tries to emerge on the strings failed to take root. In fact, both Aus Italien and Don Juan preceded it and Tod und Verklärung was written at the same time. So there’s no reason in terms of composing maturity for me to find Macbeth less arresting and interesting. But I do. It uses a normally large orchestra, with triple winds and five horns, and though this was a thoroughly lively and resonant performance it was only in the closing phase that the music showed signs of cohering and evolving in a promising and interesting way.

The concert as a whole was most enjoyable however; as I wrote above, however, there was no ‘must see/hear’ about the programme. For me, several other Shakespeare-inspired works would have suggested themselves, such as Berlioz Symphonie-dramatique, Roméo et Juliette from which around 40 minutes of beautiful excerpts could have been played. Or the Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev music for the same play might have had more pull than any one of the pieces programmed.