The last week of February saw us taking advantage of our relocation to enjoy three more trips out – a concert, a film and a live opera relay. I’ll discuss the film and the opera in separate posts. This one concerns our visit to the Congress Theatre for a wonderful concert.
Our second ever visit to one of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s regular Sunday afternoon concerts saw us accompanied by dear friends who were visiting for the day. It proved to be hugely enjoyable with memorable performances of three works from masters of orchestral colour – Mozart, Sibelius and Dvorak.
The Mozart piece was his clever and popular overture to his late opera The Magic Flute. I’ve heard it many times before (Magic Flute was the first opera I ever saw live, back in the seventies), but it never ceases to thrill. As is often the case, the overture picks up themes that will be heard later in the piece, but bounces them around the orchestra from one section to another with great skill and considerable speed, especially given the brisk pace set last week by the young English conductor Ben Glassberg.
The second work was Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. I have known his music since I was introduced to the Karelia Suite as a schoolboy. That work was known to millions as the theme music for the long-running ITV current affairs programme This Week. A birthday present of a recording of that introduced me to the companion piece on the LP, his majestic fifth symphony. My admiration of his work grew from there. His music has a special quality which always speaks to me of the cold north, of forests and lakes: it’s bleak, somehow, but also deeply impressive. My love for the Violin Concerto dates from the 1988 recording with Nigel Kennedy and the CBSO under Simon Rattle. However, I realised sitting in the theatre last week that I had never heard the work in a live performance before.
This account, by the French violinist Fanny Clamagirand, was very impressive indeed, and it was a moving performance of a hugely challenging work. She rightly got a terrific reception from the Eastbourne audience, and gave us a touching and beautiful encore.
The second part of the afternoon saw a performance of Dvorak’s eighth symphony. If Sibelius’s work speaks of the cold north, then Dvorak is totally central European, full of warmth, colour and joy.
I have known and loved this symphony since I was a boy, hearing it for the first time at the old Crystal Palace concert bowl in the mid-1960s. It’s not as popular as the ninth - the much more famous New World – symphony, but it is a fabulous work, full of dance rhythms and orchestral colour which was brought out brilliantly by Glassberg and the LPO. Their sparkling performance was rightly greeted with rapturous applause by the almost capacity audience in the Congress Theatre, and we left the auditorium full of joy with big smiles on our faces.
I can think of few better ways of spending a Sunday afternoon!