Friday night's concert from the Oxford University Orchestra, under the baton of the energetic young conductor Toby Purser, began with a confident swagger, showing the kind of precisely controlled playing for which both have become renowned.
With star turns from flautist Tom Hancox and Tom Brady's trombone section, Hindemith's little-known Symphonic Metamorphosis was played with panache and technical assurance.
The second movement, based on a melody from Weber's music for the play Turandot, was particularly memorable, with all sections of the orchestra clearly relishing Hindemith's exotic musical colouring.
The players seemed more at home in Elgar's spectacular Symphony No. 1, which soon found its feet as the hushed introduction gave way to a warm full orchestral tone.
Purser seemed reluctant to let his brass players off the leash in the sinister and martial scherzo, but when he did, the results were impressive.
Purser held musicians and audience alike in rapt attention at the conclusion of the beautifully played slow movement, where solos from leader Gabi Maas and recent BBC Young Musician woodwind finalist Anke Batty (clarinet) were deftly integrated into first-rate string playing.
Elgar said of this Symphony only that `there is no programme beyond a wide experience of human life with a great charity (love) and a massive hope in the future.'
Toby Purser and OUO took an enthusiastic audience through the composer's complex musical world.
In less than an hour, we were led from introspection to melancholy and grandeur in music-making which few will forget in a hurry.
It felt almost masochistic to want time to stand still during the Oxford University Orchestra's oppressively pulsating performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Its perilous opening, conveying the first crack in the cold grip of the Russian winter, was unpromising, feeling rather too suave and effortless to be truly heart-stopping. The famous bassoon solo was fragrant and radiantly bourgeois, yet lacked the eerie frailty that comes from total expressive commitment. Yet imperceptibly and inevitably the audience was reeled in, complicit in the raw brutality that followed and captivated by the frigid beauty revealed by Peter Stark's masterful conducting.
This was not a technically perfect performance, but nor should it have been. The vulnerability inevident at the start became almost visceral as the piece progressed simply because there was so much hope and fear invested in it. Whilst there were individual moments of supreme technical skill, responsible for many of which was the peerless brass section (and principals Rhydian Griffiths and Adrian Uren in particular), it was the total commitment and fierce energy of the entire orchestra that made this really special. Although sometimes less clear than one would have liked, Stark piled the rhythms on top of each other in such a way that the tension built, especially through the final Sacrificial Dance, was both unbearable and addictively cathartic. This was bold, satisfying music making, and the Sheldonian's curators will be glad that its decorative ceiling remained in a Bristol fine art studio, safe from its wild resonations.
Stark had opened the evening's performance with a glorious, glowing rendition of Dvorak's
Brahmsian Seventh Symphony, coaxing playing of exquisite sensitivity in the slow movement. The
scherzo could have started with more sense of abandon, and the otherwise excellent violins
lost some of the vibrancy and warmth of their tone and unanimity of articulation and rhythm as
the movement progressed, yet Stark nevertheless managed to make it sound convincing, animated
and spontaneous.
(JONATHAN STOREY)
Continuing an ambitious season, the Oxford University Orchestra gave us on Saturday three of the best-known virtuoso orchestral pieces, culminating in a powerful account of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade.
Leon Gee, conducting, seemed - like Douglas Boyd of their last concert - to have the knack of imposing discipline on these young players without sacrificing energy or spontaneity. The Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes were given a performance of urgent dramatic force - I had forgotten the intensely sinister effect of the church-bells on 'Sunday morning', as the odious inhabitants of Britten's 'Borough' go about their business. The 'Storm' was almost too much for the Sheldonian, just as it was in the epoch-making early performances at Sadler's Wells.
If we could have done with a little more light and shade, there was chiaroscuro in abundance in Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for Strings. This work is always played far too tamely - it is indeed a resurrection of the baroque Concerto Grosso, but 'baroque' should imply not elegant precision, but as here - tempestuous contrast between the concertino quartet (sensitively led by Stuart Baran) and the rest of the orchestra. From the first, dramatic coup d'archet the whole string band played with the most refreshing vigour and vitality, particularly in the distinctly tricky fugue.
A violinist friend with whom I attended this concert said he noticed of late a finer, richer tone in the orchestra's string section, and I wonder if that may be partly due to the very gifted leader, Camilla Scarlett. She herself took the leader's seat only for Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade, which was remarkable for blazing brass effects, wind solos (the 'Young Prince' trumpet was superb), and thrilling string playing in the final shipwreck. However, framing the ancient saga, were the gentle pleas of Scheherezade to the Sultan - violin solos to which Camilla Scarlett brought an aristocratic refinement of tone and phrasing which would have melted the cruellest tyrant's heart.
(HUGH VICKERS)
On Saturday, the Oxford University Orchestra distinguished itself in the Sheldonian with performances of two difficult milestones in the orchestral repertoire. Stravinsky's orchestral suite based on his Firebird ballet, and Brahms's first symphony. The OUO resembles the Oxford Bach Choir in working exclusively with professional conductors and soloists - the only one of the University orchestras to do so. The conductor is Douglas Boyd, a world-class oboist and founder-member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Saturday's concert, directed with fire and precision, suggested that he's one of the most gifted orchestral trainers around.
Amateur players simply don't achieve this kind of togetherness without rehearsal that are both minutely rigorous and musically inspiring. In the Firebird music, for instance, the tremolos describing the haunted garden of the magician Kastchey, shot through with occasional woodwind interjections, produced a wonderfully sinister orchestral texture, the 'Ronde of the Princesses', with lovely, warm upper-string sound, the exact opposite. Percussion and brass should be congratulated on their precision in the rhythmically very complex 'Dance of the Firebird'.
Boyd's interpretation of Brahms's First was more lyrical, less 'Beethovenian' than Papadopoulos with the Oxford Philomusica. I particularly liked the gentle way Boyd treated the opening of both first and last movements - we rarely hear the first truly Sostenuto, as marked. But the whole string section did justice to the struggles ahead, and it would be impossible not to single out the First Horn - Justin Boyes (surely a Dennis Brain in the making ) for his glorious fourth movement 'Alpenhorn' entry. The Leader, Camilla Scarlett, should also be very proud of the violin playing in the radiant divisi section of the second movement.