Florence Dove Siete, Dennis Brain?

It’s amazing how you can listen to a piece of music a hundred times yet learn something more about the music in subsequent performances. That’s why it can be incredibly rewarding to hear our favourite pieces played over and over by different orchestras with different conductors. This evening’s concert at the Verdi Theatre was yet another example of this.

You’ve got to remember that this is the orchestra which couldn’t find a conductor for their last concert so did the concert very successfully without one!!! Even the lady in the ticket office asked me what I thought about the first half of the last concert where the strings performed so well. So how is a conductor going to improve on this?

We all know that the skill of a conductor depends largely not on how he uses his baton and his hands but how much rehearsal time he has been given and how he uses that (usually very little) time. But the fact that the very experienced Lothar Zagrosek was the conductor surely helped a lot. He managed to draw colour and contrast from the whole orchestra and a better balance than we experienced in the lastconcert.

I hadn’t heard the Hebrides for ages so it was great to hear a vigorous interpretation rather a warming – up play-through. In places I felt a sense of Sturm und Drang rather than storm (come to think of it, the overture is in a minor key!). Zagrosek brought out a little more nuance and gesture to each section than I can remember having heard before.

The horn solist is a horn player of considerable note but this was not very apparent in her performance of the Mozart Fourth Concerto. She managed quite well until the final movement.

This is a movement with which I grew up. In the fifties, we would hear a recording of Dennis Brain’s performance of this movement played almost every week in request programmes on radio. So I suppose I was more critical than usual when we began to hear more and more cracked notes as the movement progressed. But our soloist, a true professional dressed in a long bright scarlet gown, completed the concerto with considerable aplomb. Where art thou, Dennis Brain?