Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall, Saturday 13th June
We were informed by Neil Bennison, in the introduction to Saturday’s performance, that the classical concerts at the Royal Concert Hall are more popular now than they have been in the last twenty years. It is no wonder since the eclectic full house thoroughly enjoyed their evening, myself included. The world renowned Nicola Benedetti went down a storm and was called back repeatedly, by applause, at the end of her exquisite Brahms Violin Concerto in D. Nicola, at the tender age of 16, won the BBC Young Musician of the Year back in 2004, and she has gone on to deservedly win more and more awards and honours.
Nicola plays a Stradivarius that is nearly 300 years old, an amazing fact in itself.
The Italian conductor Enrique Mazzola was in dynamic form and his orchestra did not let him down. The opening piece was Donizetti’s Overture to his Opera ‘Don Pasquale’. Several tunes from the Opera are featured in the Overture and they illustrate beautifully this high spirited comedy.
The final piece of the evening was Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, written in 1874 as a piano score, but not orchestrated until 1924, by Ravel. It is ten short tunes, bound together by a recurring , and familiar, Promenade, each reflecting the composer’s reactions to the paintings and drawings. It concludes on a grand scale with massive bell sounds providing a fitting end to a superb concert.
Review by James Millichip
