Perth Concert 13th April
Youth Orchestra in fine form
By even the most exalted standards the performance by the Edinburgh Youth Orchestra in Perth Concert Hall yesterday was first class in all departments.
They began with the adagio from Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus. Immediately, the confidence of the violins struck one, then the superb sound of the oboe, clarinet and flute solos. Working with these, conductor En Shao whipped up a tremendous, emotional, colourful climax.
Next came Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with Julian Lloyd Webber as narrator. As a nice touch the winds who represent the characters had masks on top of their heads: bird, duck, cat, wolf as one goes down the score. The piece was finely played and characterised. En Shao got in on the act when the wolf was captured by the tail, shaking the tails of his white tie and tails at Julian Lloyd Webber. It delighted the children in the audience, including the three in front of me who conducted and danced in their seats.
Back in his day job, as Julian Lloyd Webber quipped, he played a beautiful arrangement by David Horne for solo cello and strings of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s piano piece Farewell to Stromness. It was an effective and affecting piece, evoking such applause from the audience that he responded with an encore: the serenata from Britten’s First Cello Suite.
