Just what a force to be reckoned with the founder of the Proms, Henry Wood, must have been was beautifully demonstrated by this 150th birthday concert in his honour, concentrating on works he either premiered, arranged or introduced to London. He had a delicious habit of not telling audiences at the time when he was popping one of his ”novelties” into the programme so as not to frighten them in advance…
Youth with experience, new with the old, fresh with the traditional, fame with unknown; however they are described these four concerts were imbued with a sense of generations meeting…
Anniversaries were plentiful on this final evening of Sofia Music Weeks – the city’s 140th as Bulgaria’s capital, for example – and among them was conductor Plamen Djouroff’s own 70th. He led the Sofia Soloists, established for only a decade or so less, in a programme that covered most of the post-WW II period, seen from the point of view of a group of senior composers.
This was an event that, on paper, looked like a modest community Saturday morning song concert but then turned out to be a highly inventive and hugely moving piece of musical story-telling. Tough old blokes like me were choking back the tears at the end – not because of the drama but because of the extraordinary achievement of the performers…
The trouble with Paganini and the rest of the cohort of virtuoso violinist composers is that, after a while, a listener’s astonishment gland goes on strike. Having gone ‘wow!’ at the brilliance of the eleven and twelve year-olds, a couple of fifteen year-olds and one player of seventeen, as they rattle off Caprices as if they were tapping out a facebook message, it becomes hard to think sensibly about the music…
There are sentences you never expect to write as a commentator and this is one of them; the young string players of the festival camerata, most of them still students, were directed from the carnyx. That’s how it was…