International Music Festival opening concert 22 May

[Robin Orton]

This was great. St Barts church absolutely packed. Highlight was the Brahms Double Concerto with our old young friends Sergey Dogadin and Maya Bogdanovic playing very eloquently and poetically. What a work! I knew it a bit, but had difficulty keeping track of the immensely complex first movement. I wished the programme notes had given us a bit more help with the music, rather than going on at length about the marital problems of the original dedicatee Joachim - mildly interesting but not really relevant to the music.

Spectacular encore - an virtuoso arrangement for solo violin and cello of a ?chaconne by (so Barry Milton told me at the interval) Handel. Does anyone know who the arranger was? My guess would be Kreisler.

I enjoyed the St Barts Festival Orchestra's very dramatic rendering of the Beethoven Egmont overture as well. But I thought their performance of the Mendelssohn Scotch symphony lacked a certain finesse and charm - apart from anything else, the loud passages were all a bit too, well, loud, with the timps practically drowning out the rest of the orchestra.

What did anyone else think?

Incidentally, given that one cannot reserve numbered seats in advance at these concerts, am I being mean and misanthropic in feeling as irritated as I do when people 'reserve' seats for their friends who haven't arrived yet, by spreading their coats over them or standing guard over them with fierce but slightly guilty looking expressions on their faces? I've always thought this is an unfair practice - it should be first come first served for everybody.

[Tim Lund]

Yes, Robin, it was great and the two soloists in the Brahms were sublime. Their encore - on the authority of Sergey Dogabin himself, was Handel's Pasacaglia
[youtubes]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoGErup6-xk[/youtubes].

As I write I'm listening to this on Youtube as performed by these two recognised musical giants, and it's not a patch on the experience of hearing it last night, regardless of all the appreciative comments posted on it on Youtube. Of course this has something to do with the quality of the speakers hooked up to my PC, and also that I'm thinking about what I write, but that's just (part of) why live performances beat recordings.

I saw you in the audience, and wondered if you'd be posting about it. I thought myself of starting a thread with the subject line "Thank you, Robert Trory" as a way of starting off a thread which went beyond saying which bits of the programme were better or worse (for the record, I agree with your judgements), and communicated instead just how good it was overall, and how much we living in Sydenham - however we call ourselves - can thank Robert for what he does, making this all happen.

In another thread you and I have debated the use of language when what we want to describe goes beyond our ability to analyse. It's an area where I'm happy for people to use religious sounding language, and for me music - certainly of this quality - is such an area. As laymen - laypersons? - what can we say other than to try to express the nature and strength of our emotional reactions, but our words come out too self-indulgent, or sound too clichéd. If we know a smigdeon of music theory we can talk about the key changes, but if we do we sound pretentious, and loose listeners. Even so these things matter - even getting into the lyrics of the 2008 X-Factor.

OK - I think I've managed to say something about how much I enjoyed this.

[Robin Orton]

I absolutely endorse the 'Thank you, Robert Trory' message, Tim.

I guess the arranger of the Handel passacaglia was one Johan Halvorsen - a Norwegian composer who I've never heard of. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Halvorsen