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How about a quiz question to start? Which of JS Bach’s celebrated sons was known as the Berlin Bach and which as the London Bach? It was Carl Philipp Emanuel who spent almost three decades in the service of Frederick the Great before succeeding Telemann as Kapellmeister in Hamburg, whereas his much younger brother Johann Christian achieved later fame in London. Suffice it to say that the prodigiousness of musical talent in the Bach family has scarcely been surpassed.

One of CPE Bach’s three cello concertos (which also exist in versions for flute and harpsichord) was chosen by Laura van der Heijden for her concerto appearance with Aurora Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon.

The A minor work is suffused with explosions of youthful spirit. With its Sturm und Drang ethos it is very much a get-up-and-go package, ideally suited to the energetic freshness and robust earthiness van der Heijden brought to the part. Her nimble agility in the final movement was especially effective in the dramatic, almost inquisitorial, exchanges between her and the 13 Aurora string players. How good also to hear the separate voice of the harpsichord, so often submerged in other performances.

One of Aurora’s strengths comes from programming works designed for a chamber ensemble where every skein of sound is made to tell. Ligeti’s Ramifications was written for an ensemble of twelve strings divided into two groups, one of which is tuned a quarter tone higher than the other. The intricate layering of textures is one part of the picture, producing sounds that veer from mechanical ventilation to seething and sizzling as if from a cauldron, with a gentle growling from the sole double bass. Yet equally important is the swooping and whirling of each tiny fragment, akin to a murmuration of starlings, underlining the sense of perpetual movement. The composer’s precise markings down to an unusual pppppp and an instruction for the closing bar to “stop suddenly as though torn off” were splendidly realised by Collon and his virtuoso players. This was not so much a mass aerial stunt as a mass aural stunt.

The performance of Schubert’s Symphony no. 9 in C major was nothing if not unconventional. It had all the usual Aurora qualities of energy, commitment and precision of ensemble. Aurora’s collective approach requires that you listen to a familiar work with fresh ears. However, the hallmark of any good interpretation is that the listener must feel at any given point that this is the only way to play the piece. That was not the case here. I have often felt that the role of the trombones is underplayed, since they deliver a dark and ominous colouring to a score that can sometimes be misunderstood as an unbroken spell of sunniness. But Collon went to the other extreme. He had his three players, otherwise outstanding in tone and rhythmic acuity, standing high up in the gallery so that they towered over the orchestra. They were ever-present, delivering the underpinning that more usually comes from the lower strings. This dramatic highlighting can sometimes be offset by moments of repose as well as stronger dynamic contrasts. Collon sometimes failed to do due justice to the softer, quieter moments. In the Andante con moto, when the massive climax takes you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you, there should be more than a mere second of silence to recover from the shock. Collon’s briskness throughout the symphony ultimately led to a one-dimensional view: all the notes were certainly there, but the spirit of the piece, its grace and charm, had all but disappeared.

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Four years after his death George Walker is still a relatively unknown quantity in the UK — even though he blazed a trail of musical firsts in the US, right the way to becoming the first black composer to win the Pulitzer prize. This latest Total Immersion day from the BBC, culminating in a “Discovering George Walker” evening concert, plunged us into his world with three UK premieres.

What was revealed? Well, one obvious point is that the piece he is best known for isn’t representative of his creative output as a whole. It’s not hard to see why the expressive Lyric for Strings has many fans, especially when played with the light and shade offered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s strings and the conductor Alpesh Chauhan. Yet this music was written in 1946, early in a career that would stretch all the way until Walker was in his nineties and encompassing more than 90 works.

The voice he forged is utterly his own. Invigorating, intense and angular, his music lives in a realm shaped more by dissonance than consonance, but never tipping too far either way. Even in the boldest moments, there’s a sense of restraint rather than flamboyance. It’s difficult stuff too, although more so for the players than the listeners.
Keeping impressively calm and cool in the soloist’s hot seat for Movements for Cello and Orchestra (2012), Laura van der Heijden brought just the sort of astute virtuosity this fiendish work needs.

Until he was 94, Walker’s music pretty much steered clear of politics. The Sinfonia No 2 — with its striking second movement for extended flute solo (the excellent Daniel Pailthorpe), cellos and harp — is music concerned with its own internal logic. But in 2016 he was moved to write his Sinfonia No 5 as a tribute to the victims of a white supremacist shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, performed here in its version without spoken texts. If Chauhan could have focused on tighter ensemble at times, that didn’t detract from the piece’s precise colours, restless energy and propulsive power. Capping it all off, the Mass of 1976, which is as bracing a setting of the Latin text as you’ll ever hear. Eight soloists, the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra gave their all.

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After winning the 2012 BBC Young Musician competition Laura van der Heijden slightly slipped under the radar, partly because another young British cellist became the go-to classical superstar for the chattering classes. Van der Heijden, meanwhile, completed a degree at Cambridge and quietly deepened her musicianship out of the limelight.

Still only 24, she now sounds wonderful. This performance of Walton’s Cello Concerto was by turns poised and pert, wistful and lyrical, tautly driven and expansively rhapsodic — but always played with exemplary intonation and technical finesse. Too cool, temperamentally? I relished a performance that let the music speak for itself, reserving big outbursts of emotion for the two eruptive quasi-cadenzas in the finale.

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It’s difficult to do justice to this astonishing concert. The many messages the artists have since received makes this clear. The audience were treated to an evening of startling brilliance, surprise, and enlightenment. All may (no, should!) have felt privileged to be there. It was wonderful just to be in the Holy Child Church – St Michael’s Chapel of the first Holy Child Jesus (HCJ) Convent – for the church has been closed for many years. But thanks to Simon Wentworth and English Heritage, with its tall interior restored to its former glory, it will now become a regular Public Arts Event Centre.

During the concert, two glowing rings of dappled sunlight above the reredos, the ornamental screen covering the wall behind the alter, added to the concert’s unique atmosphere. There at the beginning of the concert, slowly diminishing, and just disappearing at the very end.

And the church has an amazing acoustic which showcased the wonderfully broad programme of Baroque mixed with the cultures of Eastern Europe and a song arranged especially for the occasion provided by Laura van der Heijden (Cello) and Max Baillie (Violin). Laura, BBC Young Musician of the Year 2012 – when only just fifteen – paired with violin virtuoso Max to bring duets by Bach, Bartok, Kodaly, and Handel. Three pieces, and a song for the encore.

Max and Laura have great rapport and were clearly delighted to be there. And this was immediately communicated to the audience. The breadth and subtlety of their playing was amazing to experience – in strings, bow, and voice. They enjoy difficult challenges and live to perform and share their exceptional gifts.

The first piece was a medley they’d put together opening with improvisation and weaving between Bach – from the Anna Magdalena songbook – and two-part keyboard inventions and Bartok from the two-violin duets. Max and Laura showed great versatility in this – their own original piece.

Second was Handel’s Violin Concerto in A Major. It’s sunny and redemptive, virtuosic and playful in four short movements. The striking virtuosi are revealed early. Max standing and Laura sitting in response. A violin speaking with a cello. Here, Laura and Max evidently enjoyed their vibrant reciprocal playing.

The third piece was Zoltan Kodahy: “high drama” as Max warned. And they weren’t to play the seminal and relatively well-known Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello. No, they played the Duo for Violin and Cello Op. 7 which Max explained was epic, rhapsodic, and about freedom. And very rich: with folksong and the influence of Debussy, the French Impressionists, and Italian Renaissance choirs.

Max explained that while it contains a beautiful folk tune, the Sonata was also melancholic, difficult, modern, atonal, and ‘squeaky’ – though it became musical again in the end. How true. Parts were of extreme difficulty – for both performers and audience – as well versatility. To me, it seemed the violin and cello are fighting for dominance while at other times are in gentle conversation – both finger plucking their strings in reciprocal harmony. Then the long pauses – where next…? lt’s full of surprises. What’s splendid about Kodahy’s Duo – while it’s extremely challenging and dramatic – is its fine resolution. Here again, Laura and Max gave us a bravura performance.

The encore was the biggest surprise of all. Laura sang the traditional song Alfonsina y el mar in a beautifully arresting voice. Wholly remarkable: effortless, natural – and clear as a bell. I’ve since watched many others sing Alfonsina y el mar on You Tube but found no one to compare with Laura’s sublime performance.

It was lovely to be able to share a drink before and after the concert. The setting is perfect: on the lawn and under the trees of the Close. Congratulations and many thanks to everyone concerned with putting on the concert.

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Nobody could deny that this was a weekend when we needed cheering up. The place for that was the Wigmore Hall, which played host to a recently formed “shape-shifting” ensemble of superb young soloists. The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective was launched in 2017 by the violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster (incidentally, they got married last summer). For their Wigmore Hall residency they gathered a starry team of clarinettist Mark Simpson, bassoonist Amy Harman, cellist Laura van der Hejden, horn player Alec Frank-Gemmill, violist Jean-Miguel Hernandez and double bassist Joseph Conyers.

Across two evenings the “collective” built up a range of repertoire that was, well, kaleidoscopic, mixing the rare with the beloved from duos and trios up to the Beethoven Septet and beyond. I caught the second concert; it left me wishing I’d been there for the first as well.

Opening with the Mozart Bassoon Sonata in B flat K292, arranged by Iain Farrington for soloist with string trio, the charismatic Amy Harman quickly proved that her instrument’s burnished, husky voice was the closest thing Mozart had to a saxophone; and the nearest a chamber ensemble can offer to a character baritone, something pleasingly emphasised by a naughty little quotation from Don Giovanni in the finale (I’m guessing this was Harman’s extemporisation). The bassoon is so underrated these days that there’s a shortage of young players of school age; Harman is just the advocate it needs. The Sextet Op. 37 by Dohnányi, written in 1935, was nevertheless the evening’s big rarity and revealed the composer, the sometime head of the Budapest Academy, throwing numerous central European influences into a red-hot melting pot and serving it up rather Brahms and Liszt. The full, rugged textures are very much the former, the grand-gestured Hungarian march in the Intermezzo totally the latter, but every sense applies.

The finale not only borrows tricky dance rhythms from folk language, but adds a louche episode of Viennese waltzing plus a dose of jazz. It really is that nuts, and I loved it. With the melliflous and debonair pianism of Poster (the pianist pictured above with Urioste), Simpson and Frank-Gemmill in unison melding their sounds into something unique, rather like the tone of the Hungarian tarogato, and the strings giving it all they’d got – dark, string-crossing eloquence from van der Hejden set it off to a splendid start – one couldn’t not.

There’s no more life-affirming piece than a well-played Beethoven Septet, and the ensemble here, expertly led by Urioste, fizzed, danced and dreamed their way through it with a refreshing lack of affectation. The Adagio basked in the sun of Simpson’s clarinet, the minuet was brusquely down-to-earth, the horn-call scherzo bouncy. Some occasionally over-edgy moments in the finale ultimately added adrenaline, while the ensemble made the most of the composer’s predilection for celebrating joy.

As encore, since there isn’t a lot of music for these eight instruments, Poster brought his own arrangement of Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”. It proved a delight, full of close-harmony big-band treats, topped by Simpson ascending into the stratospheres. We went out humming into Storm Dennis – and the highly entertaining programme notes by David Owen Norris kept me smiling on the train home.

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What is it about Czech dance rhythms that makes them so particularly irresistible? The Prague Symphony Orchestra and conductor Pietari Inkinen – Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, UK, 13 November, 2019 – opened with the overture and three dances from Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, which were buzzing round my head for days afterwards. The overture was fresh and bubbly, with incisive playing in the fugal opening. An earthy account of the Polka was a positive invitation to get up and dance, and the distinctive rhythmic character of the Furiant had a real kick. A taut, crisp Dance of the Comedians was a overspill of sheer exuberance.

Just a few days after Opera North’s staging of Martinů’s The Greek Passion, at the Theatre Royal next door, along came his Cello Concerto No 1, with Laura van der Heijden setting her stamp on the solo part with an authoritative first entry. She went on to bring out the folky character of her second theme, and duet engagingly, later, with Luboš Hucek, bassoon, and then Liběna Séquardtová, oboe.

Hucek was joined by Jan Czech, clarinet, in a deliciously smoky-toned account of the second movement’s opening, with Laura van der Heijden adding another layer of emotional complexity. The rich sonorities of her multiple stopping in the central cadenza carried over into her duet with principal viola Pavel Peřina. Her plangent, lamenting tone was echoed in the poignant, still episode in the midst of the finale’s bustling energy – those dance rhythms again – delivered with panache. Judging by various comments afterwards, Martinů seems to have made several new friends among the Royal Concert Hall audience.

Dvořák’s Symphony No 9, ‘From the New World’, may be a well-worn favourite, but with this deeply committed performance it was like hearing it for the first time. The orchestra’s sound, both warm and incisive, informed a powerful, vigorous account of the first movement. There was a real catch-in-the-throat quality to the cor anglais solo (the player was not separately credited), while the little woodwind dance near end sounded more like an echo of Mahler than I’ve heard before. The muted strings at the end sounded a hard-to-define but palpable emotional depth. There was more of the evening’s dancing energy in the Scherzo, with the woodwind bringing a delectably rustic sound to the contrasting episodes. In the finale, the urgency of Inkinen’s reading avoided any suggestion of the episodic, but there was still space to relish details, such as Hucek’s bassoon solo in the slower central passage.

The encore, Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance Op 46 No 8, was another furiant to match Smetana’s.

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You wait for years for a piece by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu to be played in Nottingham and two turn up in less than a week. An opera on Saturday and on Wednesday his Cello Concerto No 1.

Martinu was hugely prolific, producing over 400 works, and his life was unsettled (he changed countries 11 times). His restlessness as well as his tendency to pick up musical styles wherever he went can be seen in this concerto.

Cellist Laura Van der Heijden (BBC Young Musician Winner 2012) and the Prague Symphony Orchestra, under their conductor Pietari Inkinen, made an eloquent case for it and managed the sometimes startling shifts of style and mood with aplomb. It starts cheerfully in a big-open-spaces epic style, flirts with jazz and Czech folk-dance before settling down in the slow movement, its emotional core. Here Laura made the cello sing of beauty and a sense of peace – before she and the orchestra plunged into the finale’s frenetic energy.

The rest of the programme was Czech too. Smetana’s Overture and three Dances from his opera The Bartered Bride opened the concert with lots of fizzing energy and rhythmic sparkle. And it ended with Dvorak’s evergreen Symphony No 9 ‘From the New World’ which the Prague musicians must have had in their veins since birth.

The symphony is full of American colour: Indian dances, scenes from Hiawatha, spirituals and much more. But there is also a lot of nostalgia for the Bohemia which Dvorak had left behind him when he sailed across the Atlantic. Pietari Inkinen let the great tunes breathe, kept textures transparent and, whilst losing none of the music’s ability to stir the blood, revealed plenty of unexpected details and orchestral colours. And a Dvorak Slavonic Dance did very nicely as encore.

Prague Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen with Laura Van der Heijden (cello)

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The Prague Symphony Orchestra is currently touring UK concert halls under the baton of its chief conductor. He is the rising young Finnish star Pietari Inkinen now slated to conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle at next year’s Bayreuth Festival no less.

Inkinen, quite rightly, cherishes his orchestra’s characteristic “Czech” sound. This was evident in the idiomatic woodwind and brass passages of the exuberant Overture and Dances from Smetana’s opera, the Bartered Bride. The unanimity of string attack was breathtaking. So too was the transparency of orchestral detail in the clear acoustic of St George’s. The heavily accented rhythms of the Polka, a fiery Furiant and Dance of the Comedians released the spirit of these infectious Bohemian dances.

The music of Bohisluv Martinu is heard all too rarely in concert hall or theatre. Appreciative audiences at the recent Opera North production of Martinu’s Greek Passion would likely concur. An opportunity to hear a live performance of the Cello Concerto No 1 thus became an experience to be savoured. The (mostly) upbeat score contains echoes of Moravian folksong and affords the soloist opportunities for intense lyrical expression.

Laura van der Heijden, winner of the 2012 BBC Young Musician of the Year, brought a virtuosic rhythmic vigour and achingly beautiful tenderness to the challenging solo part. Pietari Inkinen and the Prague Symphony Orchestra, with strings reduced from seven to four double basses, were impeccably balanced and responsive concerto partners.

The orchestra was back to full strength for the final work, Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony No 9 in E minor: a beloved souvenir of the Czech composer’s lengthy American sojourn. It is difficult to distinguish between the American spirituals and Bohemian folk tunes so skilfully woven into this symphony. They express Dvorak’s longing for his homeland nowhere more expansively than in the Largo movement’s yearning theme, played by a solo cor anglais. Inkinen’s pellucidly clear account of the ‘New World’ created a rainbow spectrum of orchestral colour. The momentum and dynamic of his performance proved irresistible. Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance No 8 in G minor was the ebullient encore.

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Britten and Shostakovich first met in 1960 at a concert in London that included works by both composers, the Soviet’s first cello concerto and Britten’s Variations and fugue on a theme of Purcell. For this year’s Britten Weekend Snape Maltings assembled an astute programme of works mainly, though not exclusively, by the two composers and culminating in the same programme as that when the composers first came face to face.

On Friday October 19 the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, under the baton of Jac van Steen, performed two substantial works, the first being Britten’s Cello Symphony (significantly not a concerto). It derived some of its ideas from the Shostakovich concerto and also the exceptional playing of Msitlav Rostropovich who, with his soprano wife Galina Vishnevskaya became two of Britten’s closest and warmest friends. The work is not especially approachable and there is little in the way of engaging or memorable tunes that one finds in the concertos of Dvorak, Elgar or, indeed, Shostakovich. Nevertheless, the cellist Alban Gerhardt gave a splendid performance, playing with a powerful authority and the orchestral playing was both incisive and eloquent.

Shostakovitch’s tenth symphony contains much arresting music and the explosive second movement is often considered a portrayal of Stalin’s ‘reign of terror’. It was a thrilling experience; performers and listeners right on the edge. The expansive opening movement was carefully controlled and brought to a thunderous climax but without loss of clarity.

The following afternoon recreated the 1960 concert, the Britten sounding as fresh and inspired as it did when first falling on young ears as the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

BBC Young Musician winner Laura van der Heijden gave an excellent reading of Shostakovich’s first cello concerto, engaging and witty in the outer movements but plumbing serious depths in the middle two movements. Her immaculate poise and control in the cadenza was quite exceptional.

To conclude the weekend Jac van Steen skilfully directed the orchestra in a brilliant display of virtuosity and elan with Rachmaninoff’s third symphony. The inventive orchestration shimmered and glowed and the final bars were nothing less than breathtaking.

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LONDON born composer Anna Clyne’s ten minutes-long work, Masquerade,
 resourcefully deploys a huge orchestra to conjure up a street party 
atmosphere of masked guises and dances illuminated by brilliant bursts of 
fireworks. Broad sweeping themes more redolent of a Hollywood movie are 
ingeniously spliced into the kaleidoscopic musical canvas. The energised 
shaping of textures by Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro, at the helm of 
the ninety-piece BBC Philharmonic, pointed up the colours of this engaging 
miniature.


Scaled down forces for Saint-Saens’ Cello Concerto No 1 in A minor afforded 
some respite from dense orchestration before the evening’s main course, 
Mahler’s epic Fifth Symphony. Laura van der Heijden, winner of the 2012 BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition, was the deeply expressive soloist.


Saint-Saens’ extremely challenging demands on the soloist have made this sunny concerto a favourite of virtuosi including Casals, Rostropovich, Tortelier and Jacqueline Du Pre. Laura van der Heijden evidently relished the drama of the stormy opening section and the yearning, 
song-like central section. Her dazzling coda and the BBC Philharmonic’s felicitous accompaniment brought the concerto to a stunning conclusion.


Conductor Joana Carneiro then displayed her absolute mastery of the 
architecture of Gustav Mahler’s immense Symphony No 5 in C sharp minor. 
A defiant opening solo trumpet set the tone for the extraordinary dynamic 
range of the BBC Philharmonic’s luminous performance. The strings bristled 
with menace in Part 1 and, embellished by the harp, plumbed the sumptuous 
depths of the pensive Adagietto. Carneiro unleashed the full cataclysmic 
force of the brass chorales, not least in the incandescent climax to this great work.


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The flames from the two dozen candles burning in the chandelier above the stage in the 19th-century library of the Bantry House mansion in West Cork drew your attention heavenwards… as did the closing moments of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. As Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud played these almost inaudible upper register notes, an entire audience held its breath, and maintained that silence after the last traces of music had vanished. Only then did the extended applause begin for a remarkable performance by Kraggerud, cellist Laura van der Heijden, clarinettist Mate Bekavac and pianist Alexei Grynyuk that brought the ten-day long West Cork Chamber Music Festival to a close on Sunday.

Festival founder and music director Francis Humphrys had said one of the themes of this year’s festival was birdsong, but those birds were singing in a wildly diverse range of places. For Messiaen, the birdsong he weaves into the first movement of his quartet represents the freedom he and his fellow inmates could only dream about at the Stalag VIII concentration camp in Silesia where the composer was imprisoned after France was overrun by the Nazis. He wrote his 55-minute-long quartet for the players he had available – clarinet, violin, broken-down piano and a cello that reputedly had only three strings.

As is often the case in Bantry, the musicians had not necessarily played together before, but rose to the occasion. Bekavac, a Slovenian clarinettist who plays jazz and klezmer as well as classical, gave a demonstration of the outermost limits of human lung capacity with his extended notes in the clarinet solo movement.

Van der Heijden proved herself to be the sister of soul on the cello for the second night in succession. Having brought proceedings to a near standstill with a stunning performance in the third movement of the Brahms Piano Quartet no. 3 in C minor on Saturday, she again squeezed every drop of beauty from Messiaen’s fifth movement duo for cello and piano that is meant to evoke the eternity of Jesus.

Grynyuk, who had his chance to shine earlier in the evening with a show-stopping performance of Liszt’s exuberant Hungarian Rhapsody no. 6, was the perfect accompanist in the Messiaen, where much of the piano part consists of repeated chords intended – and succeeding – in creating a sense of timelessness.

Messiaen’s quartet could easily make a programme with just one other work, but the last-night Bantry House audience got a real earful to send them on their way. The evening opened with Hindemith’s Wind Quintet, a light-hearted work by a composer not much associated with levity. The Azahar Ensemble gave a polished but effervescent performance that would have had fans of French prankster Jean Françaix smiling.

After a blast through Liszt’s take on a Pest carnival from the 1840s, the first part of the concert concluded with the Equinox Suite by Kraggerud, extracted from a longer work which has pieces set to different themes in all of the world’s 24 time zones. The five sections in the suite included one on an alchemist from the library in Alexandria who has discovered the secret of eternal life and another on a suicide bomber in Baghdad. The latter ended with a hanging, single note played by the violin that seemed to suggest a life had just ended, but otherwise the piece seemed stuck in fairly conventional harmonies and did not impress.

More satisfying was a performance of Turkish pianist Fazil Say’s inventive Violin Sonata, performed by violinist Mairéad Hickey and Grynyuk. This 1996 work stands the test of time, incorporating jazz and folk elements and including a section where the pianist plucks the strings for a sound like a Turkish oud. Hickey and Grynyuk gave it a polished reading.

From that soundscape we progressed to another of Benjamin Britten’s works based on a theme by an earlier master, in this case his Lachrymae, reflections on a John Dowland song for viola and piano, written by Britten for Walter Primrose if the American virtuoso would play at his Aldeburgh Festival. The resulting work, in the hands of Bantry performers Ellen Nisbeth and Izabella Simon, brought out all the subtleties of the piece in which Britten teases his listeners with a hint of Dowland in the opening but doesn’t give the full reveal until the end. What better way to bring the evening round to its climactic moment, the Messiaen, than this sombre work?

A phenomenal programme, beautifully played and delivered, in a stunning place.

Bachtrack

The orchestra, conducted by Karl-Heinz Steffens, and the young performer collaborated on a very engaging performance of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B Minor.

The interplay between the orchestra and the performer showed a beautiful sympathy for the moving work and Laura van der Heijden’s playing was wonderfully expressive and assured with a lightness and delicacy of touch.

The evening started on a more strident note with Sibelius’ urgently-paced piece, Lemminkainen’s Return, one to really get the heart racing.

In the finale, Brahms’ Symphony No 4 in E Minor, the flute and clarinet players shone out in an all-round excellent performance, richly deserving of sustained applause and the conductor’s huge smiles.

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Artistically, can this 121-year-old British tradition be meaningfully franchised for global export? Or is presenting Australian orchestras under the Proms banner just opportune rebranding, pandering to lingering cultural cringe?

Certainly, this opening program with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra — under British chief conductor and long-time Proms participant Andrew Davis — delivered a satisfying, well-balanced program, with the MSO in typically fine form.

Opening with Dream of Flying, a stirring new work by Australian composer Nigel Westlake based on material from his recent score for the film Paper Planes, the program quickly slipped into 19th-century French repertoire.

Laura van der Heijden, the BBC Young Musician for 2012, embraced the pathos and sudden contrasts of Saint-Saens’s Cello Concerto No 1 before mild-mannered Davis turned to the passionate whirl of Berlioz’s lovesick Symphonie fantastique.

A distinctly Australian story about a country kid overcoming the tyranny of distance, Paper Planes gave Westlake scope to convey youthful optimism, fantasy, adversity, persistence and triumph. Dream of Flying preserves those threads and the score’s cinematic qualities: lush orchestration and luminous detail, sustained tension, heroic percussion and brass builds, dappled wind textures and restless string twittering. Beginning with an unpitched whoosh of air in the brass, Westlake captures the exhilaration of flight, twisting and turning from triumphant panoramic vistas to gossamer ascents, radiant blooms and joyful meditations.

At 19, van der Heijden reveals exceptional maturity. The Saint-Saens often suffers maltreatment, cellists slashing through tempests, then saturating delicate asides with ostentatious phrasing. Van der Heijden was having none of that, the beauty and clarity of her tone, even and sensitively weighted bow contact, and an unlaboured expressive palette making for an elegant performance. She gave fiendish double stops, harmonics and upper-register climbs the rare honour of being treated as musical ideas rather than tricks, making sense of what is generally rendered as acoustic porridge.

In a sturdy account of Symphonie fantastique, Davis luxuriated in Berlioz’s moments of high drama, while flitting lightly across more nuanced passages.

BBC Proms Australia: Prom 1. Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Hamer Hall, April 13. BBC Proms Australia continues in Melbourne until Saturday.

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It may only be a miniature replica, but the first international outing for the UK’s largest and most celebrated classical music festival, the BBC Proms, is cause for excitement nontheless. This inaugural season of the BBC Proms Australia, taking place this week in Melbourne, consists of just five concerts, in stark contrast to the 90-plus that take place in London. With so few dates to deliver proof of concept for this imported franchise, shrewd programming as had to be front of mind, so in order to draw a respectable crowd to this pilot year, a leaning towards lighter, more effervescent repertoire, over more earnest works, has clearly been the strategy.

And who better to helm the first performance in this series than Sir Andrew Davis, one of the Proms’ most seasoned luminaries. In many respects, not least the conspicuous absence of any promenade area for low-cost standing tickets, it’s almost impossible to accurately transplant the Proms from its home at the Royal Albert Hall, but at least with Davis on board, this would a musically authentic experience.

Opening the proceedings of Prom 1, presented by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, was a semi-new piece by Australian composer Nigel Westlake, who is best known for his film scores, particularly the music for Babe, the 1995 adaptation of Dick King-Smith’s cherished children’s book, The Sheep-Pig. This newly commissioned work, Dream of Flying, draws on material from Westlake’s most recent film score, Paper Planes, which tells the story of a West Australian boy’s hopes of competing in the World Paper Plane Championships.

While I have no doubt that this music would be touching in conjunction with the film, as a concert piece Westlake’s score is of a rather generic ilk, employing a trite harmonic vernacular that rarely dared to reveal a more distinctive voice. Occasionally, colourful moments of innovation, such as the use of a chattering quartet of violins to create a pocket of activity within the wash of the orchestral canvas, made chattering quartet of violins to create a pocket of activity within the wash of the orchestral canvas, made
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small nods to a more inventive language. Overall however, this was a fairly unremarkable, albeit well- constructed, offering.

Things improved markedly with the second piece of the evening, featuring British-Scandinavian wunderkind Laura van der Heijden performing Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor. At just 19, this tremendously charismatic performer displayed a confidence and artistry far greater than her years, delivering a rich, treacly tone warmed with a robust vibrato. This relatively short, single-movement work is not often considered among the greatest cello concerti, but in the hands of musicians of this calibre, it is most definitely worthy of a performance.

It may lack the heft and technical virtuosity of more popular works, such as the cello concerti of Elgar and Dvořák, but there is an elegance and a bright, buoyant wit in this music, wonderfully illuminated here by the MSO under the baton of Sir Andrew Davis. One of this maestro’s most incisive qualities is his understanding of emotional intention, and here the shifting character of this music was astutely observed. From the strident drama of the opening Allegro to the delicate, heart-warming simplicity of the central Allegretto and through the fever-pitched finale, each section was given its own space to communicate, thanks to the combination of van der Heijden’s impressive skill and Davis’s attention to detail.

The evening’s second French fancy was the pièce de résistance of this opening Proms performance: Berlioz’s brilliant and barmy Symphonie Fantastique. Next to the relatively restrained musical language of Westlake and Saint-Saëns, the verve and audacity of Berlioz’s epic ode to actress Harriet Smithson still feels astonishingly pivotal: both a celebration of the symphonic legacy of Beethoven and an incubator for the sumptuous excesses of the late Romantics.

This piece is an expression of passion, explored as both devotion and obsession, and as such its tiniest details must be realised with the same meticulous rigour as its broadest strokes. Fortunately, Davis is the ideal conductor for such mercurial music. His keen, sprightly rapport has cemented a connection to this orchestra with such a fine-tuned level of communication that every quirky gesture and frisson of excitement were brought vividly to the fore. Each of this work’s five parts, which are narratively individual and yet inextricably connected through Berlioz’s idée fixe, were so sharply drawn that they existed as exquisitely crafted entities in their own right. It’s little wonder that the audience, myself included, were moved to rapturous applause between each movement. If the BBC Proms Australia is starting as it means to go on, Melbourne’s music lovers are in for a great week.

The BBC Proms Australia continues at the Hamer Hall, Melbourne until Saturday April 16.

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Laura van der Heijden – the 15-year-old winner of numerous musical prizes – may well be the UK’s answer to Sol Gabetta. A pupil of Leonid Gorokhov, she was commanding both musically and technically in Walton’s Cello Concerto, the work with which she won the 2012 BBC Young Musician of the Year competition.

Although the opening was taken at a rather deliberate pace, with unfocused playing from the Royal Philharmonic that lacked the shimmering timbres that in part forge the exquisite and mystic atmosphere, van der Heijden nevertheless managed to evoke poignant emotions in the questioning theme. Undaunted by the largely unresponsive orchestral partnership, she was assured in the lyrical passages, the only minor caveat being the double-stopped passages, which could have benefited from a greater sense of melodic continuity.

In the scherzo, van der Heijden generated an exciting rhythmic energy in the motivic writing, but she was perhaps most impressive in the finale’s solo cadenza, where she drew well-voiced lines and a compelling narrative.

Although the orchestra was lacklustre in the Walton, Clio Gould’s accomplished rendition of the violin part in Holst’s rarely heard but eloquent A Song of the Night, saw the helpers respond more sensitively as chamber musicians. Even better was Elgar’s Enigma Variations, which boasted top-calibre playing with marvellous character and refinement.

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Unleashed from the shackles of academia – apologies to St John’s College Cambridge – Laura van der Heijden has launched herself into a hectic performing schedule. From performing Elgar’s Cello Concerto in Russia, van der Heijden touched down in Sheffield a few days later; Music in the Round in the Upper Chapel being rather more intimate than Ekaterinburg’s huge concert hall.

There may have been a few signs of tiredness at the start of Bach’s Viola da Gamba Sonata no.1 in G major, a hint of awry intonation for example, but she soon got into her stride with a dashing Allegro. Her sweet tone shone in the almost minimalist Andante, as did that of her pianist, Tom Poster. But there is a problem with chamber ensembles using a piano in Baroque music – the power of a huge Steinway grand cannot be hidden. The phrasing was beautiful again in the final Bourrée, but whether Bach intended the keyboard to be on equal terms with the cello is debatable.

These minor problems were vigorously cast aside in Britten’s Cello Sonata.

Van der Heijden spoke of her sympathy with the range of emotions in Britten’s Cello Sonata; the first movement posed unanswerable questions, she said, then responded with outbursts of frustration. Piano and cello were balanced here in the chaos of emotions and technical challenges were effortlessly overcome. Likewise in the difficult guitar-like pizzicato chords of the Scherzo. Balance and clarity were again on show in the huge range of dynamics of the third movement which died away into high harmonics beautifully. The Marcia which followed was nicely sarcastic, and the final irregularly spaced moto perpetuo gave Poster a chance to be a showman too.

Poster pointed out that all the composers featured had names beginning with B and next up was Nadia Boulanger. She composed very infrequently after the tragic death of her younger sister in 1918, but her Three Pieces for Cello and Piano show us what might have been. They may be short, but they once again gave van der Heijden the chance to charm with her intoxicating sweetness of tone.

In Brahms’ Cello Sonata no. 1 in E minor, both performers and audience were carried away by the composer’s almost unrivalled combination of tunefulness, structural sophistication and powerful emotions, one slight imperfection being the re-emergence of the piano’s dominance, particularly in the finale. This resulted in some lack of clarity, but the overall effect was still overwhelming, and the work provided a triumphant conclusion to the evening.

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Held in the attractive setting of the Picture Gallery the audience was royally treated to the playing of Laura van der Heijden using a seventeenth-century cello by Francesco Rugeri of Cremona and pianist Tom Poster playing the house Steinway model D (2001). The programme commenced with J.S. Bach’s Viola da gamba Sonata No.1 a work originally ascribed to the 1720s but now thought to be later. Intended for viola da gamba and harpsichord the work sounded quite splendid on the modern strung cello and piano and I was struck by the amount of style and grace Van der Heijden and Poster lavished on the sonata. The near-hypnotic effect of the soulful Andante movement was especially enjoyable.

Jumping forward some two hundred and twenty or so years we heard Britten’s Cello Sonata from 1961 written for his friend Mstislav Rostropovich. A stark contrast to the J.S. Bach, Van der Heijden and Poster revelled in the spikier rhythms and often austere soundworld of Britten’s score and I must single out the third movement Elegia (Lento) for the aching sense of reflection the players perceptively created.

After the interval came a work by Nadia Boulanger. Although renowned as an influential teacher, with a dazzling roster of students including Copland and Bernstein, I don’t encounter her music too often and it was good to make acquaintance with her Three Pieces for cello and piano. Originally composed for organ around 1914 these beautifully crafted miniatures certainly leave the listener wanting to hear more. Titled ‘Vite et nerveusement rythmé’ the final piece, quite superbly balanced for the two instruments, felt confident and assertively played providing an uplifting buoyancy.

The final work of the evening Brahms’s Cello Sonata No.1 completed in 1865 is an undoubted masterwork of which I never tire. Compared to many works of this era the piano does not take a subservient role sharing a more equal status with the cello. Van der Heijden and Poster’s robustly confident approach suited the often-weighty writing and I relished the performance which was uniformly steadfast. Notable was the opening movement Allegro non troppo where the low, rich register of the cello was exploited so successfully. With such brooding introspection, the duo generated passages displaying a dazzling level of substantial intensity. For an encore to this engaging recital Van der Heijden and Poster chose Rachmaninoff’s popular ‘Vocalise’ which was quite splendidly played but in truth I would have preferred something less well-known.

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Cathedrals of sound – that’s the cliché routinely wheeled out to describe Bruckner’s monumental symphonies. But cliché or not, it felt like the ideal description for the Lammermuir Festival’s opening concert (****), whose climax was a magnificent Bruckner Seventh that filled every nook in the warm interior of St Mary’s Church, Haddington.

Indeed, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra players themselves spread back far beyond the nave and chancel, with six or seven rows of woodwind and brass, but they thereby delivered a wonderfully three-dimensional richness to the sound. Conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens took things at a leisurely pace – perhaps unnecessarily so, with St Mary’s admittedly resonant yet beautifully clear, crisply detailed acoustic – and stressed the architectural grandeur of the Symphony. His brassy climaxes (complete with quartet of Wagner tubas) were almost overwhelming – but, more importantly, felt like the inevitable outcome of the slowly evolving material that had gone before. His dense, heavy scherzo, however, felt slightly too tightly controlled and soft-edged to whip up the demonic energy the movement can often generate.

Nevertheless, it was a magisterial performance, full of sonic splendour, with the BBC SSO players on exceptional form. They were utterly convincing, too, before the interval as a far more intimate ensemble for Haydn’s C major Cello Concerto, with 2012 BBC Young Musician winner Laura van der Heijden as soloist. She gave a sprightly, impeccably phrased account, as muscular as it was lyrical – even if her sometimes rather liberal tempo fluctuations threatened to drag back Steffens’s brisk pace at times.

“I know what you’re thinking: what does that sound like backwards?” A change of tone completely on Saturday afternoon, for harpsichordist and scholar John Butt’s masterful journey through Bach’s Musical Offering in Gladsmuir’s Victorian Parish Church, for which he was joined by seven players from his Dunedin Consort (*). It was a wonderfully witty yet erudite event, matching brilliantly characterful playing – of the intricate canons and inventions Bach conjured from an awkward theme throw at him by Frederick the Great – with pointed insights from Butt himself.

And it was just the kind of format to bring what Butt described as this ‘arcane mind-music’ dazzlingly alive, as he came up with ever more ingenious ways to demonstrate how Bach went far beyond the King’s initial challenge. How about coming up with alternative possibilities for Bach’s unrealised, DIY closing canons? Or getting listeners to raise their hands when they’d had enough of a ‘perpetual’ canon, which could theoretically go on forever? Butt’s talk-plus-performance concept was just as playful and insightful as Bach’s music – enormous but entirely serious fun for both mind and heart.

More music for the heart to close Saturday, with a deeply expressive all-Schubert concert from brothers Magnus and Guy Johnston on violin and cello, and pianist Tom Poster (****) in the intimate, capacity-filled space of Dirleton Kirk. There might have been a few unwelcome intonation lapses and misjudged articulations in Guy J’s hearty, rubato-heavy Arpeggione Sonata, but the threesome’s B flat Piano Trio was full of heroic energy, and their opening Notturno exquisitely refined – a performance to truly treasure.

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IT is indicative of the place that artistic directors Hugh Macdonald and James Waters have built for their East Lothian event – the UK’s best festival according to the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society awards last year – that it has concerts this year by three of Scotland’s four national music companies, with the BBC SSO, Macdonald’s old outfit, giving this opening concert, and Scottish Opera joining the party later this week.

Conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens made his debut with the missing one, the RSNO, earlier this year directing a concert that featured 24-year-old Romanian cellist Andrea Ionita playing the Schumann concerto. Here he was teamed with 21-year-old Laura van der Heijden, winner of the BBC Young Musician competition back in 2012 when she was just 15, for Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C, his first for the instrument, but a lost work until 1961.

Its Adagio second movement in particular contains some of the composer’s most melodious writing, while the sparing use of the winds in the finale is quintessential Haydn, with the chamber-sized SSO strings in perfect balance with the soloist throughout, under Steffens’s attentive direction. The soloist’s relaxed, elegant poise on the cadenzas at the end of the first two movements demonstrated a musical maturity well beyond her years.

Pairing that work with Bruckner’s most often-heard symphony, his Seventh, revealed a kinship in the optimistic opening of its Adagio second movement, although the Austrian then embarks on his own long path in ways that would have seemed very odd to his predecessor. Conducting without a score, Steffens plotted a journey through the work that made the most of every detail of the orchestration, from flautist Bronte Hudnott and clarinettist Yann Ghiro’s partnership in the opening movement to the crucial role of the bass instruments in the finale.

Perhaps not an obvious work to programme in the venue, for all Bruckner’s own firm faith, it proved perfect for the wonderfully warm and resonant, rather than reverberant, acoustic.

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They say that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. Well, when it comes to the two Lunchtime concerts that straddled the change of year from 2017 to 2018, it would appear that it can. In December we welcomed the outstanding winner of the 2016 BBC Young Musician of the Year, playing with his siblings in the Kanneh-Mason Trio. In January partnered by the pianist Petr Limonov came another cellist, Laura van der Heijden , the English born daughter of Dutch and Swiss parents and when 15 years of age the 2012 winner of the competition. The former for very good reasons has loomed large in the classical music world over the last year, the latter had until this concert escaped at least my attention. The reason was not hard to find in the programme. She has clearly, and no doubt very wisely, combined an education with a quietly burgeoning concert career. However, be in no doubt that on the evidence of this concert she belongs to what is becoming a royal line of native cellists who have been revealed by the BBC competition, two of whom ,Natalie Clein who won in 1994 and Guy Johnston in 2000, are very well known in Leicester. In this concert she and Petr Limonov showed themselves both to be outstanding young artists.

As the music making proceeded one thing began to emerge which was not obvious before the recital. With the exception of Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata I knew none of the works being performed but, having heard some of Schnittke’s and Webern’s other compositions, thought that the audience might be in for a testing hour. In fact, it emerged as a beautifully designed concert, which in itself suggested the high musical intelligence of the designers. We were introduced to Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style, humorous and ever alert to undermine musical expectations, expectations which were further confounded in Webern’s early Two Pieces for Cello and Piano which almost sounded like Elgar! This was followed by the ‘real’ Webern ,Op 11, which came across perhaps as the still centre of the concert, where musical statement was stripped down to its barest essentials. Then we were shifted back in a piece by Lyadov to the kind of short work for cello late 19c. Romantic composers could toss off in their sleep, before finally being pitched into Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata Op.119 ‘s teeming world of invention, in which the iconoclastic jostles with the romantic. It was a constantly intriguing journey. However, whilst it worked as part of a narrative musical pattern, I did wonder whether we had in the context quite enough time to get fully attuned to Webern’s ultra cryptic utterances. In this setting did it perhaps rather invite a response of ‘So what?’, I wondered. In 2016 a performance in the Museum of music of similar aims if rather greater length, a quartet by the legendary contemporary composer Kurtag, certainly did not invite such a response, love it or hate it.

As to the performances given by this duo, perhaps one might concentrate on the final work and for a change start by handing a bouquet to the pianist. There is sometimes an inclination to think that the pianist in a cello sonata is essentially an accompanist. Indeed, I have a CD of the Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata issued by a major recording company not so many years ago in which the cover of the CD is filled by a picture of the cellist with the name of the pianist consigned to the bottom corner, and this in a work written by one of the greatest pianists of all time who obviously had every intention of giving equal if not greater attention to the instrument. The same might apply to the Prokofiev Sonata written by another Russian virtuoso pianist.

To say that Petr Limonov rose to the challenge (of the Prokofiev) is an understatement. In the third movement there was a fine swagger to a passage that reminded one of such things as the March from the Love for Three Oranges. Throughout, the typically staccato passages in the work were delivered with a thrilling accuracy, edge and crispness.

Yet what most impressed

in this context were two other things, firstly

was the amount of shimmering crystalline sound conjured from the piano at its quieter moments

and secondly that even with the piano lid fully up he never drowned the cello. That does occasionally happen when even the most experienced of artists play in this intimate space for the first time.

Not that one felt this too likely to happen to this cellist.

Laura van der Heijden’s range of expressive tone and dynamics seemed to me simply breathtaking. In the early Webern and in the Lyadov the cello sang with a thrilling purity. This was warmth without any blowsiness and in the parts of the sonata where Prokofiev’s rich lyricism was to the fore we were back in the world of the ballet Romeo and Juliet. Yet she could also find so many other colours in the cello, astringency at times in the Schnittke and throughout where necessary a light and nimble fingering which made the cello sound almost skittish and dance-like.

This was cello playing worthy of being called aristocratic so entirely musical was it.

One last point. The hour and particularly the performance of the Prokofiev raised in my mind yet again the nature of musical genius. Long ago in my youth the world of music, led of course by academe, worshipped on the altar of strict sonata form and this composer was thought far too prolix for his own good. Yet, constantly and increasingly I have found pleasure and excitement in music which teems with ideas and colour even if, or perhaps because, it runs the very evident risk of spinning out of control. In another art form which I know rather more about that is one of the things that makes Shakespeare what he is. The great Dryden at the end of the 17thcentury answered the wise men of his time, who wished that the dramatist had been born in their more polite, ordered and classical age, by simply stating that Shakespeare is the greatest of all dramatists because the whole world is in his plays. Perhaps after all we should trust the audience rather more as to what is worth listening to! Certainly this Duo produced a wonderfully invigorating hour’s entertainment and convinced me that at least I was right to follow my inclinations in regard Sergey Prokofiev. I really do hope we shall hear these two fine musicians again soon in another programme as thought- provoking as this one.

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Only superlatives are appropriate when describing the recital Cockermouth Music Society experienced recently. The young cellist Laura van der Heijden is already a remarkable musician, exceptionally mature in her approach and in the execution of the music she plays.

Her recital with pianist Martin Roscoe was a triumph in every way. It featured an interesting programme of varied music, beginning with a spirited rendering of Schubert’s D major Sonatina, written for violin, but working well for cello. This was followed by

Chopin’s Cello Sonata Op.68, which was played with breathtaking beauty, exquisite sound from the cellist at all times, with the pianist expertly managing the difficult piano part.

The second half opened with some short pieces from Anton Webern, one set being in late romantic style and the other being atonal. Again Laura triumphed with great renderings of both, playing with superb control of touch and varying the nuances to give us an amazing few minutes of the type of music which most people would expect to find hard to appreciate.

Shostakovitch’s Cello Sonata, his last completed work, really set the seal on an evening of superb performance from both cellist and pianist. This is a valedictory work in the sense that one feels the composer is looking towards an end to life on the human plane, sometimes with foreboding ,sometimes with acceptance, but knowing that he has to face it (we don’t know what he sees-a void, an abyss, choirs of angels?) but

we listened to Laura’s wonderful interpretation of the nuances of the music and felt we had learnt something we hadn’t known before.

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On a sunny early July Sunday on Holywell St, the coffee concert programme was an all-Schubert piano trio one, spearheaded by his ‘Notturno’ Adagio in E flat from 1827, a bare year before his death at age 31. Today a stand-alone piece, it is believed to have originally served as the slow movement in the B flat piano trio before being replaced by the composer for reasons unknown. The piece describes a full circle, the opening bars recurring as the closing ones. They were taken dead-slow by our trio at ‘largo’ pace – an unusual tempo for the opener in music of this type and era. Then

a yearning melody took over at a swaying, barcarolle-like rhythm, followed by emphatic, almost didactic chords from Martyn Jackson’s crisp violin and Laura van der Heijden’s cello, accompanied by rippling, right-hand piano scales from Petr Limonov that gradually grew in intensity; very recognisably related to those in the ‘Trout’ Quintet. Both works were composed on summer holidays in rural Austria, though in different regions of the country. The three instruments blended seamlessly;

I would never have known this is not an established trio, but one more or less formed for these coffee concerts, I think at the behest of organiser Chris Windass.

The main work of the concert was Schubert’s Piano Trio in B flat major, D898, a work of predominantly light-hearted tone rather than of the complex moods of the composer’s last period works, with light and shadow, major and minor often alternating rapidly, agitation being quickly followed by calmness. This chiaroscuro is very largely absent, however, in this Trio, the mood being bright and carefree. Major keys play major roles in each of its movements, especially in the finale with its Mozartian gaiety and unsullied high spirits, though the decoration of the main themes in the two outer movements is pretty elaborate and at some length; a contrast with the conciseness of Mozart, and I always think this is one of the principal difference between the two composers in respect of their chamber music works.

In his trios Schubert, as here, was generous in apportioning the roles evenly between the instrument. Mr Limonov’s piano had no dominant role, and I enjoyed the merry camaraderie in the interplay among the three, though in the passage towards the end of the opening ‘allegro moderato’ where the emotional intensity is suddenly heightened, it was the piano which led the way into something briefly more profound. The ‘andante’ is a Berceuse, a lullaby with a rocking feel to it, and Ms van der Heijden’s cello came to fore, setting out the melody as Mr Jackson’s violin backed her up as a murmur. She is a past winner of the intense BBC Young Musician competition (in her year there were 453 entries). In the ‘scherzo’, Mr Limonov tossed out a zesty, stammering theme, all but daring the violin and cello to take up the idea and run away with it. In the more serene, elegant middle section, they slowed down. But Schubert’s saucy opening tune soon emerged again and they were off and running, fastidiousness trumped by boisterous high spirits.

The finale, a quick rondo, was taken at a jog-trot embroidered by trills from Mr Limonov’s right hand. There followed a gorgeous Schubertian Serenade as a little encore, which was received as warmly by the audience as had been the main body of the concert.

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What a wonderful concert to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Haywards Heath Music Society!

Laura van der Heijden (cello) and Tom Poster(piano) gave us an outstanding concert. Within a few minutes of the opening of the Debussy cello sonata it was obvious that these two extremely talented and sensitive musicians were at one with each other.

The music of the Debussy is full of tempo and dynamic changes, and flits from bursts of staccato to languid, lyrical phrases in the blink of an eye, yet their playing was completely coordinated.

The second piece was Schumann’s Three Romances, of which the middle movement in particular was indeed ‘heartfelt’, and Laura’s beautiful bowing arm produced the most perfect legato, drawing the best out of the 18th century English cello by Hill that she plays.

This was followed by Martinu’s Variations on a theme of Rossini, which was a tour de force of technical mastery by both musicians. Laura had to play some extraordinary staccato bowing, and Tom had his work cut out, but in spite of having some really challenging music to play, he still seemed to be able to find the time to turn away from the printed music to watch Laura’s bow so that they were always perfectly together.

After the interval, we heard ‘L’ by Graham Fitkin, originally written for Yo Yo Ma. This was a very entertaining piece, full of contrasts and interesting cross-rhythms, and a very nice overall shape. From a quiet passage in the middle with long held notes on the cello, it built up to a lively ending culminating in the last few bars of tranquillity.

The last piece was the Cello Sonata in G minor by Fauré, and was played with consummate musicianship. The piano part is complicated at times, but Tom played it with such delicacy that it was never overpowering.

A nice touch was the fact that both musicians spoke to the audience, which nearly filled the church, and the applause produced an encore of Ravel’s ‘Piece en forme d’habenera’.

All in all, this was a concert performed by two world-class players who are masters of their instruments.

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The renowned Endellion String Quartet, which has had a residency at Cambridge University since 1991, performed three string chamber works to a capacity audience at West Road Concert Hall on Wednesday evening, being joined in one of them by 2012 BBC Young Musician of the Year, cellist Laura van der Heijden.

The concert began with Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18 No. 4 in C minor, the only one of a group of six to be written in a minor key, the same key as that of the contemporary Pathétique piano sonata.

Two movements, one a pleasant contrapuntal scherzo, the other a menuetto, are sandwiched between a passionate opening allegro and a final up-tempo allegro prestissimo. The quartet, beautifully performed, shared with the Pathétique sonata both its tempestuous and sombre moods as well as its lyrical intensity.

On its completion First Violinist, Andrew Watkinson took an opportunity to look ahead to the Endellion’s last concert of the current season (on May 24, also at West Road) in which the Quartet will be joined by acclaimed cellist, Guy Johnston in the Schubert Quintet in C for 2 cellos.

And the ‘Endellions’ hope to share a glass of wine in the foyer with that evening’s concert-goers!

Next in the programme came a bravura performance of Janáĉek’s so-called ‘Intimate Letters’ String Quartet No. 2 – a work inspired by the extensive amatory epistolary exchanges between the composer and the married Kamila Stösslová, almost 40 years his junior.

Poignantly, it was premièred only a month after Janáĉek’s death in 1928 and, like the Beethoven quartet which preceded it, combined passages of lyricism and enthusiasm with intervals of deep introspection, all reflecting the commotion of a mind obsessed, and all perfectly represented by the Endellion, the dance movements of the third section irresistibly transmitting themselves (and enjoyably for the audience) to seated cellist, David Waterman!

After the interval, the Quartet was joined by current St John’s College music student, cellist Laura van der Heijden in Arensky’s String Quartet No. 2 for Violin, Viola and Two Cellos.

Andrew Watkinson had announced that Laura had valiantly insisted on keeping this engagement despite being a bit under the weather. But if she was, then it didn’t reveal itself, and it must have been contributing to her wonderful depth of tone and to the composed expressiveness she demonstrated throughout.

Second Violin, Ralph de Souza made himself scarce, allowing the required combination of violin, viola and 2 cellos to create

something of a revelation in Arensky’s beautiful, quasi-symphonic and deeply Russian work, drawing on native liturgical traditions and patriotic folk melodies to provide his moving elegiac tribute to Tchaikovsky who had died a year previously.

Outstandingly performed was the set of seven variations which make up the second movement of this piece, where combinations of instruments involved themselves in various melodic exchanges before the rapt audience.

With this performance of a work rightly taking a prominent place among the most celebrated of C19th Russian compositions, the Endellion String Quartet and guest, Laura van der Heijden, concluded an engaging and thought-provoking programme in a display of their customary superb musicianship.

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Cellist Laura van der Heijden – 20 next month – won the BBC Young Musician competition in 2012.

Currently a student at St John’s College, Cambridge, she is gradually developing her career with a number of recitals so far plus concerto appearances with the Philharmonia, English Chamber Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and – earlier this month – the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Her duo partnership with pianist Tom Poster is maturing beautifully, on the evidence of their recital for Huddersfield Music Society.

Tom Poster won the keyboard prize in the 2000 BBC Young Musician competition and is now well-established both as a performer and a composer.

Together they can play anything, switching from 19th century romance to impressionism to 20th century to contemporary at the stroke of a bow or the touch of a piano key.

Van der Heijden is expressive but controlled and by not going over the top she finds extra emotion and intensity. She has a sustained sweet, dark tone and is a mistress of colour, knowing exactly when to pump up or ease down vibrato. Everything she plays is unforced, clear and beautiful.

Their programme was refreshing and avoided the big beasts of the cello/piano repertoire.

Debussy’s D minor Cello Sonata begins and ends in D minor but is modal and ephemeral in its tonality. After a prologue movement a serenade creates a fantasy of cello glissandi, bowing over the fingerboard and delicate flute-like sounds. The finale is denser for both instruments. It is a fascinating and truly original work, a major achievement as was the performance.

Schumann’s Three Romances Op. 94 are lyrical and disturbed pieces and Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 2, here given its first Huddersfield performance, is in an unfamiliar style – very different to the Fauré of the Requiem – and has an almost constant stream of cello melody over its three movements.

In both works van der Heijden reminded me of the young Jacqueline Du Pré. BBC 4 had broadcast a clip of the teenaged Du Pré the previous night. There were similarities, but van der Heijden was better.

The contemporary work ‘L’, written for Yo Yo Ma’s 50th birthday in 2005, has composer Graham Fitkin’s characteristic frenetic quality with still interludes. Fitkin wrote “’L’ is for line, for lust, for life and for longing. It is also Latin for 50”.

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Orchestra of the Swan were in top form for their last concert in their 2015-1016 Shakespeare season. Conductor David Curtis brought unusual colour and some subtlety to Otto Nicolai’s rather workaday Overture to the Merry Wives of Windsor, particularly in the opening and in the transition into the Falstaff section.

The Shakespeare/Falstaff theme was continued later with Falstaff music from both Elgar and Walton, all four pieces delicately delivered by Curtis’s impeccable timing, tempo control and customary restraint.

The festivity closed in appropriate Proms style with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Nos 4 and 1 and Sir Henry Wood’s delightful Fantasia on British Sea Songs.

But the highlight was a stunning performance of Elgar’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra played by the brilliant young cellist Laura van der Heijden. Her Concerto was a long way from the melancholy and somewhat lugubrious performances often heard.

The programme notes pointed out that ‘Many listeners have heard nothing but sorrow in this work: nostalgia for a war-shattered world long gone, perhaps a premonition of Alice’s death, a regret for forgotten dreams’. This was miles away from what we were presented with on Saturday.

What we heard was a fine work which explored the search for identity with the protagonist (the cello) on a quest for understanding of and in the world (represented by the orchestra), outlining the struggles, accommodations and adjustments which have to be made in order to triumph on the journey. It was beautifully shaped and modulated. A majestic solidity was presented in the opening movement, the context for the cello’s quest for identity. Van der Heijden’s brilliance is that what she does sound quite simple, the hallmark of a fine artist. It was in the second movement when the cello began to anticipate rather than follow the orchestra’s ideas and in the final one where the cello was confident and separate from the world.

Van der Heijden’s playing sounded simple. It was always reflective rather than self-indulgent. There was never passion for passion’s sake. In the end the piece was not sad but triumphant and forward-looking. Magnificent.

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The name Ernö von Dohnányi is not one which trips readily off the tongue, but it is a name which deserves to be better known in musical circles. I was alerted to the brilliance of his piano quintets when one of them was played at a Nairn Performing Arts Guild concert some fifteen years ago. I was struck then by the opulence and lyricism of the music, and I had the same reaction when it was played at the latest Music Nairn concert by Tom Poster and friends. They say it is not so much what you know as whom you know, but in this case both seemed equally important. As a considerable virtuoso on the piano Poster had been able to assemble an ensemble of simply stunning skill and musicality to play this very special concert, and an evening of delights unfolded.

The concert opened with Schubert’s charming Sonatina in D major for violin and piano, and it is a mark of this master’s skill as a composer that he invests such a slight work with such craftsmanship. Two beautifully modelled movements envelope a slow movement of considerable profundity and poignancy in a perfectly balanced work, and violinist Elena Urioste sympathetically supported by Poster drew a wealth of subtlety from this apparently simple piece of music.

The two were then joined by their three colleagues, cellist Laura van der Heijden, violist Rosalind Ventris and violinist Savitri Grier, for a wonderfully poised and theatrical performance of Schumann’s Piano Quintet. Like his essays in the string quartet form, the Piano Quintet is a work of infinite subtlety, with quirky moments of striking originality. The enigmatic in modo d’una Marcia is a case in point where the mood swings between tragedy and ardent romance. There was a beautiful unanimity in the string and piano playing which belied the fact these were not players who were in the habit of playing together – two days of intense rehearsal had clearly built a rapport which would be the envy of many regular ensembles.

For me the highlight of the concert was the Dohnányi Piano Quintet no 1. Surviving improbably into the 1960s (what would he have made of the Beatles?), the Hungarian Dohnányi was mainly famous in his prime as a stunning piano virtuoso, and this tended to overshadow his considerable achievement as a composer, his compositions being wrongly regarded as mere vehicles for his formidable technique. When we listen to them now, the opposite is almost the case as the brilliance of the composition overshadows the awesome demands on the pianist. At times it was hard to believe that only five instruments were playing as the music towered and surged in symphonic proportions, and it was clear that much of the density of texture was being added at the keyboard. Understandably Dohnányi is influenced by Richard Strauss, whose immense compositional facility he shared, but I also heard other influences such as Dvorak and even Puccini. This work had been the main reason for calling the group of friends together, and

the immensely powerful performance it (Dohnányi quintet) received at their skilled hands more than vindicated the ambitious project.

Enthusiastic applause elicited a deliciously laid-back performance of an arrangement of Gershwin’s mellow number ‘You can’t take that away from me’, into which the musicians swung themselves with as much enthusiasm as the rest of the programme, and which

sent us all home with a shimmy in our step.

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On Saturday night, Brian Wright brought together four late romantic works which complemented each other with their respective approaches to narrative.

In Richard Strauss’ Don Juan the episodes and emotional turmoil of the Don’s life were clearly displayed for us. There was some splendid playing from the horn section, and throughout the sense of pace and tone colour was finely etched.

It was a real pleasure to welcome back Laura van der Heijden as soloist in Walton’s Cello Concerto. It was with this work that she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2012, and

her approach has deepened and gained even more captivating warmth. She brought a joyous spontaneity to the second movement and led us through the more introvert solo passages of the final movement with ease and conviction.

Albert Roussel is hardly a household name, but the suite from his ballet The Spider’s Banquet is more than just a charming rarity. The writing sits comfortably between Debussy’s romantic web-spinning and the intensity of early Stravinsky. Brian Wright drew our attention to these as we easily followed the story of the life and death of the insects.

In the South is Elgar at his most extrovert, and his concert overture sits well beside Strauss’ Don Juan. There is little English melancholy here and a great deal of extravagant rushing about. Yet at the heart of the work is the melting viola solo – wonderfully played by David Hesketh – which could only be by Elgar.

A splendid evening – would that there had been even more there to enjoy it.

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Cellist Laura van der Heijden made a name for herself when she won the BBC Young Musician Competition in 2012, and in performances since has developed a distinct ability to communicate with audiences.

As in a previous appearance at Harrogate’s Wesley Centre she was accompanied by Alison Rhind whose sensitive piano playing was a perfect foil for the rich sounding cello.

Their nicely varied programme began with Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style, a sequence of pieces based on his film music and including a busy Balletto, a refreshing Menuetto and a Fuga with

a lovely mix of the delicate and the sweeping with pianist and cellist demonstrating a tremendous unanimity throughout.

Schubert’s Sonata, originally written for the now obsolete Arpeggione, received a most convincing performance with parts of the lovely Adagio played with the utmost tenderness.

In James MacMillan’s short devotional Kiss on Wood, both players exploited the sounds quite movingly with notes and chords often hanging suspended in the air.

It ends so delicately that the audience was urged not to applaud when it finished and instead, after a suitably reflective pause, the musicians moved gently into Rachmaninov’s rhapsodic Vocalise.

Finally we heard a superbly balanced performance of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 3 for Cello and Piano, Op. 69, including an all too brief Adagio cantabile and some beautifully sonorous playing.

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Musical magic was in the air when Laura van der Heijden (cello) and Alison Rhind (piano) gave a recital for Cockermouth Music Society. These two great musicians worked together in such harmony that the whole evening was one of the best musical experiences I have ever had.

Schnittke’s Suite in Old Style proved to be a good opener with an attractively baroque feel and here Laura’s instinctive shaping of phrases matched Alison’s sensitive accompaniment perfectly. A thrilling account of Beethoven’s Sonata in A (Op. 58) followed, with Laura’s formidable technique and bow arm power combining for a soaring cello line of great beauty. Glinka’s Allegro Moderato in D minor from an incomplete sonata requires considerable input from the pianist, but Alison managed it all with great manual dexterity and admirable musicianship. Rachmaninov’s great Cello Sonata in G minor was at once a fitting end and climax to the whole recital. Here

both players gave such a wonderful account of beautiful music, so demanding and yet so satisfying in every way, that it brought tears to my eyes. Laura is a consummate artist who makes the cello sing as soon as she touches it, encompasses every twist and turn of the music with apparent ease and when matched by an accompanist of the calibre of Alison Rhind, produced a night of music-making long to remain in the memory.

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Music lovers in Nairn were able to enjoy a memorable musical event last Sunday evening at the Nairn Community and Arts Centre when two winners of the “BBC Young Musician of the Year” played. The very young English cellist, Laura van der Heijden was 15 when she won the competition in 2012; the now internationally established pianist, Tom Poster, won the piano section in 2000.

Together they gave a virtuoso duo performance of cello sonatas, cleverly arranged to enable both musicians to exhibit their superb individual musical skills.

The concert opened with Glinka’s sonata in D minor. Written originally for viola and piano, it had a clearly Russian flavour complete with dissonant harmonies, all of which helped the composer to be regarded as the father of Russian classical music. This was a relatively short, but intriguing, piece which led artistically to the first of the evening’s major pieces: Beethoven’s sonata in A (Opus 69), the third of his 3 cellos sonatas.

This major work in four movements was composed when Beethoven was almost completely deaf and is the more remarkable because of this. Once again both performers had ample opportunity to exhibit their considerable musical skills, answering each other in an interchange of musical humour and joy exactly as the composer had clearly intended. Following the interval, this remarkable musical pair played “Kiss on Wood” by Scottish composer James MacMillan. This short piece with religious connotations started with an explosive interchange between the two instruments and ended with a fading away to nothingness after which, at the performers’ request, they went directly on to the major work of the evening – Rachmaninov’s sonata in G minor (Opus 19). This was written after the composer’s self-confessed “rebirth” and was so readily identifiable as the composer’s own – that is, of course, if you were also acquainted with his second piano concerto or had watched the film “Brief Encounter”.

Overall,

this was a musical evening to remember. The rapport and musical communication between these two now internationally renowned performers was remarkable,

particularly considering the youthfulness of the cellist who exhibited a musical maturity well beyond her years. During a post-performance interview young Laura confessed that she had asked Tom (who has played in the past with many international musicians, including cellist Steven Isserlis) if he would go on tour with her, and he had readily agreed. Next year Laura will be taking a year off from performing when she goes to university to study – what else but musicology. When she returns to the concert stage we will certainly be inviting her back to delight, once again, the music-loving people of Nairn.

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Après le récital du pianiste Alexander Ulmann (qui a été sélectionné pour le Concours Tchaïkovski de Moscou), le concert en hommage à Jacqueline Ollier, fondatrice d’Ars Antonina, l’Association Ars Antonina, pour son troisième concert de 2015 en Principauté de Monaco, au Théâtre des Variétés, présentait un récital de la jeune (17 ans !) violoncelliste hollando-suisse Laura van der Heijden.

Lauréate, entre autres, du Concours B.B.C. « Jeune musicien de l’année » à 15 ans, cette artiste, à la carrière internationale déjà prestigieuse, fait preuve d’une maturité étonnante pour son âge. Son programme mettait bien en lumière ses qualités musicales : pureté du son, phrasé toujours expressif, sûreté indéfectible dans la virtuosité. En témoignaient la « Suite dans le style ancien » d’Alfred Schnittke et surtout la « Sonate en la mineur pour arpeggione et piano D.823 » de Schubert. Tout au plus aurait-on pu souhaiter un peu plus de profondeur et de projection du son dans le premier mouvement.

Mais quelle beauté de l’expression! Celle-ci devait trouver toute sa plénitude dans le « Prélude et Danse orientale » pour violoncelle et piano op.2 et surtout dans l’immense chef-d’œuvre qu’est la « Sonate pour violoncelle et piano en sol mineur op.19 » de Serge Rachmaninov.

Musicalité hors norme

L’intensité expressive du jeu de Laura van der Heijden, son engagement, sa virtuosité constamment au service d’une musicalité hors du commun, achevèrent de conquérir un public enthousiaste. Il faut dire que la violoncelliste avait en Alison Rhind (piano) une partenaire de haute volée et de grand talent, particulièrement dans les parties redoutables de piano de Rachmaninov.

Les deux musiciennes, généreuses, ont offert deux bis : « Ne me quitte pas»et«Les lilas » de Rachmaninov.

Une soirée qui a permis de découvrir une déjà grande interprète, promise à une carrière exceptionnelle.

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Worthing Symphony Orchestra, now 80 years old, after many years as its backbone, has become a phenomenon in the town’s musical life. Likewise, its audience. After 10 years at its helm, artistic director and conductor John Gibbons is striking out into feistier musical seas and Sunday’s concert proved that his explorations beyond safer classical waters has bred an audience that trust him.

He has aboard not merely a ship’s crew adding up to a few score enjoying and relishing his adventures, not a larger flotilla of craft supporting the flagship and numbering three figures, but now a whole navy’s worth in their many hundreds. This audience back him, and do not fear the unknown on the stranger or more daunting shores he visits.

I went to the Assembly Hall on Sunday fearing the programme would draw the season’s smallest crowd. To have been wrong was a delightful mistake. And all because of Gibbons’ constant contact and dialogue with his audience between pieces of music, and his performances intended to avoid obstructing the music’s message and impact, and often disregarding popular or traditional practice in conveying the best-loved classics.

Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla opera overture was the spark plug and the WSO left port with all the orchestra aboard and tympanist Robert Millet’s cannons punching them on and out through the harbour entrance. Where to? Straight into the hostile, oppressed, distressed world of Shostakovich’s post-war Stalin Russia of artistic dictat and purge. Why?

Because it gave Worthing the privilege of hearing the 2012 BBC Young Musician of the Year, Laura van der Heijden, giving her first performance of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 1 before taking it to Harrogate, then touring it to four venues in Wales.

Learned and memorised in just a month − between school A Level studies −

she took the audience progressively deeper into Shostakovich’s world of desperate high spirits in the first movement, to introverted retreat and loneliness in the second, to a soliloquy of despair and disbelief that became a nightmare of frustration and injustice in its movement-long cadenza.

Hopeless outreach towards freedom from inside an iron cage was sensed in the humour-seeking finale, and throughout the Concerto Laura was an engrossing and enthralling musical presence with a flow of instrumentally articulated challenges and complaints to ears pre-warned by Gibbons to expect grit and guts. She made her cello growl and grumble, sneer and shudder, and sing angular songs of melancholy and defiance, death-wish and life-grasp.

The audience did not want the girl in the long scarlet/coral dress to go, and if she returns over the coming years, she will surely to this audience become an adopted younger ‘sister’ to violinist Nicola Benedetti.

Invigorated by difficult music in the surefire way only live music can achieve, the audience were then transferred south to the mountains and foothills of Alpine and Upper Austria, the domain of Anton Bruckner. They’d been once before with Gibbons, in his ‘Romantic’ Symphony No 4. This time, No 3, and changing from Shostokovich’s angst and sarcasm to Bruckner’s richly rounded sound world borne of spiritual security and assurance.

Nothing if not dedicated to presenting Worthing with new sound experiences in its envied Assembly Hall acoustic, Gibbons led Bruckner newcomers into this all-enveloping aural realm and sonority, with a complete conviction in letting it cast its own spell. Listeners were afterwards asking each other how much they knew of Bruckner before this, and went away intrigued and inspired to explore more. In such sublime ways does great classical music grow inside people and spread from them.

By happy coincidence, Gibbons’ new history-making recording of Bruckner’s monumental Symphony No 9 was on sale for the first time on Sunday. Many WSO listeners bought and took a copy home, to continue their exploration with him, beyond the Assembly Hall. [Richard Amey will review this CD for Worthing Herald website in due course]

Special credit on this day to leader Julian Leaper who spearheaded the violins through the special obstacles, uncertainties, cliff-edge plunges (I nearly said ‘leaps’), to the concluding regal assertion of Bruckner’s finale. Also to Timothy Hawes for looking so carefully after the main theme in what Wagner called Bruckner’s trumpet symphony. And also to first horn Dave Lee, not only for his section leadership throughout the Bruckner, who does beautiful things with horns, but accomplishing the singular and exacting role which Shostakovich game him.

WSO under Gibbons has moved from being solidly and consistently special, to preciously extraordinary, and now adventurously phenomenal. In guest appearances, the WSO export Worthing’s name to towns beyond the county. It leads orchestral artistic life in all Sussex and is a cultural vanguard and standard-bearer of a Worthing with precious little else non-artistic to sell, it appears, except its pier, its Dome, and its crassly-conceived new chest-beating, high-rise private seafront flat accommodation.

April brings the 3rd Sussex International Piano Competition, Worthing’s own baby conceived and delivered by Gibbons and volunteer members of the WSO’s fan group, the Worthing Symphony Society.

In five days from Tuesday April 14 in the Assembly Hall, it features not only 24 competitors from worldwide, plus the WSO in the Grand 3-Concerto Final on the Sunday, but a special solo concert on the Thursday afternoon by Turkey’s great pianistic export, Idil Biret, playing Chopin, Rachmaninov and Scriabin. She is on the competition jury, and I understand that otherwise-occupied new mother Arta Arnicane, the first SIPC winner, will be replaced on the panel entirely appropriately by second SIPC winner, Poom Prommachart.

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The 17-year-old cellist Laura van der Heijden might strike you as a normal A-level student from Haywards Heath.

She introduced her programme in a direct, unaffected manner, free of the solemnity sometimes associated with classical recitals.

“Playing in Brighton feels like home” she said, before explaining the musical challenges of Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata In A Minor, adding sweetly: “I hope you like it as much as I do”.

Van der Heijden won BBC Young Musician Of The Year aged just 15, and has since established herself as maybe the most exciting young classical musician in the country. Her stage presence immediately suggests calm assurance, the confidence born of shedloads of practice.

She prefers not to smother every note in vibrato and to communicate the rich tones of her 1906 Pedrazzini cello with strength and clarity.

Her playing is so technically secure – “her bow control is insane,” said one watching music scholar – that there is no sense of chasing the music, but rather of an artist in full command.

The Beethoven Sonata In C Major was accomplished but somewhat two-dimensional in comparison with the Arpeggione.

It felt as if the lights had been switched on, and the lively melody of the (Arpeggione) Allegro moderato and the sweet longing of the Adagio were the highlights of this outstanding performance.

Van der Heijden will be back in town next year to perform with the Brighton Youth Orchestra String Ensemble. Beg a ticket.

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The all-Elgar concert with the Colchester Symphony Orchestra was dedicated to the lost generation of the Great War.

Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture, “In London Town”, was a brilliant start to the evening. We were transported musically through the sights and sounds of turn-of-the-century London, including a suggestion of a passing military band. Here the orchestra used its dynamic range and filled St Botolph’s with wonderful sounds.

The highlight was Laura van der Heijden playing the achingly-beautiful Cello Concerto

Since Laura’s last visit to the orchestra, she has grown as a musician and gave a most mature performance of this emotionally-damanding work. There are many who may say the best performance is Jacqueline du Pré’s classic account under Sir John Barbirolli. On Saturday evening, Laura made this work her own and was mostly expertly accompanied by the orchestra.

The concert closed with a bold and convincing performance of the “Enigma” Variations. This concert programme was extremely demanding and I can only assume there was a temporary lapse of concentration in a few bars of the finale of this popular work. This musical hiccup aside, I congratulate the orchestra for their musically rewarding programme given to an enthusiastic and large audience.

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On Sunday afternoon, at The Capitol, I found myself sitting next to an 11 year old cellist. Her reaction to Laura van der Heijden’s playing was “she’s good”. The understatement of the year? Laura is the complete performer – from the moment she strides into the platform you know you are about to enjoy a stunning performance. She gave us Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations – in which she made the cello ‘sing’ – and Dvořák’s Rondo – displaying virtuosity as well as lyricism.

For these items the Horsham Symphony Orchestra was reduced to the role of accompanist – which requires great accuracy and watchfulness. The orchestra was competent but not faultless. However, the orchestral pizzicato re-entry after the cadenza in the Tchaikovsky was as good as you’ll ever get!

For the rest of the programme, we enjoyed Brahms, Sibelius and Bizet. Steve Dummer’s light and humorous introductions to each piece are perfect in tone – and the energy of the orchestra (particularly in the opening Brahms dance and the closing Bizet ‘Galop’) was palpable. The Sibelius Valse Triste was once again dedicated to the memory of Horsham musician Laura Skuce, who died last year.

Well done this time to the technical people at The Capitol for not plunging the audience into total darkness for the performance. It meant we could just make out the excellent programme notes!

Smiling faces – including many youngsters – were an indication of the delight HSO brings to the community. The orchestra has all the skills it needs to diagnose and solve the little technical problems of balance and co-ordination. Such faults are more than made up for by the spirit and enthusiasm of the players under Steve Dummer’s charismatic baton and Rachel Ellis’s energetic leadership. All in all, a team to be very proud of!

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The spotlight was naturally on cellist Laura van der Heijden, making her first Scottish appearance since shooting to prominence two years ago as outright winner of the 2012 BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. But this packed recital would not have reached the heights it did without the partnership formed with the 29-year-old Japanese pianist Mana Oguchi, whose needle-sharp support throughout this well-balanced recital – precise, innately musical and simply a joy to watch – conjured up

a compelling sense of equilibrium, interaction and empathy. Truly a duo performance.

Take the delicate interplay that ignited flirtatious energy and character in Beethoven’s Variations on a theme of Handel (instantly recognisable as the tune to the hymn Thine be the Glory), in which van der Heijden’s focused, oaken tone and athletic precision vied puckishly with Oguchi’s super-clean pianism.

They then explored the more extensive emotional realms of Brahms’ Sonata in D major (better known in its G major version for violin and piano) with equal poise and perspicacity, its warm, lyrical melodies given effortless fluidity in this luminous, multi-shaded performance.

There was a distinct change of character in the second half, ranging from the fiery old-Vienna pastiche of Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style, with its unexpected moments of harmonic disintegration, to Britten’s virtuosic, ear-tingling Sonata in C.

All that, and the encores that followed, can be heard again tonight at the Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh.

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The drawing power of the winner of the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year 2012 is not to be underestimated – many were the awe-struck comments about the formidable abilities of such a young soloist by members of the approving audience.

Still, however impressed one is – and we were – it does the wonderful Laura van der Heijden no favours to see her as, well, “such an amazing performer for her years”. She must be judged as fully-fledged interpreter in her own right.

Her reading of the much-loved Haydn Concerto was as fresh as – the concert series being titled in Tune With Nature – a snowdrop. The rich tone and technical assuredness, combined with that refreshing impression of newness, total lack of any trace of sentimentality and yes, her youth, all contributed to a thoroughly enjoyable performance.

As ever, the soloist was most ably supported by Hoffman and his chamber orchestra. The sensitivity shown by these players was exemplary – Laura was well served indeed, and the result was a natural delight.

A good choice opened the concert – Holst’s A Moorside Suite: a very English sounding piece – pastoral music reminiscent of Vaughan Williams and Finzi. This was most certainly in tune with nature, with Sinfonia Classica’s modest resources turned to advantage, offering us a fresh, clean and uncluttered interpretation.

After Elgar’s Elegy – a poignant farewell which, although written before the First World War, felt particularly appropriate in this centenary year – Sinfonia Classica’s excellent horns and oboes supplemented the strings, to play Mozart’s 29th Symphony.

Once again, it was a fresh, crisp performance. Tempi were brisk, the attack was enthusiastic and Mozart’s playfulness was nicely acknowledged (as in those concluding remarks by the wind section, and the scampering scales in the last movement).

Concerts such as this do the Queen’s Theatre in Barnstaple proud – what a success this International Concert Series has been, and may there be many more.

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Ooit was een traditie op tweede Kerstdag een uitvoering van Mahler, zo zijn we van 1 t/m 9 het rijtje afgegaan. De meeste mensen die mijn stukjes lezen weten dat Mahler er bij mij in gaat als koek. Maar helaas na 9 symfonieën moest er toch iets anders worden bedacht. Dit jaar viel de keuze op Dvorák en ineens begreep ik dat dit natuurlijk dé juiste keuze is. Heeft Mahler de melancholie, Dvorak is de meester van de hoop. Wat past er nu beter bij het Kerst?

De entourage in Musis was feestelijk, ‘champagne’ bij binnenkomst, de zaal versierd en prachtig verlicht. De directeur van HGO George Wiegel sprak de zaal vaderlijk toe. Het leek wel of we allemaal nog meer welkom waren dan anders.

Op de Tweede Kerstdag loopt er van alles en nog wat de zaal binnen. Drie generaties tegelijk waarvan op zeker de jongsten niet weten dat je niet klapt tussen de delen (waarom eigenlijk niet? Een applaus klinkt toch een stuk frisser dan hoesten en kuchen, misschien moeten we het eens invoeren?).
Iedereen komt Tweede Kerstdag naar het concert.

Laura van der Heijden was even in verlegenheid gebracht toen er na het eerste deel een klaterend applaus opklonk. (Laura is toevallig familie van Ed Spanjaard die ik laatst nog heb horen dirigeren in Musis en ook nog een achterkleinkind van een dirigent Feestelijke zaalvan HGO.) Zij speelde het celloconcert van Dvorak. Een adembenemende uitvoering. Nog maar 15 of 16 jaar, jong in ieder geval. Wat een fantastische prestatie, niet omdat ze zo jong was, maar omdat ze het stuk zo goed speelde! Over een paar jaar mag ik zeggen: “Ja, haar heb ik een keer live gezien bij HGO in Musis!”

Staande ovatie!

De drankjes gingen rond in de pauze. Daarna een van de mooiste symfoniën die er bestaan ‘Uit de nieuwe wereld’ van Dvorák. Het was mijn vaders favoriet en Uit de nieuwe wereld heb ik het Largo gekozen bij zijn uitvaarplechtigheid nog niet zo lang geleden. Niet per sé een droevig stuk, eigenlijk heel hoopvol, passend bij mijn vader, een optimistische, goedgehumeurde en geestige man. Luister er een keer naar als je wil, ik zet onderaan een linkje.

Zelden heb ik zo’n prachtige uitvoering gehoord. Met rode wangen heb ik zitten luisteren. En die Manacorda, die is zo geweldig. Het hout had veel te doen en het koper. Ik wilde echt de fluit en de klarinet een keer met name noemen. O, o, o… ik weet nu al dat ik de anderen te kort doe.

Alweer gingen de mensen op de banken. Van mij mag het elke Tweede Kerstdag Dvorák zijn voortaan.

Voor we de deur uitgingen nog een kleine verrassing. Vier zangeressen zongen kerstliederen bij de uitgang. We gingen nog niet naar huis. HGO bedankt!
Allemaal het allerbeste in 2014. Ik verheug mij op de concerten volgend jaar!

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Newly-appointed principal conductor Robert Guy made his debut with the Phil on Saturday night.

His specialist area of interest and expertise, we are told, is contemporary music, which holds out the prospect of interesting and unusual programmes in seasons to come.

But for starters, we had a concert of music that could be categorised as tried and tested.

This is not to say that the repertoire was unchallenging. Far from it. And we heard a concerto from a teenage cellist who is surely destined to be a major star of the classical music scene.

The concert opened with a performance of Rossini’s Barber of Seville Overture that was fairly tight but might have gained from greater dynamic contrasts.

It concluded with Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pathetique”. Although this is full of the composer’s trademark big tunes and ingenuous orchestral effects, the symphony always seems to have a troubling sub-text, with its weird, almost childlike march theme in the third movement and the unanswered questions posed by the finale.

As was the case throughout the concert, the upper strings of the Phil produced a good body of sound, especially in the famous first movement theme, but there were some ragged moments and the lower strings need to be bulked out.

As usual, the brass and woodwind made a strong impact.

The centrepiece of the concert was the Elgar Cello Concerto, one of the most melancholic of English musical utterances, performed by the teenaged Laura van der Heijden, who earned prominence from her success in last year’s BBC Young Musician of the Year contest.

On that occasion she performed Walton’s Cello Concerto and on Saturday she showed that she has also mastered the much better known Elgar.

She was fully up to its technical demands and its many mood changes, from tortured introspection to almost hysterical skittishness.

Could such a young player also have the emotional maturity that one would have thought necessary for a work that has the reputation of being Elgar’s deepest journey into existential angst? Yes she could. This was a performance that could easily have come from a player three times her age.

There were absolutely no problems of balance between soloist and orchestra, with the cello being fully prominent whenever it had to be – a tribute to the power of Laura van der Heijden’s playing but also to the Phil’s young new conductor, who promises to develop a fruitful relationship with one of Huddersfield’s most venerable musical institutions.

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We may be moving rapidly towards autumn but this was an evening of joyous spring-like enthusiasm. Constant Lambert’s The Rio Grande is probably more familiar by reputation than by the number of live performances but made a fine curtain raiser, and one obviously relished by the choir. The changes of mood were deftly handled by Tom Poster at the piano, ranging from romantic indulgence to cutting edge jazz. Mezzo-soprano soloist Sophie Mansell sounded fine but from my seat she was completely lost behind the piano lid.

After the interval we were awash with Walton, wallowing in the delights of Belshazzar’s Feast.

Given the density of much of the writing, the opening is actually thinly scored and the solo baritone carries with ease, not that there was any difficulty with Njabulo Madlala’s ample tones. Some minor problems with entries from the choir did not detract from the overall impact and it was certainly a joyful noise.hazzar’s Feast. Having heard this most often in church or cathedral, it made a change to be able to hear far more of the text from the choir and experience the immediacy of the brass from the stage boxes.

Between these works, and in fine contrast, we heard Elgar’s cello concerto. As the earlier review shows, I heard Laura van der Heijden as soloist in the same work five days earlier in Maidstone. In the Royal Festival Hall, making her South Bank debut, the acoustic was more favourable and the lower range of the cello made greater impact. I was also more aware of the extended lyricism of her approach to the slow movement. The orchestral sound from the Royal Philharmonic created a wider palette of tonal support. In the final movement she creates impressive tension between the potential melancholy and the over-arching nobility of the score.

She was very warmly received and I expect to see her here again soon.

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The prospect of hearing Britten in the Mote Hall, Maidstone, conjures up visions of the Moot Hall at Aldeburgh, but the bleak concrete Leisure Centre could hardly be less romantic. Happily, once the lights are switched off, the Maidstone Symphony Orchestra adds a touch of magic and we are in a concert hall for the start of the new season.

Each concert includes a concerto with a young musician and it will surely be difficult for the other soloists this season to have quite the impact that Laura van der Heijden achieved last night in the Elgar cello concerto.

The unusually slow, hushed opening was foretaste of what was to come. Where so many soloists find melancholy or even despair in these pages, here we had the joy that autumn can bring. Sudden tiny bursts of sunlight in the mist, minute changes of tone and colour, gone before we could pin them down. As the first movement drew towards its close she brought a coolness, even a playfulness to the phrasing which was deeply moving.

The third movement was clean and warm but never indulgent. Those of us used to a heady amount of portamento here may have been struck by the almost classical impact of the melodic line. This led to a noble opening for the final movement and a sparky conclusion. The return to the opening theme was a memory, not a fulfilment. When we recall that Laura van der Heijden won the BBC Young Musician of the year in 2012 and is only 16 now, this was a truly remarkable performance. I look forward to hearing her again soon.

The evening had opened with Britten’s Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. There was real tension in the wind and a rawness in the brass which was very effective, supported by secure strings. The acoustic is good but exposes solo parts so that the tiniest details can be heard. Individual woodwind entries in the storm scene were unexpectedly clear and the impact of the percussion brighter than usual.

After the interval we heard Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony. If there had been any thought that the shrill wind and rasping brass had been endemic to the orchestra, the lush, highly romantic sounds produced here showed the range of tone the orchestra can produce. The string sound became more positive and lush and the horns warm and rounded. The trembling solo horn with the harp was particularly effective at the opening of the second movement.

The final movement was furious in pace and Brian Wright held his forces together with aplomb, bringing all of us to a triumphant conclusion.

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This year’s King’s Lynn Festival is proving to be a great artistic success, in my view, but even when standards are so high the recent concert given by the BBC Young Musician of 2012, Laura van der Heijden and The European Union Chamber Orchestra directed from the violin by the excellent Hans-Peter Hofmann proved to be something really special.

The orchestra played throughout with a superbly rich tone but at the same time their articulation was clean and fresh, the music being interpreted with natural feeling and sensitivity. These qualities were evident in abundance in the two works in which Laura van der Heijden was soloist. She brought youthful enthusiasm combined with elegance and élan to her interpretations of Haydn’s C major Cello Concerto No.1 and projected well the atmosphere of the young composer Tom Watts’ work Bridge of Sighs for solo cello and strings.

Inspired by a walk across the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge the work plays homage to the music of Monteverdi, one of the most famous composers to work in Venice, and uses a fragment from one of his madrigals, “She weeps and sighs”. The Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge is a 19th Century tribute to the famous “prison bridge” in Venice so the music’s ebb and flow and sighs were especially appropriate; a magical piece!

Music by Mozart, Grieg and Respighi (his excellent Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No.3) were also included in the programme and a power cut just before the end did not deter the players from giving us a lively encore.

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The Bedwyn Music Society have done it yet again; brought another stunning world-class performer to St Mary’s Church, Great Bedwyn.

This time it was the young cellist (only 16), Laura van der Heijden, the BBC Young Musician of the Year 2012. In fact, there were two immensely talented women playing that night, as Laura was accompanied on the piano by the impressive Mana Oguchi, born in Sapporo, Japan, in 1984.

Your reviewer is still reeling from the remarkable technique and style consistently displayed by both performers throughout the entire evening. Laura achieved grade VIII cello and piano when she was only 10, both with distinction. This makes me feel woefully inadequate, since I was a comparative pensioner at 17 when I achieved grade VIII cello.

Laura has incredible poise and presence as a performer. Even when playing the most technically challenging music (and there was plenty of that), she appeared to expend no energy, was unflappable, and achieved perfect results. She produces a beautiful tone from her Galileo Arcellaschi cello, made in 1935.

The evening started with Locatelli’s Sonata No 2 in D. Although a contemporary of Handel and Vivaldi, Locatelli is not nearly as well-known. Despite the complexity and speed of the sonata, Laura never even glanced at her left hand on the fingerboard. She placed everything immaculately, with not a note even a fraction out.
The Locatelli was a virtuoso piece, showcasing the cello, fluctuating between virtuoso double-stopping and very high thumb position work, to lyrical, plaintive passages.

Next was Brahms’ Sonata No.2, Op 99. As expected with Brahms, the emphasis shifted radically. This was
effectively a duet between piano and cello, with both playing more equal parts.

Finally a stunning rendition of Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata Op.19. Again, like the Brahms, this was more a duet between cello and piano, with the piano taking a much more important role than just accompaniment.

The audience loved it all, and the performers were called back on stage, where they performed Popper’s Dance of the Elves. This involved super-fast cello work, sometimes so high that Laura’s left hand was beyond the fingerboard. And played, again, with immaculate precision.

The audience would not let Laura and Mana retire. They were called back for yet another encore: Rachmaninov’s introspective, yet expressive and lyrical Lilacs.

After another two curtain-calls, they were allowed to leave the stage.

All in all, an extraordinarily impressive evening.

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Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Guernsey Symphony Orchestra couldn’t have been marked by a more exciting event than on Saturday evening at St James. In the days leading up to the concert, there was speculation in the air that something special was going to be shared with the audience.

Indeed, for everyone who was lucky enough to get a ticket, a real treat was to be had as the winner of the BBC Young Musician of the year Laura van der Heijden was the special guest soloist of the evening.

The concert began with a beautiful rendition of Welcome Ode Op.95 by Benjamin Britten, admirably guided by guest conductor for the evening concert Richard Dickins, a graduate of the Royal College of Music and musical director of Imperial College, London.

This beautiful piece featured a wonderful melodic backdrop by the Guernsey Schools Music Service Youth Choir, directed by Rachel Wright.

The piece certainly set the scene for what was to follow.

Anticipation was building as Laura van der Heijden arrived on stage.

At the age of 10, Laura had achieved distinction at Grade 8 in both piano and cello and is now just 15 years old.

The 70-piece orchestra also seemed to watch every move Laura made as she prepared to perform her winning piece from the BBC Young Musician of the year competition, William Walton’s Cello Concerto. The orchestra, ably led by regular guest Roger Coull, sensed the excitement as Laura produced a spellbinding, faultless performance.

The way in which she communicated to the audience through the harmony with her cello was beautiful to watch and listen to. She made her cello sing out eloquently in a refined and passionate way which captivated the audience from start to finish.

The three movements were almost magical and after the final ruminative one ended very quietly it was met with rapturous applause.

After several encore visits to the stage and with a tear in the eye, she had truly entertained everyone – this star of today and of the future had won the hearts of everyone.

During the interval, Laura said she was ‘delighted to play in Guernsey for the first time’, adding that ‘everyone had been helpful and made her feel very welcome’.

The second half of the evening was an opportunity to listen to Schubert’s Symphony No.9 in C Major (D944).

This piece was played well, was full of energy and intensity and also showed Schubert’s ability to integrate rhythmically inventive allegro with a powerful finale section which thoroughly entertained the audience.

A wonderful balance of music for the entire evening, and a fitting end to the 20th year celebrations of the Guernsey Symphony Orchestra.

With Credit Suisse sponsoring the orchestra for the last 20 years, we are very lucky that we have such talented musicians locally and are able to attract guests of outstanding calibre to the island to play with this accomplished orchestra.

Conductor Richard Dickins told the audience: ‘Life without music is a poorer life’ and that ‘the Music Service players in the island were our diamonds in the Guernsey music crown’.

It was an evening not to be missed.

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On the basis of this concert, and on other recent events I have reported for Classical Source, I ought to ask the editor to buy my lottery tickets, for this proved to be, in more ways than one, a memorable evening for all the right reasons. It showed – for those with ears to hear – that the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is, under very good conductors, capable of the highest standards of performance.

Paul Daniel was in charge – always a good sign – and the programme clearly proved, with the large audience attracted by it, that there is a demand for English music. A fine account of The Wasps Overture, full of character and unfailingly musical throughout, opened proceedings, tempos judged to a nicety. Laura van der Heijden won the BBC Young Musician of the Year a few months ago by giving a terrific performance of Walton’s Cello Concerto: the one she gave on this occasion surpassed it for virtuosity, understanding, musical integrity and overall grasp of every aspect of this (now) widely accepted masterpiece.

I put (now) in brackets for I can remember the British premiere of this work at the Royal Festival Hall, by Gregor Piatigorsky with Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting, 55 years ago, and the rather toffee-nosed reception accorded the score by many in the press. But over the years our familiarity, and therefore our understanding, of the work has grown to the point where I, for one, regard it as fully the equal of Walton’s other concertos, a truly indestructible work, subtle and quite original in expression.

Hearing Laura van der Heijden’s inspired and inspiring performance proved the quality of Walton’s invention and his compositional artistry time and again: every phrase, every paragraph in the solo part was perfectly projected with true feeling and character, not only on its own terms but also in the part it plays in the work’s overall structure. Hers was an account of the highest musical instinct and integrity, and the occasional glance at the RPO’s cello section during the performance revealed that almost all of them also knew every note, even when they were not playing, their interest heightened by their outstandingly gifted young soloist. And she is only 15 years old! Laura van der Heijden deserves the finest of instruments, for on this showing she is not the Young Musician of the Year, but of the Decade.

One might cavil that the orchestral balance, internally as well as vis-à-vis the soloist, was at times a shade, but no more than that, overpowering. But Laura van der Heijden was not the only soloist: Clio Gould, one of the finest British violinists of recent years and the much-admired leader of the RPO, was the soloist in a very rare performance of Holst’s only work for violin and orchestra – A Song of the Night, dating from 1905 – the same year as Mahler’s Seventh Symphony (which sometimes is called ‘Song of the Night’ – and ten years before Szymanowski wrote his Song of the Night, Third Symphony: any extra-musical connexions there?).

The Holst was not first-performed until 1984. I was immediately struck then by its quality, manifestly not deserving the neglect which had befallen it; but the reasons for its relative rarity are not hard to seek: at around ten minutes or so, it is too short (these days) for orchestral programming, but more importantly there are no memorable tunes – such as we find in The Planets, Beni Mora, St Paul’s Suite, the military band Suites and The Perfect Fool. Nonetheless, it was good to hear it, especially with such a fine and committed account as Gould gave, excellently partnered.

Before Enigma Variations, we had a delightful interlude in the shape of the presentation by Paul Daniel of The Salomon Prize 2012, awarded by the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Association of British Orchestras, to the RPO’s co-principal double-bass, Roy Benson, who, as the citation began, “For over thirty years … has given unstinting service to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and his fellow colleagues.” This fine and unassuming musician – who once cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats in aid of the RPO’s sickness and benevolent fund – certainly was a more than worthy
recipient.

After all this excitement, one might have forgiven conductor and orchestra for handing us a routine account of the Elgar – but far from it: this was a truly fine performance, a real performance, in that Daniel at no time skated over the surface. His was never a reading to emulate greatly-loved recordings, for his pauses between Variations were occasionally quite lengthy, as if asking his audience to pause and reflect on what had gone before and to prepare for what was to come; at no time did this detract from the work’s overall unity, and the RPO responded magnificently, especially in the very moving ‘Nimrod’ and the personal subtleties of ‘*** Romanza’ (Variation XIII), quite magically conveyed. A quite excellent concert all round – now, Mr Editor, when’s the next one?

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At the age of just 15, Laura van der Heijden has been awarded the title of BBC Young Musician 2012. With the sturdy piano accompaniment of Huw Watkins on Friday afternoon, she began her recital with JS Bach’s Gamba Sonata No.2 in D, BWV 1028.

Originally written for the viola da gamba, Laura managed to coax all the notes out of her smaller, four-stringed cello and produce a lively, moving performance.

She is a confident, assured soloist who plays with great expression and sensitivity. Her sense of dynamics was faultless and during the course of her performance, she was seen to both listening carefully to her accompanist at the piano and keeping an eye on him from time to time to ensure that they were in accord at all times.

Indeed, the rapport between the two musicians was apparent from the very first notes and continued to the end of the recital.

The four movements of the gamba sonata are varied indeed, with a slow first giving way to a lively second, followed by a slow and sombre third and a dancing, final fourth. The amount of expressive warmth that both players managed to extract from the Bach piece was impressive indeed.

The Mendelssohn Cello sonata No.1 in B flat was equally rewarding, with Laura bringing out all the delicate little subtleties in this work and making it look and sound easy. Huw Watkins’ accurate and sensitive accompaniment was and added bonus here.

More of a duo performance was the Debussy cello sonata which followed. It sounded at first almost light and frothy compared to what had gone before, but as the work continued, it was obvious that Laura’s sense of dynamics, light and shade, were carefully delineated and pizzicato parts were executed as skilfully as the arco. The romantic second movement of this work was most enjoyable as played by this soloist and again she was listening carefully to her partner to ensure faultless togetherness.

A Rachmaninov romance was played as an encore and, owing to a most vociferous Corn Exchange audience, the romance by Rachmaninov was followed by De Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance for good measure.

It was longer than the usual hour on this occasion, but the audience would have kept the musicians there all day, given the chance. When I asked her later if she had a particular favourite, Laura said no, but admitted to a great fondness for the Debussy.

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A full house at the Medieval Hall on Saturday was spellbound by a recital given by the charming 15-year-old BBC Young Musician 2012 Laura van der Heijden, (cello), and conductor, composer and keyboard player Howard Moody.

These two consummate musicians have performed together since 2006. The almost tangible communication between them was clear for all to see, hear and experience.

They immediately captivated the audience with JS Bach’s Sonata for viola da gamba and harpsichord No 2 in D.

Following this was Mendelssohn’s cello sonata No 1 in B flat Op. 45.

It would have been easy for the balance of this extraordinary work to be upset in favour of the piano but such was the sensitivity of the performers that there was never any danger of this happening.

They drew the audience into a deeply musical and delightful world, contrasting moods and melodies with every phrase beautifully crafted.

Tchaikowsky’s Pezzo Capriccioso Op. 62 gave van der Heijden a chance to skitter and flit around her instrument, always superbly controlled, and the final piece, Debussy’s Cello Sonata showed off the fantastic range both of the glorious instrument and the enviable skill of both performers.

For a final encore van der Heijden gave us the flickering, frightening and incredibly fast Fire Dance by Manuel de Falla. The whole evening was an amazing experience.

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WHAT an embarrassment of riches Worthing Symphony Orchestra fans find themselves possessing this season.

It closed on Saturday evening — a deviation from the normal Sunday afternoon slot — with a near-full house, an electrifying pianist already familiar to them in Ian Fountain, a cellist no less than the newly-crowned BBC Young Musician of the Year in Laura Van Der Heijden, and a conductor in John Gibbons who knows when to stand back and let great music speak.

After a clamorous and chaotic overture of film score dimensions by Anthony Collins and William Walton’s imposingly consummate coronation march Crown Imperial, Tchaikovsky hit us with his immense Piano Concerto No 1. Fountain, bespectacled, tall, still with his Winchester Cathedral Choirboy looks despite a thinning crown, gave us genuine maestoso, spirito, semplice and con fuoco.

From the word go, he and Gibbons went for it and some of the tempo were frighteningly fast, meaning sheer adrenaline surging through arms, hands and fingers had Fountain delivering from a precipice and perspiring in the heat of an unseasonally hot May night.

Fountain smiled as he listened to the quieter interludes while resting. Then both men saved the fastest for the end of the finale, by which time he had already genuinely caught fire, following the bliss of the flute-led melodiousness of the slow movement.

If ‘fountain’ means explosive beauty and shape with water, this was the genuine article and his solo performance goes down as one of the most exciting in modern WSO history. Ian Fountain has been here before with such contrasting concerti as Brahms’ No 1 and Mozart’s 24th.

And it’s no surprise to hear that he will be directing as well as soloing with Chichester Pro Camerata in a Chichester Festivities 2012 concert on June 27. It’s at Chichester University Chapel with Bruckner’s String Quintet Adagio, Mozart’s 12th Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. No woodwind or horns in this concert.

Despite the blowing and hitting WSO members going shirt-sleeved, tympanist Robert “Troyte” Millet sporting red braces, the strings stayed in jackets and the interval arrived with drinks calling and two open-flung side doors having brought little or no relief.

Then we met Laura Van Der Heijden in Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, for Cello and Orchestra. Booked long before her BBC triumph, she had been tipped to Gibbons by Hove music man Tony Purkiss as potentially a Forest Row-based heir to Jacqueline du Pré. Immediately, her big sound hit us (could Perkiss be right?) and a musician ship subliminally beyond her 15 years was evident as she gave us a first professional performance of stunning accomplishment and authority.

This was surely enough for one night. But Gibbons and the WSO had their own crowning of the Jubilee celebrations still to come. Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

Gibbons’ empathy with the Worcestershire King of British Orchestration extends to he and the composer’s shared passion (and sorrow) for Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club. Gibbons, in introducing the work claimed the latest and, to him, most convincing explanation of the underlying Enigma theme Elgar cunningly says runs through the work.

The tune for the Variations begins to the vocal rhythm of “Wol-ver-hamp-ton”. In his programme notes, Gibbons’ equally plausible theory points out “Ed-ward El-gar”.

We’ve heard Gibbons and WSO doing Enigma before. It’s already a tours de force for this band. Gibbons wisely tries nothing clever or beyond the already rich imagination or observation of Elgar himself, whose notes and directions place glory on a plate to an orchestra good enough to carry them out. The WSO are more than good enough and in partnership with Gibbons, glory was completely theirs.

Next season brings Nicola Benedetti in Bruch (before she plays it at The Proms), Laura Van Heijden in Dvorak, John Inverdale in Prokofiev, Jessica Wei Zhu in Schumann, Arta Arnicane in Dohnanyi. As if these aren’t riches and favourites enough, into the mix, too, comes a first: the great operatic bass and WSO supporter, Sir John Tomlinson as Wotan in a scene from Wagner’s Ring.

Toast Mr Gibbons, all ye, around your gardens and tables this summer — and realise that we are now surely, despite the recession double dip, in a golden age of WSO programming.

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Throughout the preliminary rounds of BBC Young Musician 2012, the judges have stressed that the emphasis is on musicianship, on looking for that extra spark that makes every performance really special, but also on the importance of enjoying music. This was the one thing that really stood out at tonight’s final, as all three soloists really communicated their love of what they do to everyone in the hall.

They also treated us to a fascinating programme that balanced the unknown and the familiar, beginning with that much maligned and neglected instrument, the recorder. Charlotte Barbour-Condini, celebrating her 16th birthday, made a huge opening statement by playing an extended improvised introduction to Vivaldi’s Recorder Concerto in C minor. At this point, I have to declare an interest, being a recorder player myself, and hearing the magical sound of a solo recorder filling Hall One of the Sage is one I won’t forget, although in style her improvisation didn’t entirely fit with the Vivaldi that followed. Accompanied by a much reduced orchestra of just 3 violins, bassoon, double bass, cello and harpsichord, Charlotte managed the tricky job of achieving a good balance with the other instruments and gave a wonderfully vibrant performance. There were some nice changes of tempo in the first movement, the Largo was poised and elegant, and and the Finale’s fiendish fast passages – full of big leaps, where the recorder mimics the sound of a double-stopping violin – sparkled with excitement.

We were then taken back into the realm of the familiar by pianist Yuanfan Yang who played Grieg’s ever-popular Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16. This was an excellent choice for showcasing his range of dynamics and colour, and the audience loved it. From the dramatic crash of the opening chords, much of the piece was played with the youthful bravado that it deserves. Northern Sinfonia, under the direction of guest conductor Kirill Karabits, matched Yuanfan’s energy, and the last movement was particularly exciting, right from its clipped and rhythmic opening. As a whole, though, this movement could have improved if Yuanfan had just allowed it to cool off a little, to let in a touch more contrast. He did this beautifully in the slow movement, where the quiet passages were wistful and tender, before the passion built up again. Yuanfan looked and sounded particularly assured, as if he’d been playing major piano concerti in front of packed houses for years, and I’m sure we will see great things from him.

The overall winner of the competition, Laura van der Heijden, exhibited incredible musicianship and maturity from the moment of her first appearance in the category finals, and her thoughtful approach showed through even in her choice of concerto. Instead of playing one of the “big” famous cello pieces such as the Elgar or the Dvořák, she opted for William Walton’s relatively unknown concerto, and made it her own. Walton’s concerto reverses the expected form, consisting of two slower outer movements, and a virtuosic second movement. This fast movement glittered with colour from the woodwind, matched beautifully by the cello solo passages. The concerto opens with a gently swinging, seductive theme, and the lyrical passages sang out beautifully. The final movement (Lento – Tema ed improvvisazioni) contrasted poised beauty with an exciting cadenza, followed by bold orchestral flourishes, before dying away to almost nothing. The beauty of Laura van der Heijden’s playing lies in the fact that she has a wonderful expressivity, but never, ever overdoes it, and the pianissimo ending of the concerto was enchanting, ending with just the solo cello, captivating the audience, just as the solo recorder had done at the beginning of the concert.

While the judges made their decision, we were entertained with a very relaxed performance of the second movement of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto by last year’s winner Lara Melda. All three finalists are to be congratulated for their wonderful performances: in a weekend where a dog won a national talent competition, these three, and all the other category finalists, showed that Britain really has got plenty of talent. I have no doubt that they will all go on to have very exciting careers, and Charlotte Barbour-Condini will be a marvellous ambassador for the recorder – but in my mind there is no doubt that Laura van der Heijden is something quite special, and her title of BBC Young Musician 2012 is well deserved. Look out for her: she’s going to be a star.

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Through a fog of jet-lag I nevertheless enjoyed watching the finals of the Piano and String categories in BBC Young Musician 2012. The level of technical mastery in these young players is quite astonishing. I’m constantly amazed at how they manage to combine schoolwork with the countless hours of instrumental practice required to reach that level at such a young age. And I wonder how they manage to acquire such admirable composure on the platform by their mid-teens. They look more relaxed and much more media-savvy than I was at their age. Specialist music schools must have a lot to do with it, I think.

My only disappointment was the absence of girls from the Piano final. Where were they? Many of my best piano students are girls and I can hardly believe there weren’t any good candidates.

These days, everyone seems to be able to tackle virtuosic pieces with incredible aplomb; competitor after competitor presented programmes of enormous technical difficulty. Despite the rising level of virtuosity, however, it remains the case that what the audience is hoping for is someone who can combine instrumental mastery with emotion and understanding. That combination is as rare as it ever was. But we did see it, notably in the case of Laura van der Heijden, the 14-year-old cellist who won the String final last night.

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