Thursday 25 May 2006

Tuesday's Salomon Orchestra concert at St. John's Smith Square went very well. The orchestra, under Dominic Wheeler, were on terrific form and all three works (Ravel's La Valse, de Falla's El amor brujo and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade) were outstanding. The hall in not large so the orchestra made a wonderfully full, thrilling sound in the louder passages (I know, loudness is not everything, but its still fun occasionally). The soloist in the de Falla piece was Sara Gonzalez, a mezzo-soprano from the Canaries currently studying in London, she displayed a lovely dark, Spanish-hued voice.

Interestingly, all 3 works had dance links. Ravel's work was written for Diaghilev's company (but wasn't used), de Falla wrote his work initially for a Spanish dance company and it included spoken sections but in the 20's he transformed it into a ballet and of course Diaghilev's company did a ballet version of Scheherezade with Nijinsky as the Golden Slave.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous11:02 am

    If you liked Ms.Gonzalez, be on the watch because she´s one of the finalists for the Gold Medal competition at the Guildhall School this year 2007. Final round will take place on 3 May.

    ReplyDelete

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