Jennifer galloway oboe biography of albert
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BBC Philharmonic: Reflections on Debussy at the Bridgewater Hall
The evening of dreams began an hour before the concert, with Entre-Temps for oboe and string quartet by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, an admirer of Debussy and a similarly ‘cinematic’ composer, with an ability to play with sound-colours which is alluring for film directors in search of atmospheres. Takemitsu wrote that this short piece was made up of episodes in a dream which ‘moved on through the night towards the twilight’, but I heard – and saw – an anxious group discussion and shades of red: original dreams are transformed in the transmission. All difficulties in performing it were overcome, seemingly effortlessly, by Jennifer Galloway, the BBC Philharmonic’s Principal Oboe, and four of its members who make up the Marchini String Quartet, all of them regulars at the Bridgewater Hall.
Vaughan Williams’ popular evocation of the spirit of the Renaissance,
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Astounding beauty in the BBC Philharmonic's Alpine Symphony
This season highlight BBC Philharmonic concert, taking place in the wake of announced cuts to the BBC’s English orchestras, put forward as strong an argument as possible against the new strategy. The strategy, proposed by the erstwhile Chief Executive of this very orchestra, makes some fanfare about the need to prioritise “quality, agility and impact”. With a gripping world premiere prefacing Lieder by Alban Berg and Strauss’ gargantuan Alpine Symphony, this programme demonstrated all three of these scarcely tangible goals in spades, while also highlighting precisely what would be lost under the proposals.
The headline news of the evening was an astoundingly beautiful day’s walking the meadows and peaks of the Alpine Symphony. With the Bridgewater Hall packed with just about every brass and percussion player in the city, the latter manning a deliciously decadent trio of wind machines
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Prom 6, BBC Philharmonic, Davis review - a bracing pair of British symphonies
The programming had a neat simplicity: the fourth symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Tippett. It was also slightly thin – just over an hour of music which, even allowing for having to give way for a late-night Dido and Aeneas, could have squeezed in something else.
Neither symphony is easy listening – and this, combined with the heat and travel chaos, meant a small house. But Sir Andrew Davis proved a sure guide through the thickets, making sense of the often dense textures while also finding space in the sporadisk clearings.Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony was premiered in 1935 and he famously said of it: “I don’t know whether I like it, but it’s what inom meant.” It’s very different in tone and means from the symphonies either side and fryst vatten often seen as reacting to the political developments in europe at the time, an interpretation RVW resisted.
It’s certainly full of angst and tension, right from th