Review: The Big Concert, Raploch, Stirling

Arts Editor

Friday 22 June 2012

Five stars: BIG it certainly was.

The Big Noise Orchestra of Sistema Scotland now boasts four young tuba players, and the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, the role models for the young musicians, runs to some ten double basses.

The high point of the evening came early, when the two bands joined forces to play Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. Perhaps finer playing was to come, but the pictures of the young Scots lining up alongside the internationally acclaimed Venezuelans and demonstrating full concentration will remain with everyonewho saw them. That audience included perhaps 5000 local people as well as Westminster Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt and one of the chief architects of the Cultural Olympiad, Tony Hall. It was revealing that both chose this event to attend as the London 2012 programme was launched across the nation, and even better that they were upstaged by Maestro Jose Antonio Abreu, the creator of El Sistema, with his reciprocal invitation to the Big Noise Orchestra to visit Caracas next year to celebrate its fifth birthday. This fourth birthday event was beautifully produced, in spite of the weather, and those heart-warming pictures were married to a truly excellent outdoor sound. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel and his original charges produced an account of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide that was as purposeful as it was appropriate to end a first half that had begun with the Raploch youngsters playing the Purcell that begins it. In the Scherzo of the second half performance of the Eroica Symphony the ebullient Dudamel was (Abbado-like) barely conducting at all, such is the obvious rapport with the musicians. If the story of Beethoven’s Third was unlikely to be told here as it might be in a concert hall, it was still the case that individual principals and the overall orchestral balance shone impressively.

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Review: The Big Concert, Raploch, Stirling

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