Lynn Cahill’s welcome at Christ Church Cathedral was a happy dollop of sunshine on a wet Saturday lunchtime with The Kelvin Ensemble from University Of Glasgow. This thirty-piece Orchestra arrived almost late and set up double quick without a sound check and proceeded to delight the audience with a summer’s day programme to gladden the most waterlogged heart.
The dramatic fanfares for Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute created a bring-up-the-curtain music and these young musicians, under Justin Fung’s brisk direction, just revelled in the vitality of life in swirls of strings, dramatic brass, emotive passages and some more memorable slow fanfares.
Beethoven’s pastoral Symphony No. 6 was such a joy and this chamber size group filled the space with life, birdsounds and a big lyrical sense of a changing landscape, gusts of wind that promised warm emotion. A lush repeating and familiar motif just got better and better as the music clouded over into the beginning of a summer storm to clear the air with new colour, new life and a pulsating air. You could hear the cuckoo and still feel the impending storm, the gatherine menace of strings, darkening brass and that repeated lyrical passage.
The storm rattled the timpani, shivered among the strings as the harshness of brass was soothed by a cor anglais and the clouds cleared, the light was musical and luminous and
