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Description: Peter Ash conducts works by Debussy, Strauss and Wagner. With soprano Alwyn Mellor.
Phone: 0845120 7500
Website: www.barbican.org.uk
Email: info@barbican.org.uk
Trains: Tube/BR: Moorgate/Barbican 
Opening hours: Mon-Sat 9am-8pm, Sun 11am-8pm
Extra info: Pub, Food, Parking
Musical youth: the LSSO responds magnificently to a programme that ranged from Wagner to Debussy
Given the catastrophic decline in instrumental tuition in this country, it's frankly astonishing that there are any youth orchestras left at all. Yet the London Schools Symphony Orchestra is still going strong. It gives three Barbican concerts a year, each preceded by intensive rehearsals held in the school holidays.
This autumn's concert under the able Peter Ash must surely have been one of its most venturesome ever: big scores by Strauss and Wagner, tackled with enthusiasm, verve and accomplishment.
It opened, however, with a suitably restrained and rarefied account of Debussy's Danse Sacre et Danse Profane, in which the string section provided an ideally delicate backdrop for the harp solo, played with assurance and style by the talented young Cecilia Sultana de Maria.
With Strauss's tone poem Death and Transfiguration, the magnitude of the challenge facing the orchestra was evident - perhaps occasionally just a little too evident. The opening chords were insecure, the tempestuous main section - admittedly a life-and-death struggle according to the composer's scenario - taxing the strings to their limits.
A selection of excerpts from Wagner's Gotterdammerung was scarcely less ambitious, but here the challenges were heroically surmounted. The sequence began with an evocative performance of the Dawn music, eloquent cello lines mostly moving together and alternating with well controlled low horns.
Fine clarinet and bass clarinet solos led, via impassioned love music, to splendid horn calls and a roller-coaster ride of a Rhine Journey. A noble Funeral March, with an impressively managed quartet of Wagner tubas heralded an excellent Immolation Scene, in which the soloist was Alwyn Mellor. Commanding of tone and consistently alert to verbal inflection, Mellor has huge potential as a Wagner soprano.
The orchestra responded magnificently, whether reduced to a sympathetic whisper or soaring confidently to its ecstatic conclusion.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Personally, I loathe Wagner, always have - there's just something about him and my poor husband suffers because I even don't like some of the more modern composers who are influenced by him.
But it is good to realise that once again, truly great teaching has not been totally supressed in this national curriculum world of ours! These youngsters were inspired by teachers who genuinely loved their specialist subject especially in the infant and junior school.
You see, you have to get them young - for the most part. There are children who somehow have discovered the classics on their own. These are the children who will find their own joy later on, through their own hard work. The real, genuine pity is that all children have to work so hard to get there. I know: it's how I found my husband. And then you have the parents to combat, should they be so inclined!
- Carlyle Braden, Croydon, UK
