Carnival of music (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Carnival of music

9:27am Wednesday 27th January 2010

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Carnival of the Animals it was billed, but it became more like a Carnival of Music.

London Mozart Players kicked off with Haydn’s Symphony No 83 in G Minor, La Poule; Jaunty, fresh, superbly disciplined and, under conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, expansive in dynamics and subtle in balance.

With cello and double bass centre left, as opposed to normally behind or near second strings, Wetton made much of the high contrast of Haydn’s work, and the “clucking” effect – La Poule translates as The Hen – shone through not only amusingly but dramatically musically.

Mozart’s Concerto for two pianos in E Flat brought to the platform Tomoka Shigeno and Waka Hasegawa, playing Steinway D concert grands. Their unanimity was remarkable; their playing delicate, passionate and caring.

But then the Carnival proper: poet Roger McGough, with just a hint of his native Liverpool accent, read some of his poems as an adjunct to Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals.

His poetry is hilarious: The ostrich which buried its head in the sand and forgot where; the seagull which is an eagle without headlights.

Hardly an animal wasn’t mentioned and hardly a musical emotion avoided.

That languid cello solo, The Swan, so finely played by Sebastian Comberti, dazzling flute work from Kate Bedford, the rare treat of a double bass solo (the poem had to be about an elephant) from Stacey Watton, Angela Malsbury’s clarinet so accurately imaging a cuckoo and the two pianists made the Carnival of Animals into a Carnival of Music.

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