SUMMER SCHOOL
Assessment of the Summer School and German tour from Peter Donohoe
Frome Festival Summer School Author: Peter Donohoe
This year's Summer School started on Friday 14 July and culminated in the two performances on Sunday 16 July - and on Monday 17 July, at this point 130+ singers and over 80 musicians flew off to Germany to perform two concerts in magnificent purpose-built halls close to Leipzig .
To have played a part in both the Frome Festival and in particular the
Summer School and the Somerset Youth Orchestras visit to Germany was
rewarding, a real eye opener to what can be achieved and also to some extent
nostalgic.
To deal with these in reverse order:
One of my early concerto dates, back in 1980, was to play Rachmaninov's
Piano Concerto No 2 with the Somerset Youth Orchestra. It was a very good orchestra then, as it is now, but the significance of the time of that
concert, apart from the fact that it was my last concert as a single man (I
was married a few days after the performance), was that it was shortly
before the abandonment of peripatetic music from the schools of Somerset.
The resultant dearth of musical and cultural awareness than afflicted the
area for several years has thankfully been put right by the contrasting
vision of the present day county council. The startlingly great results
include the rejuvenation of the Youth Orchestra, which proved four times
over by performances of an extremely difficult program that given the right
circumstances they can rise to extraordinary challenges and achieve
something that I am sure the members will never forget. My own experience of
being a member of three different youth orchestras in the 1970s is that I
remember every moment of all the concerts we gave, however many I have given
since as a professional musician (an average since the early 1980s of around
150 concerts a year) with enormous excitement; the courses and performances
were formative for me, as I know they will be for the present day members of
the SYO, and, then as now, the more demands that were made the more
formative and exciting they were.
The demands on the orchestra this year have included, in April,
Rachmaninov's 4th Piano Concerto (probably the most difficult concerto for
the orchestra in the mainstream repertoire) conducted by Andrew Sherwood
with me as soloist, Elgar's Enigma Variations in the same concert, and this
summer Liszt's Piano Concerto No 2, and perhaps most demanding of all,
Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony. That Jason Thornton demanded of the
orchestra and choir no less than what he would have demanded of
professionals meant, not that the players were overwhelmed by what was being
asked of them, but that they rose to the challenge and played four very
moving concerts of an extremely taxing work. It not only moved the festival
goers in Frome, but seemed to move the German audiences even more - a
fascinating insight into the wisdom of not making assumptions. It is
certainly true that, with one or two exceptions, British music is not played
very much outside Britain, and we tend to make the traditional assumption
that it is because it is not as good as music from Germany, Russia, or Italy
etc. But actually it is not true - the reason is exactly because we tend not
to believe in it ourselves. To assume a negative reaction by the Germans to
a quintessentially British work like the Sea Symphony (which even I was
guilty of) proved to be groundless. The power of the performances won them
over to a work that very few people in Leipzig or Dresden would ever even
have heard of.
The summer course and the tour between them comprise a huge achievement on
the part of Somerset , the Frome Festival, and all those who were involved in
organising all of the events. Most of all, of course, it was an achievement
on the part of the members of the orchestra and choir, who showed what could
be done just by responding positively to the demands made of them. I was
very proud to have been involved.
Peter Donohoe
31 July 2006
READ REVIEW OF SUMMER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE 16/7 by Alan Burgess
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