SINFONIA CYMRU

SW ARGUS REVIEW Monday July 16 2005

Sinfonia Cymru
The Riverfront, Newport

Nothing so engages the sentiments of a young orchestra than music which is almost relentlessly outgoing.

For its latest visit to Newport, Sinfonia Cymru couldn’t have chosen a better programme to illustrate musical complexity and rhythmic vitality.

Schumann, by instinct a miniaturist, had his work cut out attempting to retain this element of his nature in a symphony, with its demands of length, development and overall structure.

By his third, the so-called Rhenish of 1850, he had managed to reconcile them in an evocative work full of cheer. Even the solemn fourth movement more than hints at the breathtaking spaciousness of its surroundings.

The leaping interval of a fourth at the start and finish of the work and elsewhere is energising stuff, easily passing for the rush and impetuousness of youth.
This orchestra, founded to give young professional instrumentalists their introductions to the paid ranks, relished the mood in robust and energetic playing.
Conductor and founder Gareth Jones set uncompromising speeds in Mozart‘s Linz Symphony (No 36 in C), especially in those places where the composer is adding something new and striking to the inspiring model and example of Haydn.

David McClenaghan, principal horn of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, was the soloist in Richard Strauss’s First Horn Concerto, another piece full of careless flourishes, written by a composer still in his teens.

Only Strauss could make such an unpredictable instrument sound both boisterous and seductive and only players of Mr McClenaghan’s calibre could have us swooning rather than on edge.

Nigel Jarrett