Amateur orchestras rising to the challenge
“The weird thing about playing music for the left hand is that by the end of the performance you’re fully warmed up on one side”, he explains. “The left hand feels like it normally does after a concert, but the right hand feels like it does after having not played for a week. It’s a very odd sensation, it almost makes you feel unbalanced in the physical sense.
“And the serious answer to your question is that I sometimes use my right hand to provide a balancing grip on the top end of the piano whenever the left hand is required to leap around, as it does near the beginning of the Ravel.’’
Donohoe was awarded the CBE in this year’s New Year’s Honours list (overdue, many might think). His reaction to the accolade is interesting.
“I think it’s not so much to do with whether or not the government committee that decides these things thinks you are a good pianist (or whatever you are), but whether or not you have contributed something to the community.
“It was stated that it was given to me for ‘services to classical music’, but I do like to believe that it is something more societal than that.
‘‘I’ve always believed that music and the arts are much more important to society as a whole than society tends to realise – and that is no truer anywhere in the world than it is in this country – and it’s always been my ambition to contribute in some way to making that fact more widely accepted, to bring music to a wider audience without dumbing anything down, and to use whatever abilities I have been born with to be genuinely British and to contribute something to Britain.”
There’s another piano concerto being performed the same evening, over at the Artrix in Bromsgrove, where the Central England Ensemble, conducted by Anthony Bradbury, gives the premiere of the Piano Concerto no.2 of Anthony Bridgewater, played by its composer.
“The first movement is rather like a nocturne, a night time piece but with dark and dramatic events at its heart; I can well remember dark winter evenings, after my children were in bed, sitting at the piano overlooking my garden as I wrote it,” says Bridgewater, director of music at Old Swinford Hospital School in Stourbridge.
Tony’s Concerto is framed by two Shostakovich works: the showy Festive Overture and the Symphony no.10, fraught with personal political tensions.
And back in Birmingham the astounding young talents of the CBSO Youth Orchestra are conducted by Michael Seal in April-England by John Foulds, and Walton’s biting Symphony no.1.
Centrepiece of this all-English programme at Symphony Hall is the Elgar Cello Concerto, with Andreas Brantelid the soloist.
And how gratifying that all three concerts are devoted to music of the last century. Those people (there are still some) who blanketly profess not to like 20th century music should think on.
* Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra at Adrian Boult Birmingham (Sunday February 21, 7.30pm). Details on 0121 303 2323
Central England Ensemble at the Artrix, Bromsgrove (Sunday February 21, 7.30pm). Details on 0773 425 6268.
CBSO Youth Orchestra at Symphony Hall Birmingham (Sunday February 21, 7pm). Details on 0121 780 3333
