Cambridge Philharmonic Orchestra
Alison Balsom plays Zimmermann
West Road Concert Hall
Sunday 14 October 2007

The Cambridge Philharmonic Society is certainly spreading its wings this season. With no fewer than nine concerts in the programme, none of them offering a run-of-the-mill repertoire, conductor Tim Redmond and his merry men and women are certainly aiming high.

The programme for the opening concert, by the Society’s excellent orchestra, at West Road on 14 October, pulled no punches, yet it combined fun and food for musical thought in exhilarating measure. The audience was large and enthusiastic, the playing confident and disciplined and the whole evening a marked artistic success.

The Vaughan Williams scholar Michael Kennedy has described the great Cambridge-trained composer’s London Symphony, which filled the first half of the programme, as his most ‘Mahlerian’, meaning that it aims at creating a whole musical universe of its own. It certainly does. Always colourful, now perky, now mysterious, now serene, now almost tragic in tone, it demands virtuoso playing from the orchestra and a fine sense of balance and structure from the conductor. It got both in full measure. The Phil played with an intensity, a fire and a sensitivity that made it hard to believe that they was not a fully professional band. ‘Follow that’ was the unspoken order of the day.

Which is precisely what the brilliant young trumpeter Alison Balsom did. The name of Berndt Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970) is, I imagine, is a name to drop amongst the cognoscenti rather than one familiar in most music-loving Cambridge households. So it was fascinating to hear from Mr Redmond (aided and abetted by an excellent small group of singers from the Phil’s choir) how his short but powerful trumpet concerto, based on the spiritual ‘Nobody Knows de Trouble I See’, is constructed. They provided a most helpful introduction to this concentrated and eclectic work and the performers did the rest. For sheer purity of sound, precision of attack, clarity and variety of tone-colour, Ms Balsom must be right at the top among solo trumpeters; and the watchful Mr Redmond and the alert orchestra ensured that the concerto made the maximum possible impact.

Zimmermann’s Concerto is certainly no lollipop. What followed and concluded the concert certainly provided a whole bag-full of them. This was Shostakovich’s Suite for Variety Orchestra − culled from the music that he composed at various times to Soviet films. From the saucy march that opened the Suite, through the variety of dances that followed to the helter-skelter finale, the Phil laid into the music with zest, confidence and style.

A varied and unusual programme, some fine playing and a generally serious but festive atmosphere − what more could one ask? Well − how about the spicy programme of operatic highlights on offer, also at West Road, on November 25?

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