Review: York Guildhall Orchestra (YGO), New Barbican Centre, York

8:32am Tuesday 13th May 2008

YES, you the read the line above correctly. Back in the Barbican.

No obvious changes there (despite the addition of New') and no apparent reason for being kept away these several years.

YGO orchestra celebrated in style on Saturday.

Faced with Mahler's gargantuan Seventh Symphony - roughly 90 minutes, requiring 100 players - most orchestras would be content to leave it at that. But Simon Wright is a hard taskmaster and threw in Grieg's Piano Concerto as an appetiser. It turned out to be a lot more.

Leon McCawley approached his solo role selflessly, treating the work as a duet rather than a virtuoso vehicle. He rippled through the first movement soulfully, but held nothing back in its cadenza.

Equally poetic in the slow movement, he was not afraid even in the finale to steady the ship when the tempo was overhasty. His was an exceptional performance.

Mahler's seventh heaven would be most people's underworld, so eerie are its textures. Rarely performed, least of all by amateur' orchestras (though YGO has long transcended that epithet), the work is supremely testing for all sections. But the brass won the day, notably with fanfares and chorales in the outer movements to wake the dead. Topping them all was Janus Wadsworth's agile horn.

Especially memorable elsewhere were the skeletal scherzo, the delicate soufflé of the second Nachtmusik, the serenity of the violins in the stratosphere. The whole orchestra sustained an unflagging energy right to the tape. Bravo!