Rochdale Music Society Concert - Heywood Civic Centre

If you ever have the opportunity to go to a concert at which the musicians are students from Chetham’s School of Music, Manchester, don’t miss out on what is almost certainly bound to be an occasion when an immense amount of teenage talent already refined and polished for accomplished performance of great music will be on display.

Such was the final concert of the Rochdale Music Society’s 2011-12 season of subscription concerts held in the Heywood Civic Centre.

It began with 16-year-old violinist Jacqueline Martens giving assured accounts of the lively Sonata in F by Mozart and Darius Milhaud’s dreamy Le Printemps.

Benjamin Hulme, aged 15, made the French horn woo and win, shudder and shriek, lament and languish, jump for joy and snap and crackle and pop in music by York Bowen, William Lloyd Webber, Francis Poulenc and Jeffrey Agrell.

Poulenc’s Elegy, written in 1957, tribute to distinguished horn player Dennis Brain who had died an untimely death in a car crash, provided this reviewer with an unexpected highlight of the evening - a sustained outpouring of intense lyricism of the highest quality from such a young performer.

Both Jacqueline and Benjamin were expertly accompanied by the School’s full-time accompanist, Elena Nalimova.

The second half of the concert was devoted to a superb performance of William Walton’s Façade by an ensemble conducted by the Director of Music at Chetham’s School of Music, Stephen Threlfall. This “entertainment”, as it is called, consists of a sequence of poems by Edith Sitwell being recited over an instrumental accompaniment. It calls for teamwork of the most concentrated kind from narrators and musicians alike, who are kept on their toes by an exhilarating sequence of bold, blurred or blistered, but always bewitching, images. Presence and poise are essential, and the players gave us these qualities in abundance.

Narrators Rhiain Taylor and Ben Taylor-Davies provided a neatly articulated and nicely cadenced frontage of words whilst a colourful background of wiry and witty musical tapestry was being woven by Oliver Roberts (flute and piccolo), Ellito Gresty (Clarinet), Greg Barker (Alto Saxophone), Will Morley (Trumpet), Jenny Pearson (Percussion), and Geraint Ballinger and Finlay Hare (cellos).

All-in-all the audience was been given a real treat.

It is to be hoped that the Rochdale Music Society will be inviting students from Chet’s on future occasions.