Wednesday 6 April, Marlowe Theatre Canterbury.

Can there be a happier musician than Tasmin Little? Appearing to enjoy every note she played, she smiled her way right through Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, finding tremendous warmth and lyricism in it as she went. Little is a very unshowy player too. Dressed in a simple flame coloured dress, she simply stood and played the piece, occasionally leaning in, beaming with delight, towards Kazuki Yamada on the podium or Philharmonia leader, Bradley Creswick. It was a performance completely free of flamboyant histrionics, so all the focus was on her masterly playing – the beautifully controlled cross string work and double stopping in the first movement, a good example. Then she gently teased every possible bit of melodious charm out of the lilting 3/4 Andante, each harmonic perfectly placed.

The diminutive, youthful looking (he’s actually 37) Yamada had already opened the evening with a spirited account of Beethoven’s Overture Leonore 3. He’s an unfussy performer too, but totally on top of the orchestra from which he drew a pleasing, incisive balance between the flute and strings in the slow passages.

One of the secrets of a good performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony is not to start too slowly because you need enough momentum to build the tension through the long introductory passage. This, Yamada brought off with aplomb, coaxing strange but engagingly menacing growls from the clarinet before he eventually let rip with full strings and all that tuneful Tchaikovian fervour.

I’ve rarely heard the exquisite horn solo in the Andante Cantabile played quite so evocatively and Yamada really milked the melody from the point when the rest of the orchestra picks it up. Then came a sparky rendering of the Valse with lots of enjoyable attention to detail. It was especially fine when it reached the symphony’s recurrent motif at the end of the movement, pre-figuring the opening of the finale in which Yamada found lush grandiloquence, although his emphasis on the arpeggios in the brass was not always to my taste. I think the Philharmonia’s string sound has really developed in recent years. It is now, almost always, impressively rich and coherent.

Susan Elkin

Barbican Hall, Saturday 26 March 2016

Sir John Eliot Gardiner asks a lot of his musicians – and equally so of his audience. The singers perform without scores and the many solo instrumentalists perform from memory. The effect is one of immediacy and intense dramatic impact. When this is united with the immaculate beauty of line, the intimacy of so many of the solo arias, and the rapport of all concerned, the impact is frequently overwhelming. I can’t recall a St Matthew Passion where the words have seemed quite so important, driving the text and insisting we follow the narrative. There was never a moment when we simply relaxed into beautiful singing, though that itself was never in doubt.

In the programme note John Eliot Gardiner makes a strong case for his approach, which avoids the pitfalls of a ‘staged’ event and the often sterile impact of a concert. Instead we have soloists who move easily about the stage to find their place to address us directly. They make eye contact with the instrumentalists and with the audience. In the final choruses, both Evangelist and Christus join the chorus, and throughout, the solo voices have come out of the chorus and returned to it.

There is a sense that the music really is more important than those who are performing it, though I doubt we could find a finer performance anywhere today.

Mark Padmore brings an urgency to the Evangelist which involves us throughout and is finely contrasted to Stephan Loges humane Christus. Trinity Boys Choirs may not have a lot to do – they rightly left the stage for much of the time – but their surprisingly continental sound brings unexpected authority to their choruses. The sudden changes in dynamic make for a thrilling choral sound from the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists are just that – a collection of expert individual players who come together to be more than the sum of their parts.

There was a standing ovation at the end. I’m not normally keen on this type of emotional outburst but on this occasion it was certainly justified.

English National Ballet and English National Ballet School have, in recent years, developed an interesting way of offering a real experience of classical ballet to children as young as three. Students from ENBS dance an abridged version of an ENB show – carefully choreographed for young dancers by George Williamson with Dramaturgy by Adam Peck. A narrator – in this case Saskia Portway – is woven into the action to make the story absolutely clear to the audience. Having opened at Peacock Theatre in London, My First Sleeping Beauty tours until the end of May. It provides valuable experience for young performers at the very beginning of their careers and lots of opportunities for families to experience ballet, possibly for the first time.

Tchaikovsky’s lush melodious score is well enough played by City of Prague Philharmonic conducted by Gavin Sutherland and Daryl Griffith although it must be much harder to dance in sync when you’re working to a recording without a conductor to watch – and some of the cuts are a bit abrupt. The young dancers do well in general although their youth shows occasionally in a strained wobble or two. Especially enjoyable are the set pieces by the benign fairies in the first act, the prince’s show piece dance in the enchanted wood and the series of dances by the fairy tale characters with a particularly witty contribution by two dancers as a pair of cats. And at the end Aurora and the Prince are suitably appealing and impressive in their final romantic pas de deux. The company of 25 – ENBS students are recruited from all over the world – rotate the principal and corps de ballet roles and no one is named in the programme other than as a member of the ensemble.

I have, as with previous shows in this series, some reservations about the narration. Saskia Portway, who co-wrote her own script, plays the older Aurora looking back on her youth sometimes wandering through the action and sometimes standing to the side. Her voice is warm although it sometimes strays dangerously close to the sanctimonious sugariness of Vanessa Redgrave in the TV series Call the Midwife. Moreover she struggles to be heard when the music is rising to one of Tchaikovsky’s magnificent dramatic crescendi. It is more effective at quieter moments when she speaks in rhythm with the music. Why though, at points when the dance makes it completely clear what is happening do we need words at all? When the Queen is counting, for example, it really doesn’t need to be spelt out by a narrator.

On the whole, though, the “My First” concept works. I saw My First Sleeping Beauty with hundreds of children and almost every one of them was totally engrossed for the full 90 minutes and that’s a terrific achievement for cast and creators. I regret though that the vast majority of them are little girls. Why on earth don’t people take boys to ballet as well?

Susan Elkin