Mote Hall, Maidstone, Saturday 20 May 2017

There was a lot of B Minor in this concert and it’s a good key for plangency especially in the dying notes of Tchaikovsky’s valedictory masterpiece, the Sixth Symphony. Brian Wright held his orchestra and the audience in rapt tense suspension at the very end of the concert (and the MSO season) before finally dropping his baton to tumultuous applause. It was an appropriate end in another way too as this concert was dedicated to a much loved and much missed veteran, cellist Margaret Chapman who died last month, after 65 years of playing with MSO. She played her last concert with them in February.

At other points in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, Brian Wright achieved a good balance between the manic energy (terrific work from brass and percussion) of the Allegro which forms the second half of the first movement and the delicacy of the unsettling five-in-a-bar con grazia second movement. The molto vivace movement packed all the resounding energy it requires – more or less together in the general pauses and exuberant enough to ensure that few people would have noticed the occasional wrong note.

Earlier in the evening Michael Petrov, a charismatic Bulgarian who smiles warmly at the orchestra when he is enjoying their playing, gave us a nicely judged account of the Dvorak cello concerto – more B minor. In the slow lyrical section of the first movement he had the cello itself almost weeping but because this is Dvorak that has to be offset against all those sparky cheerful melodies – and it was. The allegro finale was dramatic, lively and beautifully played. I shall long treasure Petrov’s sensitive duet with MSO leader Andrew Pearson in that movement.

It isn’t easy to start a programme with Night on the Bare Mountain which has a lot of exposed work and is hardly a “warm up” piece. On this occasion MSO really hit the ground running with a very assured, entertaining rendering. The string sound wove in well around the brass blasts and Anna Binney’s tender, warm flute solo at the end was outstanding.

Susan Elkin