ONLINE MUSIC REVIEW: Live From The RNCM: RNCM Sinfonietta - The RNCM, Manchester.

The now regular Thursday evening live streamed concert from Manchester's RNCM has become a regular feature on my weekly watch-list, and last night it was the turn of the RNCM's reduced Sinfonietta to play live from their concert hall.

The fact that any live music is happening at all at the moment is, in itself, a mini-miracle, since the more musicians you use, the larger space you need to accommodate social distancing rules, which comes with its own set of difficulties, not least that the further one player is away from another they are unable to hear each other as precisely and so skill sets which have been learned need to be retuned in order to cope with the 'new normal'. Trying times indeed, but the students at the RNCM are not going to be beaten.... not by long chalk if this evening's concert was anything to go by.

First came Beethoven's best loved overture, 'Egmont' with its tuneful, recognisable themes and typical bombast. Following this was another concert favourite, the short tone poem by Frenchman, Saint-Saens, 'Danse Macabre'. With only 14 musicians (it was difficult to tell, there were so few pan shots of the entire ensemble) then these pieces needed special arrangements; the first by alumnus Jinjun Lee and the second by Farrington. The scoring therefore was minimalist and quite bare.. no doubling of instruments and no scoring for a second part / voice of the same instrument. The Egmont Overture did sound at times rather scant, understandably, but the Saint-Saens was lovely, sounding for the most part like a full orchestra.These two works were conducted gracefully and lovingly by guest, Chloe Van Soeterstede.

The third piece was a complete contrast in many ways. Foremost because it was a World Premiere performance of a new ensemble-scored writing by current student, Flowers Tannenbaum. The piece was called, 'Lament' and was based on the recordings of extinct bird species' calls, the idea that the birds were coming back from the dead lamenting their extinction. Conducted by Robin Wallington, this was a rather short piece, and an interesting experiment. One could easily distnguish bird calls within the piece but for me, the work was incoherent, discordant and fragmented.

The penultimate piece brought us back to terra firma, with yet another well-known piece from the concert repertoire, and going back to France for Maurice Ravel's suite, 'Ma Mere L'Oye' (Mother Goose). This too being arranged by Farrington and conducted by Soeterstede, the reduced instrumentation actually worked in the piece's favour here as I could distinguish the harmonic progressions and chord structures more easily than with the full orchestra. Beautiful.

After a short discussion, the final piece of the evening, in order to 'go out on a high', was the showpiece, 'The Flight Of The Bumble Bee' by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Let's all help to keep the music playing! The concerts are free to watch but it is hoped that you will donate to the RNCM so that they can do just that!

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall

on - 26/11/20