St Mary's Music School Summer Concert
Tuesday 1st July 2008
NOT many schools can book-end their end-of-term concerts with Rossini's Overture to The Barber of Seville and Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No 1. But this was St Mary's Music School which, this year, celebrates 35 years as Scotland's hybrid training ground for our brightest young musicians.
It's not a big school, so repertoire takes clever planning. The Shostakovich provided the perfect climax to a wholly impressive showcase, given its focus on piano, strings and solo trumpet.
And it produced a glowing talent in 17-year-old pianist David Gray. His was a performance that embraced you from the very first note: flamboyant, if a little racy, but delivered with enough composure to enable guest conductor Rory Macdonald to ignite the accompaniment and harness the trumpet bursts of Brendan Musk.
A new work by James MacMillan - a brief religious setting called simply O - gave a celebratory lift to the programme. Void of pretension and written deliberately, and quickly I suspect, for easy and effective performance, the impact of its retro choral harmonies (sung by the cathedral choristers) against the luminescent string textures and ethereal trumpet solo was ably delivered.
On a smaller scale, the St Mary's String Ensemble rose to glorious heights in Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No 4, joined by flautists David Smith and Taylor MacLennan. Elsewhere, the school's Celtic fusion ensemble, Kilairum, were slick showstoppers in their own right.
