Finely Calibrated Shifts of Mood
MIKE WHEELER celebrates Christmas with the Derby Concert Orchestra and its new principal conductor
This was Jack Capstaff's first Christmas concert as Derby Concert Orchestra (DCO)'s Principal Conductor, a role he formally took up in September 2024. The programme mostly kept faith with the patterns of previous years, while also making some tweaks.
To begin with, Derby-born Matthew Eden's Follow That Star!, received its first performance. A highly serviceable Christmas overture, it was expertly stiched together.
Matthew Eden (born Derby, 1997)
An atmospheric account of the overture to Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel featured crooning horns and lucid woodwind textures. The dance music was springy, with a series of crescendos breaking like waves. Danzón No 2, by Mexican composer Arturo Márquez, was this year's wild card. After the orchestra's slinky way with the first part, the more earthy second part found the players right inside the music's carnival high spirits.
Arturo Márquez (born 1950). Photo © Gustavo Bandres
Following the main interval, A Very Bublé Christmas presented a sequence of six seasonal numbers from the great American songbook - 'Winter Wonderland' and 'White Christmas', to name only two - all of which feature in Canadian singer Michael Bublé's 2011 album Christmas. The orchestra, successfully re-inventing itself as a swing band for Jack Capstaff's arrangements, was joined by singer James Barrington Stephens, a Sinatra-with-a-slight-edge baritone with an easy delivery. Bob Garner's solo trumpet in 'Blue Christmas' also deserves a mention.
James Barrington Stephens
Nigel Hess's A Christmas Overture doesn't break the mould of such pieces significantly, but it does what it sets out to do very effectively. His choice of tunes spreads the net more widely than many similar pieces, to include the French carol 'Il est né, le divin enfant', and the Polish one known to English speakers as 'Infant holy, infant lowly'.
Leroy Anderson's perennial Sleigh Ride is very much a DCO Christmas party-piece (as it is for plenty of other performing groups, no doubt). Here it took its place as part of the advertised programme rather than an encore as in previous years. Jerry Brubaker's concert suite from Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard's score for the film The Polar Express is by now something of a staple Christmas concert ingredient. In Capstaff and the orchestra's hands, the shifts of mood were finely calibrated.
Jack Capstaff (born 1994)
The encore - a traditional Bavarian 'Snow Waltz', if I understood correctly - gave an unexpected new twist to the concept of audience participation, and sent everyone out on a high. And Jack Capstaff's affable rapport with the audience was just what an event like this needs.
Copyright © 18 December 2024
Mike Wheeler,
Derby UK
