Dorking Concertgoers presents the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Dorking Halls

Reviewed by John Frayn Turner

Dorking Concertgoers' opening programme of the season featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra took me straight back musically to the Second World War.

A Beethoven overture, the Grieg Piano Concerto in A minor, and Elgar's Enigma Variations were among the staple works frequently played during those momentous years.

As a foretaste of what was to come at Dorking, Hilary Davan Wetton conducted Beethoven's Overture to Egmont, the powerful piece written as an introduction to Goethe's dramatic stage work. The full-blooded RPO strings at once attacked this with pulsating precision.

The soloist in the Grieg concerto was the 24-year-old Romanian, Alexandra Dariescu, whose keyboard decibel count ranged from pianissimo to fortissimo. The familiar first movement theme was immediately nostalgic, while Alexandra slid sensitively into the limpid adagio, written in the "distant key" of D flat major. This in turn dissolved into the Nordic vivacity of the third movement. A Romanian girl playing Norwegian music to an English audience. And, dare I say it, performed with even more spirit and strength than the famous wartime soloist, Eileen Joyce.

So to Elgar's Enigma Variations, depicting a dozen of the composer's friends "pictured within". After the cellos featured in its opening andante theme, came some magically shimmering string-sweeps leading into the nobilmente of the Nimrod tune. Skittish Dorabella followed, with cellos excelling later in the andante of variation 12 – and violas in the Romanza. Hilary Davan Wetton whipped the RPO (led by Stephanie Gonley) into the frenzied finale depicting Elgar himself. All the threads were woven into this massed-forces climax.

The RPO also played Peter Warlock's Capriol Suite in six short movements, inspired by old rustic French dances. The climax here was a sword dance. It was all meticulously recreated, but seemed rather minor music compared to the main works of Grieg and Elgar. Both better played than in the 1940s, when we were young!