Oxford Times, April 2001

This "training orchestra for music, students and young professionals" gives periodic, one-off concerts and, if the blurb reports the matter honestly, exists on a shoestring. No wonder, therefore, that in the Sheldonian last week, they played with a zeal, and often with a quality, some more famous orchestras might learn from.

 

In fact, their active - not to say dionysiac - conductor, Philip Mackenzie, led them through a version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony which sounded not just fresh, but thought-provoking too.

 

The Fifth Symphony struck home. Mackenzie's rostrum bacchanal certainly drove his players to capture the haunting grandeur of this music, with its call on humankind to master the sublime. Nevertheless, a world away from Karajan, this performance seemed to stress, as paramount, the work's allegiance to its roots - which are, of course, classical.

 

The outcome was a clarity of texture, a technical restraint, and the sense that feelings were not so far in orbit as to sap a disciplined ensemble. There was a cool exactness to the wind-playing in the andante; in the third movement, the quiet pizzicato passage, with its woodwind interjections, seemed like a piquant, matchstick-figure jest.

 

One wondered, naturally. Is this how we might have treated this piece, with no dark glass of the 19th century to blur our sight? Is this how Beethoven, in ideal circumstances, might have liked to hear it played?

 

Derek Jole

 

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