Manchester Camerata, Lakes Hall, Troutbeck Bridge

Manchester Camerata, under the baton of the energetic young conductor Jamie Phillips, opened this year’s Lake District Summer Music Festival (last Saturday, August 2) in the Lakes Hall, Troutbeck Bridge. The orchestra has made frequent appearances at LDSM over many years and it was fitting that it should have been the ensemble invited to launch this year’s festival, the 30th in the organisation’s history.

The programme was carefully chosen to reflect the strengths of the orchestra and to pick up some of the threads running through festival programmes this year – the 150th anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss and the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, to name but two.

The opening item, C. P. E. Bach’s rarely-heard Symphony in B flat, set the standard for what was to follow. Exemplary in its attention to detail, the performance was full of vitality and rhythmic precision with a fine sense of ensemble; tempi were brisk but never out of control.

A fine performance of Strauss’s Oboe Concerto followed, with Rachael Clegg, the Camerata’s Principal Oboe, as soloist. She shaped and sustained the composer’s long rhapsodic melodic lines beautifully, working in close partnership with the orchestra.

The concert ended with Mozart’s great Symphony No.40 in G minor. This performance was as electrifying to watch as it was to listen to: the same energy and rhythmic precision that characterised the orchestra’s playing of the Bach Symphony was in evidence. The second movement Andante was taken at a faster tempo than one sometimes hears which helped greatly to give it a sense of forward movement. The contrapuntal interplay, which is such feature of this movement and the Allegro finale, came off beautifully, the clarity helped in part by the size of the orchestra, the sensitivity of the players and the care shown by the conductor in his direction. Another pleasing feature of this performance was the latter’s decision to follow all Mozart’s repeats, a procedure which restores the formal balance the composer clearly intended.

This was a fine opening to a festival that every year seems to grow in stature.

Clive Walkley