Edinburgh News: music

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra had a full programme at the Queens Hall last night and the first composition played reflected the variety of moods being portrayed during the evening.

John Whitener's pre-concert talk in the Upper Circle Bar was full of cheer and joy and when he demonstrated on the tuba his audience was delighted.

In earlier days the Brussels Philharmonic, founded in 1935, was known as the BRT Philharmonic Orchestra and then as the Flemish Radio Orchestra.

To open the concert, the distinguished Scottish composer Kenneth Dempster conducted the forty strong Edinburgh Napier Chamber Orchestra in the bright and cheerful overture to Idomeneo, Mozart's first

In what can be known as Music Director's Pride, his Principal string players with Aleksei Kiseliov in front came on stage in front of Peter Oundjian.

Several hundred enthusiasts were in the stalls an hour before the concert started to hear the conversation between Donald Runnicles and James Naughtie. We learned a little, but not a lot.

The first four minutes set us in the mood for some fine Russian music with the seldom heard March from Rachmaninov's Cinq Études-tableaux.

A concert devoted to Remembrancetide and the outbreak of the Great War could well have been a sad and sorrowful event.

John Kitchen told us that the lunchtime recital was titled 'To absent friends: Music for Remembrance in the week of the Festival of Storytelling and Remembrance' because All Soul's Day was just past a