On Saturday, the Oxford University Orchestra distinguished itself in the Sheldonian with performances of two difficult milestones in the orchestral repertoire. Stravinsky's orchestral suite based on his Firebird ballet, and Brahms's first symphony. The OUO resembles the Oxford Bach Choir in working exclusively with professional conductors and soloists - the only one of the University orchestras to do so. The conductor is Douglas Boyd, a world-class oboist and founder-member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Saturday's concert, directed with fire and precision, suggested that he's one of the most gifted orchestral trainers around.
Amateur players simply don't achieve this kind of togetherness without rehearsal that are both minutely rigorous and musically inspiring. In the Firebird music, for instance, the tremolos describing the haunted garden of the magician Kastchey, shot through with occasional woodwind interjections, produced a wonderfully sinister orchestral texture, the 'Ronde of the Princesses', with lovely, warm upper-string sound, the exact opposite. Percussion and brass should be congratulated on their precision in the rhythmically very complex 'Dance of the Firebird'.
Boyd's interpretation of Brahms's First was more lyrical, less 'Beethovenian' than Papadopoulos with the Oxford Philomusica. I particularly liked the gentle way Boyd treated the opening of both first and last movements - we rarely hear the first truly Sostenuto, as marked. But the whole string section did justice to the struggles ahead, and it would be impossible not to single out the First Horn - Justin Boyes (surely a Dennis Brain in the making ) for his glorious fourth movement 'Alpenhorn' entry. The Leader, Camilla Scarlett, should also be very proud of the violin playing in the radiant divisi section of the second movement.
