Northern Sinfonia summer chamber series: Beethoven, Raff, Brahms

Early Romantic symphonies lie at the core of Northern Sinfonia’s orchestral repertoire, and so to hear different groups of their players getting together with pianist John Reid to perform chamber music by Schumann and Brahms seemed like the most natural thing in the world, an intimate, scaled-down version of one of their regular concerts.

Billed under the heading ‘Echoes of Youth’, this Kings Place programme is an attractive ragbag of unlikely bedfellows. 

A “Sound Unwrapped” programme, featuring Aurora Orchestra's trimmed line-up of five musicians and one sound engineer on electronics, proves to be an absolute success. 

Das Lied von der Erde may have been down-sized but it lost none of its stature in the Aurora Orchestra’s performance of a chamber arrangement of Mahler’s great song-symphony.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, goes the familiar phrase, and that can be applied in life to any number of things, including music. Were the father of harmony, Johann Sebastian Bach, still alive today, he would be beyond flattered.

When I collected my ticket for this evening’s Late Mix concert in Hall Two of The Sage Gateshead, I was somewhat surprised to see it marked as unreserved seating. A computer glitch, I thought, until I walked into the hall and found that the usual rows of seats in this small, in-the-round auditorium had been replaced with café-style tables and chairs.