Obra: Serenade for Strings

Two dozen heroes played one of the house composer’s most intense and technically demanding scores with bravura skill and a collegiate musicality that stirred the spirit.

The classification of composers into those who write tonal music and those who inhabit the harder-edged shores of serialism and atonality raised its head once again at the first of the three concerts given by the Festival Chamber Orchestra at this year’s Presteigne Festival.

In what was apparently the first appearance from an Irish orchestra at the Proms since the 1970s, pianist/conductor Barry Douglas and the strings of his Camerata Ireland brought a programme to Cadogan Hall which examined Benjamin Britten in the context of some of his contemporaries and friends.