Royal Scottish National Orchestra reviews

Martin Yates conducts Vaughan Williams's Scott of the Antarctic with 'appropriate majesty'

One of my music teachers loftily pronounced that the Sinfonia Antarticawas not a real symphony, but merely film music. He would surely have been silenced by what conductor Martin Yates has uncovered here – essentially a huge forgotten work on, as the notes put it, ‘a quasi-symphonic canvas’, which Vaughan Williams composed in full before even a frame of the film itself was shot – apparently in a fervent three weeks.

Bax: Symphony No. 5; The Tale the Pine Trees Knew

Another splendid performance in David Lloyd-Jones’s Bax cycle with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The Fifth Symphony, like Vaughan Williams’s, is dedicated to Sibelius. Composed in 1931-2, it is not so much influenced by the Finnish master as in thrall to him. The principal theme of the first of the three movements is half-brother to one in the Fifth Symphony, the woodwind writing is distinctly Sibelian and the symphony generally conforms to a Sibelian tautness of construction.

Royal Scottish National Orchestra reviews

Thomas Wilson: Symphonies Nos 2 & 5

Massenet: Visions; Brumaire - Overture, etc

Delibes: Ballet Suites

Franck: Psyché; Les Éolides, etc

Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 3; Variations on a Theme of Corelli

Prokofiev: Symphonies Nos 1 & 5

Chopin: Piano Concertos by Benjamin Grosvenor

Tchaikovsky: Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 3; Scriabin: Piano Concerto

The Princess and the Bear

Dvořák • Khachaturian: Violin Concertos

Martin Yates conducts Vaughan Williams's Scott of the Antarctic with 'appropriate majesty'

Bax: Symphony No. 5; The Tale the Pine Trees Knew