Welcome

Welcome to our summer extravaganza! This evening we bring you a wideranging concert. One of the challenges for young musicians is to learn how to accompany a soloist. We all need to be in sync and really learn to listen to the soloist to be able to accompany in the correct way, so this was our biggest learning outcome on the course.

We are accompanying a NYOS alumna, which is always a source of pride for the organisation and a fantastic way to have a role model for the younger generations. Violinist Iona McDonald joins us to perform Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor, Op. 26, one of the most popular concertos in violin repertoire. Full of beautiful melodies, and alongside his Scottish Fantasy, it is one of the composer’s most famous works. The musicians were presented with a concerto that is not merely accompanying with simple rhythms and melodies, on the contrary, it is full of challenges, and we worked hard to get it right!

We are opening the concert with the intermezzo from the opera Manon Lescaut by my favourite opera composer, Puccini. This piece contains some of the most expressive music ever written. In this piece, we concentrate on sound production and how to follow the conductor because it is full of rubato. Sometimes it can be challenging when the tempo is not the same from the beginning to the end, but we did it!

We are closing the concert with the Borodin Symphony No.2; we worked on some of the movements during the spring course, and added two more from the piece for our final concert.

Russian composer and music critic Cesar Cui said: “The first movement is like an everyday picture of some solemn ritual; the last movement is a vivid, motley, varied celebration of sparkling gaiety.” I could not describe it better myself.

I feel honoured to have worked with NYOS again, and so happy to be back in bonnie Scotland.

Natalia Luis-Bassa Conductor