This highly successful concert by Dundee University's Choir and Orchestra was mounted to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the University as an independent entity. The stage and choir stalls were filled with a substantial student body of performers, augmented by the return of some past members for this special occasion. In musical terms the whole event, conducted by the University's Head of Music, Graeme Stevenson, was a great success. This is the more gratifying as the University does not have a music department as such, so all its music-making is based on the activities of enthusiastic amateurs.
The first part of the programme, purely orchestral, consisted of the Brahms Academic Festival Overture, an appropriately studenty opening, followed by the First Suite - four familiar movements - of Grieg's music to accompany Ibsen's play Peer Gynt. After the interval came the two choral pieces - for the cheerful excesses of Orff's masterpiece were followed by a recent piece of American frivolity, in the form of Eric Whitacre's choral cantata from 1970, Godzilla Eats Las Vegas, complete with silent movie-style projections.
The performance of the Orff showed a remarkable level of accomplishment from orchestra and choir. The main burden of the solo work lay in the experienced hands of the baritone Phil Gault, who met all its technical challenges head-on, clearly in confident control of everything. The brief song of the roasting swan, with its cruelly high tenor line, was delivered with ease by James Slimings, while Louise Thomson's lyric soprano soared beautifully in the climactic 'Dulcissime' sequence.
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