Musical Director
Mark Fitz-Gerald
Concert Assistant
Robin Foster
Concert Assistant
Ronald Williams
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Kensington
Philharmonic Orchestra
Chelsea Town Hall
23 November 2008
We all say how terrible supermarkets are - but shop at them. We are all nostalgic for chamber music in drawing rooms and small amateur orchestras - but don't attend or support their performances. Unjustly neglected and exhilaratingly good are the Kensington Philharmonic Orchestra, which recently played Khachaturian's Masquerade Suite, Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade at the Chelsea Town Hall.
The orchestra were extraordinarily accomplished, and the very fact that they were amateurs performing for the sheer love of the thing made what they played even more moving. I have often heard virtuoso performances of Scheherezade on Radio 3, and once before in a concert hall, but never have I been so swept away as I was by the KPO's playing it. Their overwhelming enthusiasm and emotion were palpable, and were transmitted to the audience to me, at any rate, and to my nine year-old neice who had refused to leave at the interval and is now a keen listener to her Scheherezade cd.
The orchestra returns to the Chelsea Town Hall on Sunday February 22nd, and will play Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, Richard Strauss's Horn Concerto No 2 with the soloist Pip Eastop, and Beethoven's symphony No. 8 opus 93.
Jane O'Grady
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