On Saturday, 25th January, Ripon’s St Cecilia Orchestra will give a concert of best-loved classical works at Holy Trinity Church. In the smaller format afforded by their regular winter concert in this venue, St Cecilia presents a programme of music by classical greats, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Beethoven, to lift the spirits.
The concert opens with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture (also known as ‘Fingal’s Cave’), with its intense and rolling melodies. Composed during his travels of Europe in his early twenties, it’s easy to see how Mendelssohn was inspired by a trip to the Scottish island of Staffa and its famous cave. Hours later he had composed the opening bars and sent them to his sister with a note exclaiming ‘how extraordinarily’ the Hebrides had affected him.
Next the orchestra will be joined by Scottish clarinettist, Ruaridh Bakke, in Mozart’s last instrumental work, the clarinet concerto. The concerto is a favourite with listeners, often appearing in the top 10 of the Classic FM Hall of Fame, and has also made a number of appearances in film, including in ‘The King’s Speech’ and ‘Out of Africa’. Soloist Ruaridh Bakke studied clarinet at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Royal Scottish Conservatoire and has performed concertos with Glasgow Symphony Orchestra and Edinburgh City Orchestra among others.
The concert concludes with Beethoven’s Symphony no 7. Composed in the Bohemian spa town of Teplice, where Beethoven was staying in the hope of improving his poor health, this work was an immediate success at its premier, with the audience calling for an encore of the Allegretto second movement. A music critic for the German press at the time described the music as ‘the crown of modern instrumental music’ with Beethoven himself describing it as his ‘most excellent symphony’.
Tickets for the concert, priced at £20 for adults and free for under 18s, can be bought online via Ticketsource (www.ticketsource.co.uk/st-cecilia), from the Little Ripon Bookshop, Harrogate Theatre box office, or on the door from 7.00pm on the concert day.
