Orchestra of Opera North

TITLE: Viennese Whirl

VENUE: Huddersfield Town Hall

BY: William Marshall

THE Vienna Factor packed Huddersfield Town Hall once again for a familiar pre-New Year programme of music by the Strausses plus some of their contemporaries and successors.

Has it become a little too familiar? Well, audience figures and audience enthusiasm suggest otherwise and once a year is hardly overdoing a diet of these Viennese confections that, despite their lightness, have quite a lot of substance.

The musical qualities are well realised every year by the Orchestra of Opera North, conducted for the 2011 edition of Viennese Whirl by Jacek Kaspszyk, whose generally restrained tempos and lightness of touch allowed plenty of instrumental detail to shine through.

The concert opened with Johann Straus’s Overture to The Gypsy Baron, possibly the most varied and interesting item on the programme. Eventually the work waltzes off into more familiar Strauss territory, but it opens most effectively in rather sparse and even sombre mood, almost reminiscent of Berlioz, with a long, plaintive oboe solo.

Elsewhere we had numbers such as Josef Strauss’ Music of the Spheres with its magically celestial opening, plus familiar material such as the Champagne Galop in which the now traditional antics of percussionist Christopher Bradley were especially imaginative. He not only popped a bottle of champagne in time to the music but also handed out glasses of the sparkling stuff which just about made it all the way round the balcony before the piece finished.

The concert was presented by Dougie Scarfe, who is amusing without forcing the humour and is genuinely interesting and well-informed about the background to the music.

And back for a second year was the singer Stephanie Corley whose fully-rounded operatic soprano sparkled in a selection of songs, culminating in a fine rendition of arguably the best number in this Viennese repertoire, Lehar’s Vilja, from The Merry Widow.