The Manoel Theatre was packed to the gallery in anticipation of an exciting evening for the second concert of the MPO Series.

They were not disappointed. Under the animated baton of Brian Schembri, the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO) gave us a concert to remember.

Weber’s Overture to  Der Freischütz opened the performance. The opera’s plot is the striking of a deal between a man and the devil to obtain a set of silver bullets to aid him win the hand of his beloved.

The demonic powers were darkly portrayed by a theme that utilised the lowest registers of the strings, clarinet and bassoon creating an eerie atmosphere.

The dramatic tension is engendered by tremolo strings and heavy drum notes in the introduction of this overture.The timbre of the strings and brass was gorgeous, with the horns particularly evocative of forest hunting in ancient times.

For the second item on the programme the orchestra was joined by horn player Etienne Cutajar, returning to his roots both in Malta and the Manoel Theatre, where he was once a member of the orchestra.

The work chosen for this evening was the Second Horn Concerto in E flat Major by Richard Strauss.

The concerto continued the theme of the evening, the high German romanticism. The performance features a  clean technique and the right expression, endurance and power playing against a full orchestra, especially in the last movement.

While Strauss expressed himself as particularly pleased with the final movement, the entire work reveals the hand of a master.

The solo instrument begins at once with a questioning opening theme based on an arrangement of the notes in the major triad... the horn’s fundamental overtone series.

The horn sings rhapsodically against the accompaniment of strings, gradually leading to a full orchestral outburst, revealing in retrospect that all we have heard so far is in the nature of a grand introduction for the soloist.

A truly enjoyable evening enthusiastically acknowledged by the packed audience

The movement unfolds with richly varied elaborations with at least half a dozen different ideas drawn from the horn’s opening sequence.

The first movement ends with the solo horn again taking centre stage, thus balancing the long opening with increasingly elegiac music that leads, quite naturally, into the Andante, whose opening features the woodwinds in unison with the solo horn pausing for a moment.

At the climax of the final movement the horns in the orchestra join forces with the soloist for a riotous version of the main theme.

Following a warm and enthusiastic ovation by the enthusiastic audience, Cutajar further demonstrated his prowess on the horn with an encore of a solo version of Rossini’s, Le Rendez-vous de Chasse, again continuing the theme of the hunt.

The original, entitled Grande Fanfare par Rossini , was written for orchestra and four solo horns.  Complete with the imitation of distant horns answering the call, utilising the technique of stopped horn, it was a virtuosic performance which captured the imagination of an appreciative audience.

With the thought of the hunters returning to the hunting lodge with a fire blazing the audience retired to the unusual warm and mild November evening to anticipate the second half of the programme.

Under the direction of Schembri, the MPO gave us an unforgettable performance of the Fourth Symphony in E Minor by Brahms.

Brahms began composing his last symphonic masterpiece at a mountain retreat in 1884.

It is often labelled the composer’s magnum opus, although the German Requiem competes for that designation. Brahms was concerned from the outset about the work’s accessibility, but audiences responded enthusiastically.

After the first performance the conductor said: “For the whole movement I had the feeling that I was being given a beating by two incredibly intelligent people.”

The first movement creates a mysterious atmosphere, alternating with forceful outbursts. Schembri never let the tension slacken. Brahms’ Fourth Symphony was so rapturously received at its first performance, at what was, in fact, to be the composer’s last public appearance, that the audience clapped after each movement.

The audience clearly felt the same way, for there was a ripple of applause after the first movement. The players enjoyed themselves hugely in the rumbustuous third movement, which was rendered with verve and precision.

The extraordinary finale is a passacaglia or chaconne (Brahms used the latter term), a form common in the early 18th century. It is a series of 30 continuous variations on an eight-bar theme.

His passacaglia theme is adapted from Bach’s Cantata BWV 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (“For Thee, O Lord, I Long”).

The whole symphony was a joy from start to finish. There was a sense of enormous commitment from the players, engendered, no doubt, from the enthusiasm of their conductor.

A truly enjoyable evening enthusiastically acknowledged by the packed audience... surely a precursor of more things to come in the remainder of the series.