Rossini, Mozart & Beethoven: A Winter Matinee

The Mid-Somerset Orchestra (MSO) gave a concert Rossini, Mozart & Beethoven: A Winter Matinee Sunday 1^st February 2026 Strode Theatre Street. This local orchestra can be relied upon to give great performances of orchestra works from the classical repertory. This one, however, with Leader Marianne Sutton and Principal Conductor Hitoshi Suzuki, was out of the ordinary, playing to a large audience filling all spaces in the auditorium.

First up was Rossini’s Overture to his opera La Cenerentola, Cinderella. The performance displayed beautifully controlled pianissimi in the strings at the beginning of the composer’s celebrated crescendi to the blast of the full orchestra complete with percussion.

The first half continued with a performance of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with Melvin Wai as soloist. Aged 17, from Macau and a current student at Wells Cathedral School, Melvin played throughout with crystal clarity bringing the best out of the Theatre’s Steinway B, displaying a maturity of approach suited perfectly to this sublime music. His biography in the concert programme did not indicate much previous experience in playing a concerto with an orchestra. A great future clearly beckons…. The orchestra in its turn responded well with the strings playing the opening rhythm quietly but with intensity before the full wind band displayed its solidarity with the same rhythm, but fortissimo. The soloist opened the slow movement beautifully, which performance also displayed equally beautiful clarinet soli. The soloist set a good tempo for the last movement, bringing this excellent performance to a rousing conclusion.

At the beginning of the second half conductor Hitoshi addressed the audience and let it be known that he is due to finish with the orchestra after their concert in July this year. There followed a performance of Mozart’s Symphony no 41 Jupiter. Not letting up on the high bar set in the first half, this displayed the MSO’s clarity of playing at its best, enabling the brilliance of Mozart’s scoring for woodwind to come forward in the second movement. The rendering of the last movement brought this already excellent concert to a thrilling conclusion. A contrapuntal tour de force, the orchestra maintained the best to the end, every line crystal clear.

The orchestra’s next concert will be on Saturday 9^th May 2026 featuring Emma Steenkamp, a fellow student of Melvin Wai, in Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony.

Albert Bawn