Many in the audience had known Charlotte Beament from her childhood in Watford, and this concert was an opportunity to hear how well her soprano voice has developed and how well she uses it. From this, and from her experience at Glyndebourne and elsewhere, we may be confident that she is starting a great career.

The Watford Symphony Orchestra began with Mendelssohn's overture A Calm Sea and a Prosperous Voyage - a modest start compared with the triumphs to come - but what the capacity audience was waiting for was Charlotte's interpretation as the soprano soloist in the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss. 

The guest conductor, John Brennan, had evidently rehearsed singer and orchestra with great care. She and they responded well. Charlotte has good tone with sensitive phrasing and accurate intonation. Her voice emerged with just the right balance from the orchestral sound, with an excellent sense of the often subtle rhythms. The solo violin passages were played with feeling by Rebecca Boyle, the leader of the orchestra.

A word must be said for the flutes fluttering as skylarks! Strauss wrote this setting of poems by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff in 1948, near the end of his life, and in this performance it was a moving expression of late romanticism.  

By contrast, when after the interval the orchestra played Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F (the Pastoral), we were taken back into the rural world of the late classical period.

For the English listener, this is the world of Gainsborough's landscape paintings. There was a good oboe solo. But this symphony dates from 1808, and also reminds us, especially in the storm episode, that this was in the midst of the Napoleonic War. It was a thrilling moment for the brass and timpani; they outweighed the rest of the orchestra at some other times - difficult to avoid in this small hall.  

Generally, however, the Watford Symphony Orchestra deserves credit for this well planned and well performed concert.

Graham Mordue