5* review for BBC Proms Concerto Debut

Ben Goldscheider performed the concerto for violin, horn and orchestra by Dame Ethel Smyth at the 2022 BBC Proms Festival. He was joined by the violinist Elena Urioste, conductor Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

The evening standard gave the concert 5*, saying the following:

“Last night’s exemplary performance by the violinist Elena Urioste and horn player Ben Goldscheider, with the CBSO under its chief conductor designate Kazuki Yamada, revealed the Smyth as a score that adroitly balances wistfulness and humour, with an individual approach to form.

To begin with, it’s decisively not in the traditional 19th-century mode of the concerto with soloist heroically pitted against orchestra. On the contrary, macho posturing is often replaced by (no less virtuosic) arabesques on the violin (exquisitely played here by Urioste), while the horn adopts a restrained form of the conventional concerto’s more combative aspects, in the third movement offering a perhaps ironic commentary on the hunting-horn rondo finales of earlier centuries.

Urioste and Goldscheider play together often and doubtless worked closely with Yamada to achieve an ideal balance between their very different instruments. From a position behind the violinist but in line with the bell of the horn, the balance was less than ideal. But one imagines that from almost anywhere else in the hall, or over the radio, this was not a problem.”

Read the full review below: