CONDUCTOR Jonathan Trim’s Beneath the Angel Strain was inspired by a verse from the carol It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. The ‘angel strain’ is Peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Brutal music of warfare and darkness is contrasted with peaceful interludes sensitively played by woodwind and strings. Do we have to resign ourselves to the inevitability of continuing war in the world? The orchestra’s exultant playing of the final bars proclaimed an emphatic 'No!'

Polish composer Chopin was already exiled in France because of war when he composed his second piano concerto. Internationally acclaimed pianist Poom Prommachart captured perfectly the sadness and longing, without pretentiousness or sentimentality. The finale was a stunningly brilliant celebration of Polish dance. Everyone was happy: orchestra, conductor, soloist and especially the audience who responded with rapturous applause.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifth Symphony is a towering masterpiece of the twentieth century. It was written in 1937 while he and millions of others were living in constant fear of Stalin’s murderous regime. How to survive? The grotesque Scherzo offered one kind of defiance. The anguished landscape of the largo was never bleaker, but the declamatory cellos called on us to remember Beethoven’s pleas for new sounds of joy. On the surface the finale is a display of Stalinist might and popular culture. In reality, Shostakovich reveals the whole show to be hollow bombast. It ends with heart stopping sledge hammer blows. Maxim Shostakovich identified in his father’s symphony ‘the determination of a strong man to BE’. The orchestra tackled this fiendishly difficult music with great assurance, playing with great concentration and intensity.

Stroud Symphony Orchestra is going from strength to strength.

Peter Harney

Next SSO concert: March 21, 2015.