Leeds Town Hall February 2008
By David Denton
Memory can be a false friend, but I can tell the Leeds Youth Orchestra that their Vaughan Williams Sinfonia Antarctica fell little short of the performance I heard the night following the work's world premiere when I was their age. Striding confidently through the score, it was a remarkable achievement.
The composure shown in those long, desolate passages, where a quiet cold chill blows through the music, was so impressive, the excellent young soprano, Julia Williams, and the Gateways School Choir perfectly adding the eerie wordless sounds.
The conductor, Douglas Scarfe, had devised an entirely new presentation of the score, adding a narrator, taken by the young Leeds actor Dean Smith, who tells the story of Scott's ill-fated journey to the South Pole, the event that had inspired VW's score. With projected visuals to add graphic images, it all worked wonderfully well. Scarfe moved the symphony at an admirable pace, the whole orchestra responding with such infinite care to colour and detail.
Leeds Town Hall