Camerata Bern . Antje Weithaas

England has the London Sinfonietta, The Netherlands the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, and Switzerland the Camerata Bern, a chamber orchestra that generally plays without a conductor and that is familiar with a wide range of styles. In this concert, eighteenth-century classics stand side by side with works from the inter-war years of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, short shrift was given in European art music to the Late Romantic and to experimental excrescences from before the First World War. Seeking a cool, objective tonal idiom, composers turned to the music of the eighteenth century. It was in this spirit that Stravinsky based his concerto for chamber orchestra 'Dumbarton Oaks' - named after the country estate of his American principal - on the Baroque concerto grosso. Within the forceful figuration and the tight polyphony, there are undeniable echoes of Bach's 'Brandenburg Concertos'. Glazunov's Saxophone Concerto, performed here in an arrangement for viola, strikes a more Romantic tone, albeit that the fairly rhapsodic form is clearly based on the three-movement structure of the classical concerto. For his virtuoso 'Sinfonia Concertante', Mozart adopted a course between symphony and concerto. The melodic exchanges between soloists are virtuoso, but so is Mozart's tight orchestral writing, rich in contrapuntal exchanges between the various sections of the orchestra.