The Four Seasons – Huddersfield Town Hall

Director: Katie Stillman

The final concert of the Kirklees Concert Season, on a Sunday afternoon at Huddersfield Town Hall, featured a slimmed down Orchestra of Opera North under the direction of its leader, Katie Stillman, who was also the soloist in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 25, composed at the age of 17 (how did he manage 24 earlier symphonies?) is an example of the then current fashion of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress). The first movement, with its violent shifts of mood and violent outbursts, is particularly typical of this style. With a much reduced wind section (no trumpets, trombones or clarinets) the horns took every opportunity to shine in a dramatic reading of the symphony, the gentle melancholy of the second movement an exception to the prevailing mood.

For Ravel’s suite, Le Tombeau de Couperin, a certain reshaping of the orchestra brought in clarinets and a single trumpet. This rather less well known work provided an ideal opportunity for what Music Director Garry Walker called “spotlighting different players or groups of players”. Stillman directed a performance of great precision and robust dance movements from her desk as leader, but the abiding memory is of Ravel’s hugely skilful manipulation of the wind players in brief overlapping bursts of melody. Among others Luke O’Toole (flute), Richard Hewitt (oboe) and Andrew Mason (clarinet) registered a lasting impression.

After the interval the orchestra was reduced to strings (plus harpsichord) for a delightfully varied and animated treatment of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the violins and violas standing throughout, with Stillman now featured soloist. Witnessing this work live, having heard it innumerable times on disc or radio, brings out the detail of the violin part (despatched with virtuoso skill by Stillman), but also all the myriad sound effects built into the concertos: the dogs, the varieties of birds, all the sounds of the hunt, the cracking of the ice, etc.). The final storm after the languor of Summer produced an ovation which delayed the onset of Autumn which also built to an exciting finale.

Daniel Bull’s cello and Annette Saunders’ harpsichord formed a solid foundation to the piece, with Winona Fifield and Katherine New on violins engaging in purposeful dialogue with Stillman and David Aspin’s viola a very noisy dog!

At the end of this thoroughly good-humoured concert Katie Stillman gave us an encore by “a violinist in the orchestra” (who?). It proved a wonderfully effective piece, the shifts in orchestral writing mirroring the delicacy of the violin part.

Reviewed on 14 June 2026