This was a concert of two very different halves and while the account of Vaughan Williams' A Sea Symphony had many virtues, it was the performance of Panufnik's Thames Pageant by CEFC and 200 singers and string musicians drawn from schools in three London boroughs that satisfied most.
Panufnik's cantata, with a text by his wife Camilla, is a thank you to his adopted country, but most particularly to the river on whose banks he made his home at Twickenham.
String principals of the Sinfonia as well as its wind, brass and percussion sections helped to reinforce the orchestra. The youngsters, instrumental and vocal, responded with vigour in a piece that draws its musical inspiration from early, folk and romantic sources in an imaginative and entertaining manner.
The final sequence, The Boat Race, was enlivened with altos, sopranos and children waving dark and light blue favours. The score directs that the winner is to be decided during performance - dark blue in this instance.
Temple fashioned a very idiomatic and measured account of A Sea Symphony, most particularly in the finely crafted slow movement On The Beach At Night Alone, and in the final and very expressive O My Brave Soul in which the soprano Alison Pearce and Baritone Peter Savidge sang quite beautifully.
