Herald December '08

To break a string in the first movement of Elgar's Violin Concerto could happen to anyone. What made this mishap different on Sunday was that Tom Bowes, appearing with Peter Evans and the Meadows Chamber Orchestra, publicly apologised for it. A soloist of renowned sensitivity, he had already shown that his playing was going to be something special; and so it proved.

Bowes, founding leader of the Maggini Quartet, has become one of the supreme exponents of British violin concertos, particularly Elgar's. To have won him for a performance of this work spoke highly for the ambitions of Edinburgh's part-time orchestra, and the players rose to the occasion. The Brahmsian aspects of the music, into which Elgar injected his own private pathos, were keenly conveyed. But it was the cadenza, in which the orchestra participates at the end of the work, for which the audience must have been waiting, and nobody could have been disappointed by the passion with which its component parts were meshed.

The concerto formed, as it was bound to do, the concert's heartfelt climax. With his warm appreciation of Elgar's glorious array of themes, Bowes performed it to admiration.