That's a lot of percussion lined up in front of me at the Queen's Hall but it turned out that not all of it was active at the same time and much of the banging was quite restrained.  Indeed the tubular bells were struck ever so gently and infrequently in an ethereal sounding piece by Arvo Pärt.  On the other hand there was some really loud, lusty and athletic double bass work in Britten's Prelude and Fugue for Strings.

The SCO are celebrating Britten's centenary with three concerts and this one, apart from Pärt's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, was a mixture of Britten and Purcell and it's one of the most enjoyable that I've been to in their entire season.  So much so that I'm going to go to one of the other three which I had not intended to do.

The hall was packed (the empty seats in the photo were for the chorus) in contrast to the Brunton Theatre where a small and doubtless select band watched four Victorian one-act farces the previous evening.  The staging had a raggedy church youth group air to it and although the three actors pumped hard at the chests of these old gems I think they need to accept that if not already dead then they are terminally feeble and will soon expire.