Still ugly but worth catching for the chorus and orchestra: Royal Opera’s Tannhäuser reviewed

A classical concert programme is like a set menu, and for this palate the most tempting orchestral offering in the UK this January came from the Slaithwaite Philharmonic under its conductor Benjamin Ellin. They opened with a suite from Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, and the inclusion of Hollywood film music in a ‘straight’ classical programme was interesting in itself. Film music has been around for more than a century now. Many scores are fully as effective in concert as (say) Schubert’s Rosamunde or Beethoven’s Egmont, and yet this almost never happens. Film scores (unless by a big beast of the classical world) are generally hived off into ‘pops’ nights. Snobbery is the most adaptable of vices.

Anyhow, here was an amateur orchestra showing the way and – even more formidably – following up with Korngold’s distinctly gnarly Symphony in F-sharp major, the kind of piece that professional musicians tend to assume is beyond the skills of amateurs (especially if they never work with them).