Following YouTube performances and two very successful online concerts, the Kingston Chamber Orchestra will mark their return to live performance with a concert featuring principal flute – Ruth Williams as soloist.

Ruth will be performing two short pieces for flute and orchestra that are rarely heard on the concert platform. The first, the Divertimento by Busoni is a single movement work in three sections (fast-slow-fast) written in 1920. The music is Mozartian in character but with unusual harmonic twists that give this virtuosic piece a mercurial character.

The second piece is the short work – Odelette by Saint-Saëns. Odelette is a term used for a woman in a Turkish harem. Saint-Saens had a great interest in the authentic music of Islamic countries and this influence is prevalent in the main melodic themes of this charming work also written in 1920.

The concert will commence with a rarely heard orchestral overture by the Spanish composer Arriaga. He was nicknamed "the Spanish Mozart" after he died, because, like Mozart, he was both a child prodigy and an accomplished composer who died young. He wrote the D major overture when he was only 15, five years before his untimely death from tuberculosis.

For the second half, the orchestra will perform Beethoven's ground-breaking Eroica Symphony. Beethoven described the work, written in 1804, as a piece to 'seize fate by the throat'. Beethoven also remarked that 'he was determined to put his old life and methods behind him and find a new path'. This he certainly achieved and the power and emotion of this piece still can sound shocking even to modern ears.