It’s always nice to see an orchestra playing something new to them.

Sometimes, it can be hard to shake the feeling that the players aren’t bringing their A-game to the eight hundredth performance of, say, Beethoven’s 5th.

Good news then to see the QSO tackling something a bit different! The bad news being that this doesn’t seem to have helped audience numbers. There was a noticeably thinner crowd for this one.

That’s quite probably because of the first piece on the programme, Arnold Schoenberg’s Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene, Op.34. Depending on how you translate it, that’s something like Accompaniment to a Cinema Scene, but it also has the subtitle of Drohende Gefahr, Angst, Katastrophe (‘threatening danger, fear, catastrophe’).

I can understand general audiences not being big fans of Schoenberg’s works, but, honestly, these days his works almost feel a bit quaint, given that there have been plenty of far more hard-edged modernist works to challenge audiences since Schoenberg’s day.

Of course, the bit that the title leaves out is that this piece was never attached to any film at all, so it’s all in the audience’s heads as you hear the music, and it all winds up feeling very Hitchcockian/Bernard Herrmann-esque.

Guest conductor Asher Fisch...