Alnwick, Recorded Music Society

Singers included the soprano Roberta Peters, the contralto Norma Procter, the tenor Nicolai Gedda, the baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky and the bass Kurt Moll.

We heard arias by Rossini, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky Korsakov, and songs by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, as well as Roberta Peters’ vocal contribution to Mahler’s third symphony.

Instrumentalists who died during 2017 were the clarinettist Gervase de Peyer, and violinists Nona Liddell, of the London Sinfonietta, and David Angel, of the Maggini Quartet.

They were represented by excerpts of recordings of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, Takemitsu’s River Run and Bridge’s Three Idylls respectively.

Conductors remembered were Georges Pretre, veteran conductor of many French orchestras, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, of the Halle Orchestra, Louis Fremaux, of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Jeffrey Tate, of the English Chamber Orchestra, who was knighted in the year of his death, and Jiri Belohlavek, of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and former chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

They were remembered by performances of music by Poulenc, Brahms, Massenet, Suk and Mozart.

It is always sad to lose artists of this calibre, but it is good to know that their music lives on in the many fine recordings they made.