Concerts without an interval? There are risks

From Hugh Kerr, of Edinburgh Music Review:

Well there wasn’t an interval at the Queens Hall tonight but there was a mighty division between the opening Mozart Symphony and the very different Shostakovich which followed. Firstly I must report that this was my first orchestral concert of the autumn season and my first concert in the Queens Hall since before lockdown. My first impressions were that the Queens Hall has been busy since lockdown, opening up the ground floor cafe and the narrow hall way from the front door, and above all creating a suite of gender free toilets on the first floor (which are much better than the old toilets). In the concert hall they have taken away the stage and pushed the audience back to allow the orchestra a more socially distance layout. The audience was socially distanced and fully masked. It seemed a decent sized audience, although what social distancing does to the Queens Hall economics I’m not sure. 

The first thing that struck me with the Mozart Symphony, known as the Posthorn Symphony, was how loud the opening movement was. …

Read on here.