The BBC National Orchestra of Wales played its first of four concerts at the BBC Proms 2008 on Friday 25 July. The venue was the breath-taking Royal Albert Hall as the Orchestra performed newly appointed Composer in Association, Simon Holt premiere, 'Troubled Light' which explores the relationship between sound and colour.

Review from the Telegraph by Geoffrey Norris

"Simon Holt's kaleidoscopic new piece, Troubled Light' which was given its premiere on Friday by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Thierry Fischer, homed in on the intriguing question about the relationship between sound and colour.

Colour, or at least our aural perception of it, is one of the crucial components of music, and the five short movements of Holt's piece take their cue from different shades of it.

We might not all possess the sophisticated, if subjective, synaesthetic sense that prompted such composers as Rimsky-Korsakov and Skryabin to associate specific keys with specific colours, but it is quite common for us to 'hear' that a piece of music has a certain spectrum of sounds that we might mentally envisage as colouring.

Holt explicitly describes one of the movements of 'Troubled Light' as being " a flash of wild red" ; another is conceived as "acid yellow".

We regularly draw on the language of the visual arts to describe the effect of music, so Holt's practice is not unusual. Here he derives stimuli both from poetry and from painting, with varied connotations of colour.

The way he deploys instrumental timbres and creates mixes of sound conjures up, with his customary imagination, a compact score that is at once multi-faceted, ear catching and clearly focused.

On either side of the Holt piece there was music by two 20th-century composers reknowned as colourists.

Debussy's 'Nocturnes' shimmered in the BBC National Orchestra of Wales's beautifully modulated performance, ranging from the softly shifting textures of Nuages to the piquancy of Fetes and the seductive sumptuoness of Sirenes with the pure rich voives of Cantamus Girls Choir adding a further dimension of atmospheric expression.

After the interval, Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's 'Pictures from an Exhibition' was given an interpretation in which the character of the various images was sharply identified with a particular vibrancy that made it special.

In performance, there can be a tendancy to over-refine Ravel's scoring of Mussorgsky's origional piano piece, but Fischer here coaxed something much more robust and well upholstered that served as a reminder that the music's roots are very much in Russian soil."

The Telegraph. Monday 28 July.

To hear the concert again follow this link to the BBC three i-player and here for the second part of the concert.