I heard a piece of music on the radio that I had not heard for forty years, Torelli's Trumpet Concerto. It is a commonplace piece of baroque writing for the trumpet, but the opening figure, played first by the orchestra and then by the soloist, has stayed in my head ever since I first heard it played by a tall fair-haired trumpeter whose name I forget by the Cambridge Youth Chamber Orchestra (CYCO) in 1967 or 1968, in St Edmunds Church, Cambridge.
CYCO, pronounced like the Hitchcock film, was an orchestra of Cambridge school musicians, led by university music students. I remember Stephen Bonner and Donald Judge, into whose rooms in Magdalen we would squeeze ourselves for rehearsals; sometimes we rehearsed in rooms on Thompsons Lane.
Unlike the Cambridgeshire Schools Holiday Orchestra which, under Ludovick Stewart's leadership, was open to all comers, CYCO membership was exclusive. I played the clarinet, though was taught the psaltery for a piece of Donald's composition, which we performed in St Marks on Barton Road. I remember playing Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony at a Magdalen May Ball supper: instead of throwing bread rolls at us, the audience were surprisingly attentive. I once inflicted a composition of my own on the wind players, who struggled through it with tolerance.
