SASO’s Festival Concert featuring Holst’s Planets Suite and soloist Giovanni Re in Arutiunian’s Trumpet Concerto was “a real tour de force” according to John Manning, music critic of the Herts Advertiser.
Writing in the 13th June 2013 edition he says: “I can’t think of a performance I have heard in the past where the opening movement, Mars, the Bringer of War, sounded so powerful or where the final movement, Neptune, the Mystic, with its choir of female voices fading into the distance had such a stunning effect.”