Worthing Symphony Orchestra in concert - review

‘May Jubilations’ Concert, Worthing Symphony Orchestra at The Assembly Hall, Sunday 22 May 2022 (2.45pm), leader Julian Leaper, conductor & artistic director John Gibbons, with piano Dinara Klinton. Edward Elgar, Imperial March Op32; Sergei Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No 3 in Dm; Antonin Dvorak, Symphony No 8 on G Op88.

SOMEONE distinctively added to the diversification of Worthing’s audience at the town’s professional orchestra’s season-closing concert. It was a Worthing Symphony Orchestra audience guest on her first public day’s work as the Borough Council’s first female, in fact its first muslim of either gender for 18 years.

Resplendent not in the formal attire of her office but sensational in a long, peach-rose coloured Bangladeshi dress, alongside her consort, husband Millad, Councillor Henna Chowdhury had welcome news for Worthing’s classical music world: “I love the piano, it’s always just amazing, and I feel I have a real affinity with music.”

The first classical concert she has ever attended became her first mayoral duty: “I really enjoyed it – and so did my husband. The piano appears a lot in Asian music and I just love the sound. I love to sing, even though I’m only a bathroom singer! I’m the only one in a very traditional Bangladeshi family who is musical and I feel like music is in my blood.”

She was schooled in Worthing at Thomas a Becket Middle and Davison High since arriving in the UK with her mother and the middle of three siblings at age 11, following the sudden early death of her father. She now works helping vulnerable people of ethnic minorities. Her three chosen local mayor’s charities include Superstar Arts, which helps disadvantaged young people and adults in creative projects.

As Henna she is, yes, named after the dark red cosmetic substance which, she informs me, even men wear although only on their wedding day, in designs on the palms of their hands. Expect to see her arriving sometimes in a sari or the traditional tunic-and-trousers costume alternative of the salawer kamiz. “For cultural events, I will be dressing to suit the occasion,” she tells me. She has begun true to her word and looks set to arrest not only the eyes but the hearts of Worthing’s community.

So what did Worthing Symphony Orchestra present to Henna Chowdhury and their second-largest audience of this courageous, Covid defying, debt-dicing season? Not everything on the programme!

The music for the famous William Tell Overture by Rossini were missing from the pile of parts ready to play: a misunderstanding between conductor John Gibbons and WSO librarian and bassist Eddie Hurcombe. A different Eddie – Elgar – stepped into the breach with his lively, original-sounding and Queen Victoria Jubilee-motivated Imperial March. This was originally intended to begin the second half but kicked off the first.

Gibbons could be allowed a degree of pride when he confessed from the rostrum that this was the first such cock-up (my words – it’s an orchestral occupational hazard) in his more than double decade of WSO tenure. He assured the audience they’d hear it instead when next season started. See the footnote.

Not programmed but beginning the second half was a reprise of Gibbons’ orchestral arrangement of the choral hymn-cum-anthem ‘A Prayer for Ukraine’ by that nation’s composer Mikola Lysenko. WSO first performed it on March 13, in response to the outbreak of the present hostilities.

No piano in either piece to captivate Mayor Henna, but soon she was in a transported state. Onto the stage, in a Prussian blue trouser suit with low silver heels, came Dinara Klinton. A London-based Ukrainian pianist from the north eastern city of Karkhiv, her mother recently having escaped the heavily-shelled city, Klinton is fully Moscow trained, then finished at the Royal College of Music.

This was no political appointment by Gibbons. Her engagement had already been scheduled at the turn of this year, after her pandemic-erased early-2020 WSO concert. But an exit-door collection for the Disasters Emergency Committee Ukrainian Appeal (charity reg no 1062638) was taken after this concert. The audience pitched in £727.61.

One of the three finalists here in the 2015 Sussex International Piano Competition, Klinton’s maturation has taken on some challenging music almost as though by the scruff of the neck. Her own recording reputation is now approaching world top rank in Liszt and Prokofiev after her CDs of yardstick works by both. Leading fans are Stephen Kovacevic, Martha Argerich and Andràs Schiff, followed by leading recording reviewers.

In her third WSO appearance, now she came and conquered Rachmaninoff’s litmus test, his Third Piano Concerto, with a performance that had at least one expert I know purring in admiration and awe.

Russian Rachmaninoff, 6ft 4in tall, huge hands, wrote it for himself to perform-storm his way to fortune in America. Small people have devised ways over the physical challenges but along the assault course you’ve got to make the music mean something –and that’s to do with soul, not showmanship. Klinton, needing fuss nor histrionics, emphatically clinched that. She showcased the composer’s enormous pianism as a heartfelt maker of melody, dance, texture and drama. She made the music’s sense in design and message. She made it make her own sense, alongside its own.

This is a supreme symphonic Concerto. She, Gibbons and the WSO made the music flare, flame and elate, ruminate, caress and soothe. Not since 2019 has Gibbons allowed himself to enlist and unleash the full WSO brass. We’ll forgive him probably the momentary forgetful enthusiasm that, without his full volume control, the honest Assembly Hall acoustic meant his brass sometimes broke its boundary. But momentarily, we too, once again, relished again being Rachmaninoff-overwhelmed.

Yet that could not have happened without Klinton, who as a native of vast lands lying under the same sunshine and rain, captured in music the spirit and insistence of a Russian freedom-seeker.

In the final bars of glory, as she crashed through the last remaining obstacles, my eyes were diverted away to the percussion whose roles were even more spectacular to behold. Timpanist Robert Millett is quarter-Moravian. Which, on a fully international afternoon at the WSO, quarter-kinned him with the Bohemian spirit and soul of Dvorak’s 8th Symphony. He had a ball playing his potent part.

We are taken by Dvorak to his country retreat from the rest of the world, revelling in his national landscape and cultural language. He wrote it before he preceded Rachmaninoff to the US, suffered the same homesickness, and in his New World Symphony melted the soulful sounds he heard in America into his own.

Dvorak picked the key of G and the result is total uplift. Today it was the jubilation of May in whatever land you were listening. In flavour of sound, the brightness and elevation of G is a rare and careful choice among the great composers.

The key of C is perceived as the purest, clearest and cleanest in atmosphere. And G, clouded by only one sharp, is the next-most. But the music it carries must be excellent or it will sound ordinary, and pall. The key inspires. In Messiah’s For Unto Us A Child Is Born achieves one of Handel’s most radiant moments, with G major’s easygoing and carefree ambience.

The large-scale composer must be dead sure of his material or he doesn’t use that as his main key. In G major music, finales leave the audience feeling refreshed and airy. Yet few composers take the risk of G major. Who did? Springing to mind are Haydn’s Surprise Symphony (No 94), Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4 and Mozart’s No 17, Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and Schubert’s long Fantasy Piano Sonata Op78.

All succeed, and right there, possibly even above them, with the WSO’s final whooping and trilling horns of Dave Lee, Jane Hanna (not Henna), Richard Steggall and Lindsay Kempley, was Dvorak and his Eighth. Three Cheers, also for the thematic scene-setting by leader Miriam Lowbury’s six cellos. John Gibbons is not a composer to assert his personality between the music and the audience. So Dvorak sold us his humane and multi-emotional world, sure and anew. It’s needed.

Richard Amey

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