REVIEW: Summer Classical Favourites concert, Worthing Symphony Orchestra

The star of Yi-Yang Chen sparkles on Worthing this week. In his third concerto appearance with Worthing Symphony Orchestra, movement by movement of its three, he made Beethoven’s Third Concerto first explode, then softly glow, then crackle its way towards its final major-key sprint to the finishing line. “The feeling grew during the performance that we were witnessing someone and something special,” said one audience member.

His stature in their eyes grew and grew. Just when you thought you were listening to an alpha masculine interpretation, there came tenderness to confound you, to strengthen the detail and widen your bigger picture. There seemed a sense of abandon about his performance and ever-recurrent spontaneity, interweaved in a direct and edgily raw focus.

Taiwanese, Chen came from Kansas with a ‘powerhouse / high-risker / taking ownership of his piano’ labelling from the critical reaction to him since New York’s Juilliard School launched him – including a lauded Carnegie Hall debut. The WSO’s orchestral introduction to the Concerto had issued no red warning of this. Was their lack of tension and vigour under conductor John Gibbons perhaps a deliberate smoke screen or fake signpost, to help the pianist create even more impact on arrival?

Chen’s first entry was like the turbulent Beethoven himself, bursting into a room of complacent ladyships and gentry, and grabbing them by the scruff of their necks, to confront the reality of his deep personal struggle with life. Immediately, he thumps his fist on the table 11 times, then he looks them in the eye and speaks softly, with a curling trill of beckoning that’s actually an assured invitation to something richer than their shallow societal trappings.

Chen’s Worthing audience was intensively alerted and engaged. What would grab them next? Biting staccato, in-your-face vehemence, soft and gentle counter-propositions. Bravura arpeggios, octaves and passages of occasionally well-nigh rabid affirmation, yet with recognisable technical articulation amid the power, instead of rush and mush. The quality of the performance matured accumulatively, it never flagged in stamina, nor lost its acuity and sharpness of approach.

After the skimming down the waterfalls of differing scales into the orchestral climaxes, Chen’s mountainous cadenza assured us that we’d hitherto seen only the secondary peaks. And then his rapt, tiptoeing emergence from it rounded off a picture so comprehensive and startlingly vivid, the audience simply had to applaud this first movement. A far from common occurrence at WSO concerts.

You see as well as hear when Chen performs. He’s not stately poised at the piano. His full physical engagement tells you he is attempting and giving more than just a show or a recitation with a veneer. The lower left leg shoots back during sudden effort in attack, to bring off the technical leaps and starts. The bum sometimes leaves its seat. The head turns occasionally towards the audience to share and underline passing beauty, which is unusual but characteristic. We’ll call it ‘The Yi-Yang Look’.

All this, Worthing and its WSO had witnessed in the 2018 Sussex International Piano Competition during Chen’s late 20s, which he won playing Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto in the Grand Finale. But now his performance comes with even more experiential beef.

Yet he unfolds periods of quietness, as often in the slow middle movement of the Third, in which the WSO’s muted strings draped their own magical veil, leading to intimate and pensive dialogue with him – and bear in mind, he’s already an accomplished chamber musician, carrying even legend Menahem Pressler’s stamp of approval. One of these moments seemed like a reverie echoing on from the Mendelssohn Overture we’d already heard. And then he brought the Largo to its touching final rest, his last note of lingering barely sounding, as though not to stir a now sleeping child. The last cocoon thread he’d spun around his listeners.

The exhilarating volatility of Chens’ finale regenerated the in-the-moment high risk factor he brings to big works. Beethoven’s storm and calm, almost like a pendulum swing, set on repeat, had his audience on the edge of their seats anticipating the next eruption he’d unleash. The sweet central section, with Ian Scott’s clarinet of comfort, then the orchestral fugato, together offer the piano respite in which to re-fuel before the final scamper home. Chen, in gleeful exuberant chatter, of course wins that race. The orchestra all clatter and tumble in behind, not a very close second, and then the acclaim begins.

Chen, dressed for the saloon bar in dark jacket, pink open-neck short, narrow light grey trousers and maroon loafers, rises with a huge, open and winning smile, a deep bow, several clasps of his hands, turning to clap his orchestra, then in a bear hug of triumph with his conductor, he nearly stumbles together with Gibbons off the rostrum. A third, even a fourth curtain call seemed destined, but Chen cuts short both, to talk to his audience.

No, he’s not a robot! They’d like to know that, but soloists even if daring to talk can flap like fish out of water. Not Chen. He invited everyone to his International Interview Concert the following Sunday at Symphorian’s Durrington Hill (25 May, see below) and alternatively to his ‘Soiree on a Steinway’ at South Terrace followed by dinner at East Beach Cafe, Littlehampton (Friday 30 May).

Then he gave an encore – again not a regular WSO concert occurrence – and it was a piece he’ll play on May 25: Gershwin’s ‘Embraceable You’, the fourth of several songs arranged so fluently and warmth by celebrated American virtuoso Earl Wild.

Chen’s solo repertoire is a compelling combination of choice classical, romantic, impressionist, and Gershwin jazziness, intersprinkled with new works by living composers his Kansas University commission at his behest. These will include the World Premier at St Symphorian’s of Icelandic guitarist Gulli Björnsson’s ‘Ocean Surface’, which makes the piano sound new in painting the sea’s changing textures. Chen’s own composition in deep reaction to the 2011 Japanese earthquake tsunami – which helped create that 2018 Competition victory here, and several others across the globe – will be one of the impact pieces, along with Beethoven’s great Waldstein Sonata.

To have a classical recording artiste on an established label (Champs Hill) give two different concerts in Worthing in eight days is a phenomenon. Chen also played this solo programme with the International Interview Concerts at St Peter’s Petersfield on Wednesday, and the same Worthing-based concert organisation will take him with it to The Spring Arts & Heritage Centre, Havant, on June 4 (7.30).

Gibbons has nurtured in his WSO concerts a regular post-interval slot which sets up for the audience, more often than not, a warm bath or a luxury chaise longue – depending on their bent. A short lyrical or evocative work, sometimes with a title few might know, but bringing an assured result – which Gibbons himself calculates will offer the world-weary a velvet-framed permit to doze. Unalloyed, ineffable beauty this time from Frederick Delius via his assistant Eric Fenby, gathering up the loveliest scraps from the Fennimore and Gerda opera into a fragile reminiscence of sweet petals that the ebullient Thomas Beecham worked into a post-war lollipop.

If you need sensuousness par excellence like this, you should be hiring Delius, along with WSO flautist Monica McCarron and oboist Christopher O’Neal.

Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony of high jinks closed the WSO season here in a spirited party. I reckoned musically it featured, among other things probably a bouncy castle and a Punch and Judy Show as tThe WSO set about having their Beethovenian’s knockabout fun, and hide and seek. The composer had his miseries but still knew how to enjoy himself! Beneath all the jumping and capering, solid ground was provided by immaculate horns Richard Steggall and Jane Hanna, and staff percussionist Chris Blundell who for this concert slipped in behind the two tympani drums in the rare absence of Robert Millett.

Richard Amey

Classical Calendar

Sunday 25 May (2.45pm): Yi-Yang Chen’s ‘voices’ International Interview Concert, St Symphorian’s Durrington Hill, Worthing BN13 2PU. Solo Piano, full performance and Conversation. Features – Ask A Question, Guest Interviewer, Guess the Composer, Give It A Title.

Music, not in performance order: Beethoven, ‘Waldstein’ Sonata; Chopin, Scherzo in C# minor and Opus 17 Mazurkas 1 & 4; Gershwin-Wild, ‘Embraceable You’; Gulli Björnsson (Iceland), ‘Ocean Surface’ (World Premiere); Y-Y Chen, In Memorium 11 March (2011) ‘Twisting Paths’ and ‘Shrine Portrait’; Rautavaara (Finland), ‘Fourths’ Etude; Ingrid Stölzel (Germany-US), ‘In Foreign Lands’.

Info and tickets here (via Facebook) or here (seetickets.com) or buy on the door.

Saturday 7 June (7.30), Worthing Philharmonic (conductor Dominic Grier), Assembly Hall: Beethoven, Egmont Overture; Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No 1 (Julian Chan); Schumann, Symphony No 2. With pre-concert talk by Dominic Grier and guests. Tickets from www.wtm.uk

Saturday June 14 (7.30),The Boundstone Chorus, at St Michael and All Angels Church, South Lancing: celebrating the 80th birthdays of Sir John Rutter and Aedan Kerney MBE. Music tbc, including two pieces by other composers. Box office: 01903 762793 / [email protected] / www.theboundstonechorus.co.uk/concerts

Saturday 21 June (7.30), Worthing Choral Society at St George’s Church, Worthing (director Aedan Kerney, associate music director Sam Barton, keyboard Olly Parr, organ Philip White Jones): Joanna Forbes L’Estrange’s choral re-imagining of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons – ‘A Season to Sing’. Choral favourites Zadoc The Priest (Handel) and How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings (Brahms). Also Sam Barton’s Heaven, and Elgar’s Give Unto The Lord. Plus a song selection from St Andrew’s CofE High School Choir, directed by Mattea Leow. Tickers from www.trybooking.com/uk/DXQQ

Sunday 29 June (3pm), Angmering Chorale and Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra at Worthing Assembly Hall. Handel, Zadok The Priest; Haydn, Te Deum; Mozart, Requiem.

NB. Concert awaiting final confirmation: tickets from www.wtm.uk

Christ Church Lunchtime Series (Worthing, 12.30)

Tuesday 17 June, The Brighton Guitar Quartet.

Tuesday 8 July, Yoko Ono piano

Tuesday 12 August, South Downs Folk Singers

Tuesday 23 September, John Collins organ