REVIEW: World premiere for Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra
He was only 18 in late August. He’s 6ft 4in and growing. His hair fringe repeatedly encroaches the top of his glasses as he converses with a spring tide-flow of quicksilver, observant enthusiasm, immersion and urgency for the subject of classical music. Those in his calling possess a disguising anonymous appearance. He is a composer living in Worthing, and coming forth.
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Hide AdYoung isn’t the word. His name is a mouthful and English thirst for the letter ‘L’ forecasts frequent mis-spelling. But familiarity in repeated reading of ANSEL CHALONER-HUGHES will ingrain it in his town community. This looks likely after the arresting debut his music made in this concert, with his short, concentrated and engrossing 6-minute piece, FLORESTAN.
As if the Worthing area hadn’t a classical music offering broad enough for its 100,000+ . . . with a solid-pro Symphony Orchestra (WSO) and burgeoning Philharmonic (WPO), the Lancing Chamber Orchestra, The International Interview Concerts (conceived and based here), plus several similarly deep-rooted choirs and ensembles. Classical music is now as broad as this. People grow to like it, embrace it, and come from miles around for it.
Chaloner-Hughes lives in Worthing as now does Philharmonic musical director Dominic Grier, who has appointed him the Worthing PO’s Composer-in-Residence. Both moved permanently to the town for the classical action here. Chaloner-Hughes after a period split between Snowdonia, Shropshire and Sussex; Grier from his Royal Opera/Ballet grounding in London, bearing a now international career, and with his Danish wife Laura Kjærgaard, who directs Lancing CO.
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Hide AdAnsel the Composer, whose work already seriously disputes his fledgling status, turned down eager Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Oxford University in favour of a gap year here, to study alone with composing tutors and mentors, including Brighton’s Sally Beamish, who has a piece on the BBC list of 10 for schools to explore this new academic year. Already he is avoiding the flock, and seeking his own trail.
Florestan is not simply a clutch of music Ansel fancied writing, and pulling a fanciful title out of the air. Florestan has substance, is a rewarding listen, interesting to Beethoven fans particularly, and it announces much to the Worthing world about its creator.
Florestan, the guy, is a political prisoner, chained up in a tyrannical death sentence, solitarily confined from the crowd of friends he leads. In Beethoven’s definitive personal-statement opera Fidelio, he’s the lesser-defined hero alongside the glowing heroine Leonore, who is eventually his male-disguised rescuer. Florestan’s thoughts and feelings come to life in Chaloner-Hughes’ music with imagination and detail Beethoven hasn’t time for in his Leonore No 3 Overture – to which, as a companion piece, Ansel’s Florestan is conceived.
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Hide AdThe expressiveness of Florestan’s music showed in Ansel a intuitive depth of feeling, variance of mood or atmosphere and individual touches of orchestration that included possibly a future Chaloner-Hughes orchestral signature sound of mystery or doubt, created by two clarinets framing a cor anglais across three octaves. The ability to achieve this so expressively foretells in the composer effective application of orchestral technique to operatic purpose, in character portrayal and surrounding context and environment. If drawn to it.
Florestan’s a rewarding listen that’s poised to strike twice on second hearing. There is the deep and telling bass drum and gong Beethoven didn’t use, likewise Ansel’s full brass and the cor anglais. You can hear foreboding, forlornness, despair, brooding hope, tension, and building excitement of anticipated release, maybe not without conflict.
He took as Florestan’s compositional raw material Beethoven’s architectural outline and his minor-key, three-note rising cell G-A-Bb which lightens to major (B) as the upbeat to the Overture’s departure from its slow introduction.
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Hide AdChaloner-Hughes tells me his childhood companions were classical composers (Haydn, who has become supreme) alongside 20th century ones (Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Hindemith) with those of the Romantic period, for him missing the mark. This shows in his ‘economy of words’. A ‘romantic’ Florestan would have well exceeded those 6min.
There’s more to come. Florestan arrives second in an evolving trilogy of human subjects for exposure. Already in Ansel’s portfolio sits his music for the decayed statue, Ozymandias, whose 1818 sonnet by Shelley warns that any individual ruling power is temporary. Third looks like being another Beethovenian literary-figure Overture companion piece. This being Egmont, the Flemish resistance warrior in Goethe’s tragic play, for the 1809 premier of which Beethoven’s Overture was commissioned. Egmont meets a more final fate than his fellow freedom fighter, Florestan.
One hopes Grier and WPO will launch that Chaloner-Hughes outcome.
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Hide AdThis Autumn Classics concert floated WPO’s new season with a 10% audience increase over their equivalent concert last season – and further musical expansion. The Bassoon Concerto by Rossini (another Beethoven hero!) was WPO’s first in their 76 years. It brought the sun that dawned in Florestan’s closing bars, with winking tunes in the outer movements, but a lonely, sorrowful middle one, cheered up by some other operatic optimist, before Chinese soloist Siping Guo’s bassoon and Ethan Cook’s gentle drum roll united, in duo, to close its curtain.
One of WPO’s excellent programme note writers, Tim Schofield, told us archives suggest others collaborated with the ageing Rossini in composing the first movement, and the aural evidence agreed. But Rossini sounded bent on getting his bassoon bravura to outgun and strip his opera singers in notes-per-breath and bar. This raised instantly Siping Guo’s star rating on his Worthing debut, backed up by his agility and lyrical projection, displayed on one of the orchestra’s less sexy instruments.
In their surprise revelation of bassoonal virtues, the Worthing audience wholeheartedly accorded him that. No bassoonist should minimise such rare chances to garner public enamour unopposed. So Guo gave them more. Sidelining the predictable male-gift wine bottle arriving from his right during the long applause, he stayed loyally focused on his new fans and played, most asbsorbingly, CPE Bach’s A minor Sonata for Flute, as bassoon-transcribed.
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Hide AdDoubters of the bassoon became converts. And after the interval, WPO added new converts of their own. Grier’s work with them on Dvorak’s Symphony No 8 (his Pastoral, Beethoven lovers?) meant two beautifully delivered inner movements, and outer ones in which all instrumental sections excelled in their relish of Dvorak’s writing, and glorification in his sound and his Bohemian cultural message. They ensured the piece did its easy tourist and PR work for the Prague and the Czech Republic, all these 135 years on. To single out the clarinettists Julie Schofield and Liz Wingrove would be invidious. But there, I’ve gone and done it – because Dvorak’s magic always needs them here in top sound form.
Next, it’s Liszt, Stravinsky and Bartok.
Richard Amey
Siping Guo’s appeared thanks to the Countess of Munster Musical Trust, helping young musicians
Next concerts:
Saturday, October 26, Adur Arts Live series at St Mary de Haura Church, Shoreham-by-Sea (12 noon – 1pm): Evgenia Startseva, piano. The London-based Kazakh presents two of JS Bach’s most significant Preludes and Fugues (tba), John Alexander’s Sandwich, Medtner’s Sonata Tragica and Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse. Cash-only admission on the door.
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Hide AdSunday, October 20 at Assembly Hall, 2.45pm: ‘Grieg Piano Concerto’ – Rhythmie Wong, piano, with Worthing Symphony Orchestra, conductor John Gibbons. Along with Smetana, Overture to The Bartered Bride; Delius, A Song Before Sunrise; Robert Schumann, Symphony No 4 in D minor (in its brighter, originally-scored Leipzig 1841 version). Tickets from wtm.uk or on the door.
Sunday, November 3 at @rtsspaces@sionschool, Gratwicke Rd, Worthing BN11 4BL, 3pm – 5.30: ‘sparks flow through autumn glow’ – The International Interview Concerts: Kenny Fu, solo piano.
. . . including Mystery Music, his own ‘Improvisation Spot’ on a theme from the audience, and Choose A Movement from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata; as well as Medtner’s Sonata Reminiscenza (Forgotten Melodies), Brahms’ Intermezzi Nos 1 and 2 (from Three Intermezzi Opus 117) and Intermezzo No 2 and Ballade (from Six Pieces Opus 118), and two extra surprises. In The Round audience have their own Ask A Question section. Tickets on the door or from seetickets.com
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Hide AdSunday, November 17 at Regis Music School, Sudley Rd, Bognor Regis PO21 1ER, 3pm: Piacere Piano Quintet. Samuel Coleridge Taylor in G minor op 1, Camille Saint-Saëns No 1 in A minor Op14. Tickets via EventBrite or on door.
Sunday, November 24 at Assembly Hall, 3pm: ‘Orchestral Transformations’ – Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra, leader Adam Barker, conductor Dominic Grier. Stravinsky, Firebird Suite; Liszt, Piano Concerto No 1 (soloist, Katya Grabova); Bartok, Concerto For Orchestra. Tickets from wtm.uk or on the door.
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