REVIEW: Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra and Worthing Choral Society join forces

(orchestra alone unless stated) Leroy Anderson, A Christmas Festival; Humperdinck, Hansel & Gretel Overture; Tchaikovsky, Sleeping Beauty Waltz, The Nutcracker Act 1 from the enlarging Christmas Tree to Snowflakes Waltz; Prokofiev, Cinderella’s Midnight Waltz. The Nativity sequence: Gary Fry, The Nativity (orch, Jack Dalley); arr Moore, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear (all with audience); Rutter, Star Carol (WCS); arr Sam Barton (WCS assoc dir), Silent Night (WCS); Marion Peskett (WPO flautist), arr Fedor Vrtachnik, The Angel’s Song, The Shepherd’s Song (WPO, children).

Arr Robert Sheldon, A Most Wonderful Christmas; Ansel Chaloner-Hughes, A Carol Fantasy; Ravel, The Empress of the Pagodas, Beauty & The Beast, The Enchanted Garden from ballet suite Mother Goose. Rutter, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Good King Wenceslas (both all with audience); Wells/Tormé, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire (WPO, children); Mendelssohn arr Willcocks/Grier, Fanfare and Hark The Herald Angels Sing (all with audience); Anderson, Sleigh Ride.

Director Dominic Grier is ditching old dictums and with his Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra taking the town into a more imaginative era of Christmas concerts with carols. Listeners probably came away with half a dozen contenders for their own ‘Top Highlight’ with most people struggling to order them in preference. Read the above programme before anything more.

Grier’s introduced fairytale elements grabbed the public imagination producing a modern-day record WPO concert attendance of 677. This number outstripped WPO’s previous two post-pandemic Christmas offerings in December and also both Worthing Symphony Orchestra’s gate figures at their own traditional Viennese New Year afternoons in January.

Post-war in this country, the aspiring way of sure-fire popular Carol Concerts more or less remains to trot out the favourite British and European carols in various choral arrangements, some for just choir, often sophisticated, others simplified for the audience to join in. Very much shaped by the David Willcocks 1960s-70s Cambridge and Royal Albert Hall vein, then the John Rutter Cambridge update combining that with some American or wider-world material, including syncopation and Caribbean rhythms.

With or without an available organ, the orchestra was there merely to accompany, although enriching and broadening the sound in substituting for a piano. Hardly any just orchestral music alone, to vary the colour and descriptive range of the occasion. The Brits hadn’t produced very much suitable music anyway and the orchestras looked little further afield. The Americans meanwhile got going with their own showbizzier thing, through Leroy Anderson and others, but within the sanctity of UK Christmas concerts the Yankee Doodlings were kept at arm’s length.

This is what Dominic Grier is making the WPO change. Nowadays, artistically, something has to be done beyond inserting a school choir to get a more modern audience interested. Grier will have noted European Christmases have long adopted their (Russian) Nutcracker ballet and (German) Hansel & Gretel opera traditions and presented them in full – their fantasy or fairytale material, seasonally suited as civilisation seeks cultural winter fuel to counter the cold, damp and dark.

Mix into the big Grier Christmas cake other fairytale stuff along with your exuberant instrumental Anderson and Robert Sheldon from across the pond, and then you have a complementing, musically balanced foil to the otherwise unbroken singing. Grier here folded in Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty waltzes, then iced it with Ravel gems from Mother Goose.

He’s got these fresh and appropriate classical elements – there’ll be others to come – which this town and hinterland audience will come back for, as their own developing new Christmas music enthusiasms. You’ve still got a pick of the carol favourites and Grier here crowned everything with an anthemic Hark the Herald in exceptional full blaze.

Three local composers featured. Marion Peskett’s springy Angel and Shepherd Songs introduced the children – alas, including only two boys (someone tell them singing breath control increases stamina on the sports field). Sam Barton, conducting in shiny leather and a hair bun surprisingly sans festive decoration, brought a variety of fleeting elements, including chromaticism and gospel, to his personal take on Silent Night.

WPO’s 18-year-old Composer in Residence, Ansel Chaloner-Hughes, contributed a succinctly compact piece, written at great speed these previous weeks, and exuding quality, confidence and ease of accomplishment. His A Carol Fantasy intelligibly broke down, reassembled and combined Ding Dong Merrily On High and O Come O Come Emmanuel within a coherent listening experience. It rewarded in its clarity, colouring and shape. His own detailed notes in the printed concert programme about form and content were for the analytical record. But the composition’s strength and immediacy lay in its intelligent economy. In its fifth minute, its ending came suddenly: a surprise, but seconds later it felt logically punctual. Let’s have it again.

New young blood took over the normal adult compèring role. Jack Dalley, just 16, is doing A-Level Drama, Photography and Digital Media at Lancing’s Sir Robert Woodward Academy. He was relaxed, engaging and well-scripted, his own spotlight item initiating the concert’s Nativity sequence. At the end, WPO’s gift to him took its cue from his biography: he confesses to a passion for biscuits.

The Worthing Choral Society, prepared by Barton and MD Aedan Kerney, were in black with red buttonholes, the orchestra in bright colours and donning Santa hats for the second half. Instead of another ordinary Christmas Carol concert sending the orchestra to sleep, Grier stretched them. They needed smelling salts at the ready but they had the audience absorbed and fascinated by this newly devised festive spread.

And WPO made some thrilling Worthing musical history. Few would argue that the sustained Act 1 Nutcracker sequence they played isn’t the most rivetingly dramatic and emotional among Tchaikovsky’s three ballet music masterworks. It’s unequalled and starts at midnight as, in schoolgirl Clara’s home, the Christmas tree slowly, eerily but gloriously, grows huge. Then a vivid, shrieking, squealing, bugling miniature field battle breaks out. It’s her toy Nutcracker soldier’s army against the rascally Mouse King’s furry forces. It develops engrossingly in astonishingly original sound. It’s no hit-and-run night raid. A lot happens, brilliantly described. And in final conflict culmination, Clara’s thrown anti-mouse slipper averts defeat and produces a Nutcracker victory.

Out of wood and paint, owing to her his life, steps Captain Nutcracker, now a Prince in the flesh. Taking her hand, in a wonderfully extended crescendo of heavenly length (sorry, I apologise to Robert Schumann!), powerfully signifying important brightening scenic transformation, he transports Clara off towards his Kingdom of Sweets. Their pausing in a forest of snow to watch the flakes dance – the chilly white atmosphere warmed by a wordless young female chorus sounding everywhere from the treetops, behind the trunks, inside the bushes and atop the sparkling snowdrifts – closes Act 1 in ineffable charm. It unfailingly draws adult tears from childlike eyes. I’m always awash from the slipper onwards.

It’s an orchestral tour de force in any language and their own triumph was that the WPO brought it off. The seasoned Worthing Choral Society ladies recaptured their own girls’ voices to clinch it. The Nutcracker has been Christmas for ballet lovers near a theatre since the 1950s. But Grier lifting it from the theatre into concert hall brought it into everyone’s Worthing Yule 2024.

Confession: I have envisaged, apparently against hope, that an orchestra might one day perform this Act 1 music in concert in Worthing, preferably at Christmas, although I didn’t really mind when. It’s finally happened. Even if in sound only, no dancing or scenery, it works as tremendous music alone. The action’s happening there in front of you, firing your imagination, and it’s potentially a ready-made fixture as this annual concert’s attraction. It will make the orchestra better and better, and bring December alive for hundreds of adults and children, in readiness for Christmas itself.

Richard Amey

This Saturday lunchtime at 12.30pm, see The Royal Ballet’s broadcast Nutcracker production on The Connaught Theatre screen.

Next Concerts

Sunday 5 January at Assembly Hall, 2.45pm – Worthing Symphony Orchestra’s Viennese New Year Concert, conductor John Gibbons. Selections traditional and less-so from the treasure-trove of waltzes, marches, polkas and overtures by the Austrian Strauss family and their contemporaries.

Sunday 26 January at Assembly Hall, 2.45pm – Worthing Symphony Orchestra Concert, conductor John Gibbons, piano Jeneba Kanneh-Mason (fourth WSO appearance). Malcolm Arnold, Cornish Dances; Kachachuryan, ballet Adagio for Spartacus and Phrygia pas de deux (Onedin Line); Florence Price, Piano Concerto; Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Valse de la Reine; Bernard Stevens, Symphony of Liberation; Klaus Badell, Pirates of The Caribbean.

Sunday 9 February at Assembly Hall, 3pm – Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra Symphonies & Serenades concert, conductor Dominic Grier, tenor Magnus Walker, horn John Peskett. Sibelius, Symphony No 3; Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings; Tchaikovsky, Symphony No 4.

Tickets for all the above above from www.wtm.uk or 01903 206206 or on the door (but first check Nutcracker availability).