REVIEW: Worthing Symphony Orchestra - serious, relevant and with surprise delights
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Malcolm Arnold, Four Cornish Dances Op91
Aram Khachaturian, Phrygia-Spartacus pas de deux Adagio ^
Florence Price, Piano Concerto in D minor ^
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Four Characteristic Waltzes Op 22, No 3 Valse de la reine
Bernard Stevens, Symphony of Liberation Op7 – Enslavement, Resistance, Liberation *
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Hide AdKlaus Badelt, sequence from film Pirates of the Caribbean – including Fog Bound, The Medallion Call, The Black Pearl, He’s A Pirate
This concert sat calm in the eye of a storm of boundless deadly conflict and fear, accompanied by unburied human disgrace staring out afresh through the gloom. On the eve of World Holocaust Day, in a world where genocide, international destruction and enforced population displacement heedlessly proliferate, John Gibbons’ concert planned months ago appositely presented key items themed on slavery^ and war liberation*. While outside the auditorium, global warming unleashing yet another storm, keeping some people at home.
We heard an African-American woman, Florence Price, pushing against racism and sexism 90 years ago in her three-part 1930s Piano Concerto of European style but echoing black folksong, spirituals and slave dance in its textures. And performed by one of the work’s champions, Jeneba, the fourth in the celebrated Kanneh-Mason musical family from outlaw Robin Hood’s Nottingham.
In our studentship of this music, performed by an artiste championing it, we heard the piano first making speeches, the orchestra apparently a commenting independent agent, then the two combining in conversation but the orchestra sometimes flooding the keyboard passagework – maybe symbolically. The central section almost taking refuge in the night, with solo orchestral instruments as visiting comforters. Its finale starting in cheery ragtime style but the entertainment seemed repressed and cut short. All over in 18min. Had the composer been allocated only the minimum slot? Or was its truncation Price’s own symbolic vocal self-suppression as per the times?
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Hide AdWe heard the Briton, Bernard Stevens’ first symphony, which landed the 1946 Victory Symphony Contest prize staged by the patriotic Daily Express, calling for an immediate peacetime commemorative musical blast. “It’s now unfashionable music but thank you for listening to it,” commented its own champion Gibbons, who’d previewed its final movement at an earlier WSO Remembrance Day concert. It had already been written during Stevens’ wartime in the army, then to be dedicated to a friend who fell.
It wasn’t a nationalistic blast, but an almost continuous river of active momentum and ideas. At only 23min, its compactness is a virtue. It had a British sound slightly forward of early 20th Century and only in its finale did it suggest a couple of Finnish or Russian tinges. ‘Enslavement’ felt not despondent but strongly determined and expansive, with elements of resolve and hope. ‘Resistance’ was positive, succinct and busy. ‘Liberation’ was intense, and advanced irresistibly to its major-key moment of release, with then a tempo adjustment into an unrelenting surge towards its jabbing final fist-pumps.
Between and around this pointed serious stuff came the cakes and, first, the scones. West Country cream (jam first?) was served in Malcolm Arnold’s heart-warming 10min of Cornish Dances, long overdue in these concerts from an Arnold afficionado such as Gibbons, who has already introduced some of his Symphonies to Worthing. Arnold has one of the most diverse personalities among the British composers and these four evocative scenes from his beloved county in 1966 came without caricature from an honest, sympathetically observant film-maker’s notebook as much as a film music composer’s painting palette.
No photo stills were needed for us to picture its four scenes – fun but noble dancing to rustically reverberant music; forlorn, abandoned copper and tin mine landscapes; hymn singing from maritime disaster-haunted communities, sung to their own marching band; and those two things invited by an affable tuba (already with one pint under his belt) into a new jiggery festive atmosphere. Bedrock fortitude remained and Arnold, in his imagination, stopping just short of bringing Stravinsky’s Petrushka Shrovetide Fair to St Merryn. Locally resident himself, he knew the Cornish wouldn’t stand for any infiltration.
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Hide AdA colleague and I discussing this attractive concert success of Arnold produced this information: these Cornish, and his other Irish, Welsh, English and Scottish Dances are gathered together on the feelgood Lyrita CD 201.
Gibbons usually avoids conventional formulae in his concerts, but his own is to exercise his audience’s imagination, often with British music, then reward it with simple wins for all. The Roman slave ballet pas de deux from Khachaturian’s Spartacus – the hero with his wife Phrygia, who knows his upcoming battle will be his last – is the poignant tale hiding inside the Onedin Line TV signature tune’s sea panorama. Gibbons and the WSO had it all under control for the best accumulative emotional effect. The wave-splash climax is when Phyrigia runs diagonally across stage and leaps up onto her husband’s single upheld hand. Strong guy.
Few will have known Coleridge-Taylor’s early, courting days Waltzes of 1898 and the third, heard here, will have alerted many to hunt down the others. There was one fleeting fleck of ‘foreign’ Dvorak/Smetana string sound, but the entire rest was that new compositional voice from Croydon.
Film music recordings are among WSO musicians’ bread and butter, so the Pirates of The Caribbean exerpts were already in their bloodstream. Big, brash, ebullient, dramatic, tongue-in-cheek yet in-yer-face, these were a near-riotously energising parting gesture. The final reward for the afternoon’s concentration by audience and orchestra alike. Was this a giant rock band playing, or a classical orchestra? Well, who cares?
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Hide AdThe occasion’s sonic homecoming was the return of WSO’s first oboist Christopher O’Neal. He’s missed the last two concerts but we heard the special sound be brought back to the fold, especially in his conversation with Kanneh-Mason in the Price second movement, and his solo underlining the Onedin Line’s screen presence.
When might it be his woodwind player’s turn to play a concerto with his WSO fellows? One concert he missed contained the Strauss one for oboe. He’s co-principal of the London Mozart Players. Wolfgang Amadeus wrote one (irresistible) in C major. So, apparently, did Haydn (a cracker). Does Mr O’Neal perform either?
Gibbons is sailing this season on a New Audience Welcoming tack, he and other orchestra directors now see as generating greater interest in orchestral music. The residual pandemic effects now seem minimal, although we appear a sicker nation since, but dramatic digital gaming music and the large John Williams-inspired music of feature cinema, plus that with other online enthusiasms are interpreted to be driving listeners this way.
Gibbons is showing he’s ready for them. This latest WSO programme contained no towering or dominating classics but did not shy from the serious or relevant, while easing newcomers into his fold with other surprise delights.
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Hide AdBoth his WSO’s first-ever free-of-charge taster concert in September, then their customary Viennese New Year one charging normal prices, broke 93% attendances. The three concerts in between recorded 65%, 67%, then 74% – this latest one deprived by the foul weather of its bonus on-the-door turnout. The town’s companion orchestra, the Worthing Philharmonic, is attracting a corresponding upflow. The classical music’s therapy is making people return for more.
Richard Amey
Sunday 9 February (3pm), Worthing Philharmonic (Dominic Grier), Assembly Hall: Sibelius, 3rd Symphony; Britten, Serenade for tenor horn & strings (Magnus Walker tenor, John Peskett horn); Tchaikovsky, 4th Symphony.
Sunday 9 March (2.45), Worthing Symphony (John Gibbons), Assembly Hall: Arensky, Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky; Doreen Carwithen, Piano Concerto (Claire Hammond); Paul Carr, Air for Strings Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings.
Saturday 22 March (7.30), Worthing Choral Society (Aedan Kerney) – St George’s Church, Worthing: ‘Lauridsen and Friends’. Morten Lauridsen, O Magnum Mysterium; Instrumental Solo 1; Ruth Watson Henderson; Make Me A World; Christopher Hussey, The Star; Instrumental Solo 2; Morten Lauridsen, Lux Aeterna. Programme including two instrumental solos performed by Natalie Meierdirk.
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Hide AdSunday 23 March (3), Worthing Philharmonic (Grier), Assembly Hall: Richard Strauss, Suite from Der Rosenkavalier; Graham Fitkin, Recorder Concerto (Daniel Swani, recorders); Rachmaninov, Symphonic Dances.
Saturday 29 March (7.30), The Boundstone Chorus (Aedan Kerney) – St Michael’s Church, South Lancing: ‘A Season to Sing’: Kerney, ‘A Song of the Seasons’; Joanna Forbes L’Estrange, ‘A Season To Sing’, choral re-imagining of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons violin concertos, on their 300th anniversary.
Saturday 5 April (7.30) Worthing Philharmonic Strings with trumpets, timpani, harp, organ (Grier) with Brighton16 Chamber Choir (Matthew Jelf) – St George’s Church, Worthing. Vaughan Williams, Mass in G minor; Howells, Elegy for String Orchestra; Duruflé, Requiem.
Sunday 6 April (2.45), Worthing Symphony (Gibbons), Assembly Hall: Haydn, Symphony No 30 (Alleluia); Malcom Arnold, Guitar Concerto; Vivaldi, Mandolin Concerto (Craig Ogden); Mozart, Symphony No 41 (Jupiter).
Tickets for all WSO and WPO concerts from www.wtm.uk
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Hide AdSunday 18 May (2.45), Worthing Symphony (Gibbons), Assembly Hall: Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture; Beethoven, Piano Concerto No 3 (Yi-Yang Chen); Delius, Fennimore & Gerda Intermezzo; Beethoven, Symphony No 8. www.wtm.uk
Sunday 25 May, International Interview Concert with Yi-Yang Chen (solo piano). Worthing venue, time, programme to be announced, but including Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, some Chopin, also other pieces.
Saturday 7 June (7.30), Worthing Philharmonic (Grier), Assembly Hall: Beethoven, Egmont Overture; Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No 1 (Julian Chan); Schumann, Symphony No 2.
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