Southern Pro Musica develop their Chichester presence

Under artistic and musical director Jonathan Willcocks, their programme features Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, Rodrigo Concierto d'Aranjuez with guitarist Amanda Cook as soloist and Beethoven's Symphony No 8. Tickets are available through https://www.southernpromusica.org/

“Southern Pro Musica have been working for 35 years, giving concerts across the south of England,” Jonathan says, “It has become established as the leading freelance professional orchestra across the south. Usually our concerts are in partnership with choirs or at Chichester Festival Theatre where we do children's concerts but it struck us that Chichester does not have regular professional orchestral concerts so two years ago we decided to take the plunge and do an orchestral concert at St Paul’s which has got a lovely acoustic. It went very well and so we did another one last year and now this is the third one in our series at St Paul’s.

“It is a good venue. It has got very good sightlines. It has the restriction that it is not huge. You couldn't really do a huge choral concert in there but for Southern Pro Musica, it works really well. It's a really good acoustic, really good for orchestral music, and we've had a very good following for the first couple of years. And we hope to have a very strong audience for the very attractive programme that we are offering which we are calling Great Classics.

“We have got two of the finest symphonies of the classical period, the Mendelssohn and the Beethoven. Beethoven Symphony No 8 is right in the middle of when he was writing his great mature music. Plus we've also got one of the most attractive concertos of the 20th century, and it is wonderful to have Amanda Cook performing it. She has established for herself a truly international reputation. The week before she is performing with us, she's doing three recitals in different states in the USA.

“We did this with her back in 2017, and she was terrific then. She is such an expressive artist. She has got wonderful technique as a player but the thing that she has that is so vital with music is the ability to communicate with an audience. She has a very natural poise and ease, and this work gives her a wonderful opportunity with its Spanish guitar tradition and the beautiful melodic duet that the piece has in its central movement with the cor anglais.”

As always, for Jonathan, a huge part of the enjoyment is in the programming: “I get really excited when I sit down to programme a concert. There is the wealth of material, and over the years you try to explore as widely as possible works that will work well in a concert. And the reason why Mozart and Beethoven are held in the esteem in which they are held, as compared to say Salieri who was a contemporary of Mozart's or the other prominent musicians who were around at the same time as Beethoven, is that they have survived the test of time and the distillation of history.”

Jonathan very much hopes to continue the Chichester orchestral concerts: “We hope that there is a real place for a professional orchestra such as Southern Pro Musica to perform in Chichester. It's such an artistically vibrant city with so many wonderful things that you wonder why it doesn’t have its own professional orchestra, as many cities do. I have got nothing but praise for the amateur orchestras. They do wonderful work and the opportunities they give for amateur musicians to play are absolutely splendid but a professional orchestra brings another dimension to performance.”