Dawn and sunset as Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra light up new Worthing Festival

The cultural dawn of Worthing’s first full arts Festival is an overdue vehicle for the town’s wide artistic personality. Ironically, it has taken a few new local politicians to make it happen - not from a Conservative or a Lib Dem council but from a Labour one in its maiden term of office.

Last year, early after lockdown lift, under her leadership, Tarring councillor Rita Garner, with colleagues Cathy Glynn-Davies, Andy Willems and Dale Overton, found and assembled the town’s arts providers and makers to meet, confer, collaborate and pool skills and draw on fresh forms of assistance and backing. The aim was to engender a more co-ordinated, coherent and substantiated showcase of the town’s artistic offering. By the second meeting, the arts community’s festival potential was too strong for the councillors or the providers to resist.

This dawn has encountered another sun already risen and – on Sunday’s emphatic evidence – now blazing. Its first light came nearly 10 years ago when young conductor Dominic Grier became Worthing Philharmonic’s music director. Imported then from Covent Garden, he has recently moved home, south from London to within a few Mussorgsky picture exhibition promenades of The Assembly Hall itself. The reason? To be in local residence and touch for what is now, no question, the most exciting and highly-elevated phase in the town’s orchestral life.

Worthing, almost outrageously in these beleaguered modern times, has not one but two symphony orchestras, not merely worth the name but driven by London standards. To quote the American army joke, Worthing’s never had it so good. And at a time when orchestral music awareness, post pandemic, is filtering further down the public age range. Younger people looking over the Worthing Festival programme online will have noticed this concert.

Worthing Symphony, full-time professional musicians of London’s world hub of musical excellence, already stand with director John Gibbons on a tier of guaranteed top quality. Worthing Philharmonic, rising to the disciplinary and qualitative leadership of Grier, are on a new historic high level of output and artistic presence.

The Philharmonic are arch-dedicated musicians who, usually for career-choice or domestic reasons, sometimes frustrating ones, are non full-time professional performers. They are all accomplished, many formerly Conservatoire-schooled, some trained in European music capitals. Many are busy and successful instrumental teachers, some are ex-pro orchestral players, some as yet outstanding students. The orchestra is recognised and attracts players from roughly a 20-mile radius.

This concert, already scheduled when Worthing Festival joined the 2023 calendar, put the town’s orchestral stamp on it, and no one present on Sunday will fail to realise WPO are a now a major public musical draw. It proved a Festival triumph, delivering even more than its sure-fire success recipe promised. I heard Wagner’s Prelude & Love-Death in a different light. I saw innovatively Strauss’ the Four Last Songs brought physically alive instead of merely sung. And I was reminded how frightening Tchaikovsky’s Fifth can be, as well as how hugely persuasive.

In the hands of Grier and WPO, the Tristan and Isolde operatic Prelude evoked how unsettling are the internal and external struggles that love, in full torrid voltage, undergoes in trying to breathe and adequately articulate itself. Wrestlings, continuingly unresolved until the Liebestod releases them. But Grier’s reading, less voluptuous, reminded us that if in a concert hall this Lovedeath has been so readily presented as the steamiest bed scene in orchestral music, that presumption can be rather ludicrous, given its actual context in the Wagner opera.

Yes, treated as a physical consummation, the music is more fully and sensuously – humanly – descriptive than anything in the genre, before or since. And who is to deny Wagner was not simultaneously inferring that? But the reality is one of the two lovers is already dead. So here is the other, facing that fear-come-true, and in an act maybe pre-destined, the only way she wants to express anything more to him is to die with him.

What evolved in this more tightly tempoed performance seemed much more like an intensely agonised mounting transfiguration, an apotheosis, a culminating release from earthly life. Ending in a blessed peace both post-orgasmic and post-mortal. The single note held by oboists Clare Thornton-Wood and Iona Walker, like a shaft of paradise light, inviting the final chord of rest, was gratifying and perfect. So simple, original, and visionary a stroke of orchestration, Wagner repeated it instead with a trumpet in his final music drama, to seal Parsifal’s passage to sublime destiny.

WPO publicity did not clarify whether they were to perform this with the added voice of Isolde from soprano Nadine Benjamin. It proved not. Grier said: “I believe the orchestral version on its own stands up.” Correct – as anyone knows who has experienced it, for example, at a funeral for a beloved person joining, in death, their devoted but pre-deceased partner.

Richard Strauss had no death pact with Paulina, his operatic soprano partner and sole wife. Gratefully contented after a long marriage, they chimed with how two compatriot German poets contemplated life’s approaching closure in ‘Spring’, ‘September’, ‘Going to Sleep’ (all by Hesse) and ‘At Sunset’ (by Eichendorff). Again, this concert showed us something different, this time from soprano Nadine Benjamin – not only in interpretation but song projection. This next is especially fascinating.

The late Jessye Norman is a soprano who in the public mind took possession of these deeply nostalgic Four Last Songs. A next-generation soprano may do likewise. Brixton-born Benjamin left school to work in high finance banking, had her own bands in garage and drums ‘n’ bass. She’s not a product of any classical music conservatoire student sausage machine.

At 23, she took vocal training and later began performing relationships with English National Opera, and The Royal and Glyndebourne opera houses. In parallel, she developed her song singing, and also began mentoring artists, and performance and mind coaching, with insight and advice from her broader background, under her own emblematic branding: Everybody Can! In her 2019 BBC Proms debut, she sang all the soprano solos in Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music. And, a big clue to what follows here, on BBC Radio 3 she presents the series Opera, the Art of Emotions.

Benjamin seems a possible post-Norman contender, with not just a voice unstrained when reaching highest, but distinct and personal interpretation and live performance stagecraft. More thoughtfully involved, she disregards the automatic traditional custom, seen with the WSO with this same work a few years back, that song artists simply stand and sing. But foreign words with musical notes alone, in song, aren’t enough to excite engage new British audience. Instead, Benjamin introduces some telling humanising enactment and projection.

“I see the four songs like a sequence of love stages,” she told me. “ ’Spring’ is life first emerging from darkness, as though through the birth canal. All life lies ahead.” She sang this with soaring elation, wonder, and purety of joy.

“ ’September’ is adolescence.” She has in mind, I think, not the customary autumnal colouring or feeling but a reactive overview of that quest for self-knowledge through the mysteries of youth. She therefore sang, not with melancholy for the dying summer, but with far less inhibited fervour and adventure, and leaping and floating.

“ ’Going to Sleep’ is middle age.” The taking stock, a sense of life lived, bringing knowledge, wisdom and a fulfilment. She sang with a knowingness, but with a voice craving to fly.

“ ’At Sunset’ is transcendence”. She sang with a radiant readiness and acceptance of what, for all of us, will be.

She took the stage in two full-length layers. A grey dress and an open purple organza robe dropping open from both shoulders. At the end of ‘September’, garden vegetation fading from its best, “Summer slowly closes its eyes from weariness”, the closing French horn solo ushers in a permanent change of dimension and mood.

Personifying the soul’s liberation during slumber, ‘Going to Sleep’ features one of the world’s great orchestral violin solos. Benjamin makes it speak back to the singer. During its course, singers solemnly and silently self-possessed, face the audience, leaving the violin is solitary.

Not Benjamin. In sublime reciprocation, physically she turns to face her violinist as he plays, to listen, concur, commune and empathise with his message of release. At its conclusion, still facing him, now singing back, she begins her vocal entry and only slowly resumes her outlook over the audience. WPO leader Preston Yeo, forewarned by Benjamin, responded immaculately to her focus of attention, and with it,ours.

Finally, in ‘At Sunset’, sky darkening, after the two larks [flutes] “rise into the scented air”, the ageing couple know “soon it will be time to sleep” and hope not to lose their way in the “vast and silent peace so deep in the sunset glow”. Benjamin now folds her arms around herself, her left hand on her right upper chest, her right hand under her left elbow, her robe closing to obscure her dress. And she sings, “How weary we are from wandering. Might this perhaps, be death?”

The larks return, but only to fade into the distance with the orchestra, during which Benjamin emits a long, almost ecstatic smile, her arms drop and leave her side, her robe falls open again. Such artistry was not lost on the orchestra. WPO secretary and second violins member, Michelle Willis: “Some of us were moved to tears when she turned to watch Preston play.”

Likewise, I am certain, were many of the audience, some rising to their feet in massive response for Benjamin, having seen and heard something so touchingly imaginative from a classical solo singer in a concert hall. Preston was invited into the curtain call with Benjamin and Grier. First horn John Peskett, not merely for that ‘September’ solo but plenty else, ought to have been, also.

Benjamin is soft-spoken. “The orchestra were warm and friendly, and this concert became particularly a vibrational connection with themselves and with me. I felt that we weren’t separate. The performance became a very spiritual experience.” In rehearsal, when the Four Last Songs entered their final moments of destiny, the town hall clock struck twelve. “Yes, we heard it. At such moments, things like that create something unique for everyone.”

John Peskett got his delayed reward after the Tchaikovsky, as should any unerring horn player for his mood-setting solo in the extended second movement, which exceeds the first in gravitas and reach. It’s a symphony these 73 players adore, and it showed in their commitment to its emotional beauties and outbursts. Grier’s release of their energy and fervour was all the more impactful for the control he had to exert over it, to keep power in reserve.

The first big climax, inexorably built, packed a gigantic punch in what at times was as searing and as stormy an account of this Symphony as one could wish for. The Fate subject second-movement appearance came as a full-blown nightmare. Development sections were notable for their detail. The winds called as the great tit and danced the waltz. The string section strength in numbers ensured the Tchaikovsky sound and sweep. With them, the clarinets and bassoons gave us the dark melancholia. The brass brought the festivity parade marching as well as the gargoyle-grotesque and vehemence of the composer’s torment.

By the end I was jotting down: “Who needs the ropey old 1812 Overture when you could set fireworks and cannon fire to this blistering last movement?” Orchestra and conductor were greeted by audience reaction one musician described as from Cloud Nine. WPO viola player Lynda Bartram commented: “It was just momentous and thrilling to be part of the whole occasion, brilliantly led by Dominic.”

Benjamin and Grier have known each other for 13 years since their only previous working collaboration, in Porgy & Bess at Opera Lyon in France. She said: “Dominic has got a very natural way of talking to his musicians. You then know who he is, and you think, ‘I want to follow him, I want to listen to him, to make my sound match his wand, and to make magic with him’.”

Richard Amey