REVIEW: Worthing Symphony Orchestra and Kosmos Ensemble join forces on stage

Hubert Parry, Lady Radnor’s Suite; William Walton, Touch her soft Lips and Part (Henry V); Ihor Shamo, Accordion Concerto (soloist Miloš Milivojevic ); Grace Williams, Sea Sketches; Errolyn Wallen, Triple Concerto (soloists Kosmos Ensemble – Harriet MacKenzie violin, Meg Hamilton viola, Miloš Milivojevic accordion); Astor Piazzolla arranged Harriet MacKenzie, Libertango (soloists Kosmos Ensemble).

Times were in western Europe when news of a serious Accordion Concerto being performed would have created bemused assumption that it would inevitably still sound like a street jaunt through Paris. A skilful busker joining forces with a backstreet band of sacked Moulin Rouge musicians. But world music’s emergence as a consumer’s genre has changed that.

There is new local cultural awareness, slow to be adopted by classical music, that there is actually a folkish musical world worth taking notice of, eastwards of Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Scandinavia, and globally beyond Europe’s surrounding seas.

Ukrainian Ihor Shamo’s Accordion Concerto yanked us back by the shoulders, demanding we listen to the squeezebox as a contributing and comfortable orchestral partner, sharing in deep expression alongside virtuosic pulse-raising and innately-generating nostalgic feeling that was unclichéd.

Times were in western Europe, too, when women composing music could expect the impact of their work to reach no further than their kitchen and the barbed wire fences put up outside by men in domestic control, let alone in musical judgment power. That is, unless they were exceptionally well-placed as star concert-giving instrumentalists (eg. Clara Schumann) or being close to musical academia (eg. Lili Boulanger), or of unorthodox sexuality and belligerently capable of looking after themselves (eg. Dame Ethel Smyth). Even despite she being Felix’s sister, Fanny Mendelssohn’s compositions languished, disused in obscurity until recently. World-impacting MeToo has changed that.

Sea Sketches and Triple Concerto, by Grace Williams and Errolyn Wallen, came onto Worthing Symphony Orchestra’s music stands (belonging to Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra, the WSO acknowledge) thanks to International Women’s Day being a few days later on March 8. Not that director John Gibbons’ previous choice of ‘female’ music has made WSO a desert for women or placed WSO among classical organisations now guiltily programming it after being relieved to be able to ignore it down the post-war decades.

Beware of concert organisations‘ publicity spinning the undoubted past institutionalised and societal shunning or cold-shouldering of women’s music as ‘overlooking’ or ‘neglect’.

Kicking everything off on Sunday was a man’s composition for the use of the first British female pioneer of women’s public orchestral performance and conducting (Lady Radnor). It was interesting to hear, coming from the composer of the ubiquitous anthem Jerusalem, who died in Rustington. But beyond being a historical exercise with a pleasant result, it scarcely seemed to make any de-sexification move more than showing that a highly-trained Victorian Englishman could happily put together a simple 13-minute take on the standard Baroque Suite of Prelude, Allemande, Sarabande, Bourée, Slow Minuet and Gigue, the purpose being for an amateur women’s orchestra to be able to play it.

Gibbons is a Walton fan and, jumping forward 50 years, he slipped in two minutes of beauty, quietness and polite intimacy in the hands of sedate strings. Touch Her Soft Lips And Part is Pistol’s goodbye to Mistress Quickly in Shakespeare’s Henry V, as set by Walton as an Agincourt Battle interlude during the now famous movie.

The WSO programme brochure gave us a page of John Gander’s informative background research but in this context, was this music merely making worshipful celebration of women’s comforting interaction with battle-worn men? Whatever argument might have been raised, these two pieces were a leisurely curtain-raiser to the concert’s core which, after showcasing the accordion on the modern cosmopolitan classical stage in another ‘interloping’ male composition, was finally to arrive at two women composers’ adventurous work.

The engagement of Kosmos Ensemble grabbed Gibbons the chance to present Ihor Shamo’s window on the accordion during an afternoon welcoming world music style to WSO repertoire, rather than throwing it in among mainstream classical items and appearing anomalous. Shamo wrote for big screen, radio drama and live theatre as well as for concert hall, and his proven skill in generating atmosphere is yet enhanced by the accordion. That atmospheric strength is this Concerto’s key.

Beneath the yearning desolation of the opening Preludia lay what could easily today be seen as an embodiment of Ukrainian battlefield loss. Like a lonely, baroquish threnody, it set a scene that drew in the eye and ear to an unaccustomed solo instrument, played not by a Ukrainian artiste but one from the Balkans. Yet Shamo was writing this not long before his 1982 death, not having known his country free of Soviet rule.

The following fugue movement was troubled. Strings, accordion, then strings again, had long things to say alone, and possibly in controlled opposition to one another – the mood semi-elegiac, gentle. But there emerged, significantly, a solitary, bitter and stabbing agony, spitting from the accordion in the closing bars, against soothing strings strangely unheeding. Unexplained drama, indeed.

Filmic, serenade-like, was the flowing third-movement Aria, a now consensual outpouring of tender joy by soloist and orchestra. The final, festive Toccata, of almost perpetual vigorous forward motion, added a craggy eight-note figure and its sudden conclusion added a parting hint of further drama.

Very few of we Britons know enough about the accordion left-hand buttons to salute adequately soloist Miloš Milivojevic’s range of skill, but we were shown the instrument’s dynamic and expressive capabilities, our respect leapt higher for that, and the audience reception for Milivojevic was unhesitatingly generous.

I was fortunate and grateful to hear Grace Williams’ Violin Concerto at last year’s BBC Proms, so was ready, at WSO, for the prowess of her Sea Sketches. They emanated from a Royal College pupil of visionary Ralph Vaughan Williams (no relation) and the orchestrationally skilled Gordon Jacob. Welshwoman Williams also absorbed the company and aid of Benjamin Britten, particularly in the area of his film score career. All accumulated inside her to provide the pictorial high-flight of this concert.

The opening Sea Sketch, called High Wind, was a visually effective and convincingly evocative opening. Sailing Along was a disarming notion of calm water in swaying depiction. Sea fog and mist inspires Channel Sirens as it would a composer not employing wind instruments but thriving in their absence, including turning profitably to the solo viola. Williams succeeds. After the energetic Breakers, Calm Sea in Summer was the kind of conclusion Worthing people recognise – lazy, languorous, more lengthy, and the violins at last dissolving the dream in an imaginative closing touch.

The already highly decorated composer, Belize-born Errolyn Wallen MBE, brought Kosmos Ensemble in to cut this concert’s strings loose in her Triple Concerto, written for them, then to unwind in their own memorised arrangement of the popular, easily assimilated Libertango by Piazzolla.

The Triple Concerto came in three movements – Strong, Solemn and Humorous. It gave rein to the dancing and singing intrinsic to violin, viola and accordion. Together the Kosmos trio are liberating themselves from classical rhythmic convention and formal stricture, although classical sounds and instrumental effects combine with the inevitable instrumental folk feel, and the expansion of expressive freedom in improvisation sections for the soloists.

Neither Triple Concerto nor Libertango are music to dissect, or perhaps even for the listener to interpret. Instead, they are to unwind to, and enjoy in their directness, variety and the unpredictability, in the slightly different way each performance with its own spontaneity will turn out.

As Libertango went into a hypnotic, elongated finish on a repeated chord sequence, Kosmos, still playing their instruments, left the stage and began a saunter up the central aisle of the auditorium. Before they’d got much further the music ran out on them, leaving the rest of the waiting audience in the air. But after such tantalisation, should anyone resultantly hanker after a bit more tango, see below the International Interview Concert in Worthing, featuring another by Piazzolla – possibly with a more complete ‘walkabout’. There could also be something else Ukrainian.

Kosmos went back up on stage to take their applause and receive the standard gift flowers-in-a basket (for a woman soloist), and bottle of wine (for a male) from Worthing Symphony Society to take home. But was a trick missed here? In recognition of International Women’s Day, might not the gifts’ gender have been liberally reversed, so the women could more emphatically celebrate their triumph?

Plenty in the regular WSO audience enjoyed experiencing the ‘soloists with a difference’. One commented to me: “Enthralling performances. Wonderful virtuoso soloists. Inter-communication, sensitivity and verve. Totally compelling.”

Richard Amey

For anyone trying to identify the previous guest soloists at WSO concerts lined up on individual pop-up banners behind the three double basses (Eddie Hurcombe, Adam Precious and Richard Watson) at the top of the stage, they were: Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cello), Sheku again, Jess Gillam (saxophone), Jennifer Pike (violin), Craig Ogden (guitar), Nicola Benedetti (violin) and Johan Dalene (violin).

Next Concerts

Sunday 17 March, International interview Concert – 3pm, at @artsspaces@sionschool, Senior Building, Gratwicke Road – Kamila Bydlowska violin & Olga Paliy piano.

Full performance plus conversation, with Guest Interviewer and audience Ask A Question.

Brahms, Scherzo from FAE Sonata; Saint-Saens, Sonata No 1 for Violin & Piano; Piazzolla, Argentine Tango ‘I Return to the South’ from the film Sur; Ennio Morricone, Love Theme from the film Cinema Paradiso; Gershwin/Frolov, Concert Fantasy on Themes and Songs from Porgy & Bess, drawing on My Man’s Gone Now, I Got Plenty of Nuttin’, Summertime, Bess You Is My Woman Now, It Ain’t Necessarily So, and I Ain’t Got No Shame.

Also, a secret surprise extra item.

Book at seetickets.com here or buy at the door

Saturday 23 March, ‘WPO at 70’ Celebration Concert: Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra, Worthing Choral Society, The Boundstone Chorus – 7.30pm, Assembly Hall; leader Preston Yeo, conductor Dominic Grier, piano Alissa Firsova.

Weber, Overture to Der Freischutz; Beethoven, Piano Concerto No 5 ‘Emperor’; Alissa Firsova, To Spring; Walton, Belshazzar’s Feast.

Saturday 20 April, Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra with The Merry Opera Company – 7.30pm Assembly Hall; stage director John Ramster, conductor Dominic Grier. Mozart, The Magic Flute (fully staged opera performance).

Sunday 21 April, Worthing Symphony Orchestra ‘Dave Lee Quartet’ Concert – 2.45pm Assembly Hall; conductor John Gibbons. Mozart, Overture to The Magic Flute; Peter Warlock, Capriol Suite; Robert Schumann, Konzertstücke for Four Horns and Orchestra (Dave Lee Quartet); Roussel, Sinfonietta Op52; Beethoven, Symphony No 5.

Tickets for all three above from wtm.uk