Review: Worthing Symphony Orchestra ‘Autumn Colours’ concert

Worthing Symphony Orchestra ‘Autumn Colours’ concert at The Assembly Hall, leader Julian Leaper, conductor John Gibbons, cor anglais soloist* Olivier Fraser.

Edvard Grieg, Holberg Suite; Ralph Vaughan Williams, Six Studies in English Folksong* (Lovely on the Water, Spurn Point, Van Dieman’s Land, She Borrowed some of Her Mother’s Gold, The Lady and the Dragon, As I Walked over London Bridge); Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis; Wllliam Alwyn, Autumn Colours*; Richard Strauss, Metamorphosen for 23 Strings.

If you weren’t there – especially if you normally are – this was among the best WSO concerts you ever missed. And if Worthing Symphony Orchestra concerts aren’t on your radar, they would be if you were hunting for the fullest cultural/arts experiences to be had in Worthing. Local businesses are noting and responding. If you are repeatedly and invariably touched by Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia, as are most awestruck British classical radio listeners, then at this concert you were in a similar zone to the orchestra themselves. “We love it. It’s a great play,” lead cellist Miriam Lowbury assured me during the Interval – having just sent its final chord, its final word, its final wisdom, fading into the English distance. At which the audience, a very high percentage of whom would know the piece, sat in temporary silence.

And this, too. If for you the unforgettable sound of a singing cor anglais is a rare thrill and heart-stopper, and the now cooler mornings and colouring leaves spark sadness for your lost summer, then the sustained and concentrated atmosphere of Alwyn’s Autumn Legend will surely have welled up in you that sentiment. Soloist Olivia Fraser’s leading of music that’s known to scarcely any of us, including the orchestra, revealed the unparalleled 24-carat capability of this instrument to soak you in a mood and keep you there. In this case, by Alwyn, for 11 minutes. That’s almost 2 minutes longer than Sibelius (The Swan of Tuonela), much longer than its total role in Dvorak’s brown bread advert (New World Symphony), and even longer than the scene-setting pastoral calls in Berlioz (Symphonie Fantastique) and Rossini (William Tell Overture).

English composer Alwyn’s selection of this instrument for this purpose was the practised masterstroke of a career film-score writer. The cor anglais has the colouring and magnetism to be not the setter of the scene but the whole mood personified. And why all 11 minutes? I’d say A) because Alwyn was unfettered by any film director’s insistence, and B) because, shorn of summer, most of us need to dwell in autumn to stave off winter as long as possible.

Vaughan Williams and Alwyn had autumn birthdays. Alwyn had also been set an example by Vaughan Williams’ Folk Song Studies. And cor anglais was picked deliberately by Alwyn expert, John Gibbons, from VW’s seven alternative arrangements of this originally cello-and-piano piece, These being for strings with violin, viola, clarinet, bassoon, alto saxophone or tuba. Savouring the sheer sound of the English horn (the cor anglais’alias) was WSO’s purpose and how glad were its audience for a precious experience unlikely to be repeated.

Haydn got there before the others and I hope we hear how he did, in a future WSO horns offering which uniquely and ineffably combines the French with the English. Virtually only Vaughan Williams scholars and purist folksongsters are aware of his Six Studies in English Folksong. It’s now a victim in obscurity surely owing to its forensically academic title which will have sat well in Oxford University Press’ catalogue. Gibbons and Fraser now made them public for modern times.

Gibbons says in the concert programme brochure notes, these are less “transcriptions” than “elaborations”. The composer cherry-pi cked five slow melodies and finally one fast, then slenderly presented all inside nine minutes with Fraser’s spellbinding renditions coming in the loving qualities Vaughan Williams entreated. The effect was treasurably beautiful, yet so elusive. The tunes go from the heart to the heart. But ‘Studies’ was the wrong word. Spotlights, perhaps?

Many a classical listener has had Grieg’s hummalong Holberg Suite on the radio while doing something else. The different experience of actually being there in the same room when an orchestra plays something live is what brings audience to hear the WSO in their Assembly Hall. Something that, encountered elsewhere, flits by during normal life suddenly grabs you in all-action high definition and technicolour. And no phone interrupts . . .

WSO’s Holberg Praeludium was busy and fresh; Sarabande, full-toned and bodied; Gavotte, breezy with a trio like a country-fayre dance; the religious Adagio, elegiac with cellos ministerial; its final Riguadon playfully framing a mournful core – today like summer’s final merriment in gathering mist!

The Holberg was a happy, familiar warm-up for a string orchestra, before they played two gorgeous rarities, one glory of the Tudor and 20th Century worlds visionarily blended (the Tallis), then the goal towards which the whole afternoon worked and prepared: the Strauss Metamorphosen.

And here is the crux of Sunday: some audience heavily dependent on woodwind eloquence, brass and percussion excitement, would have hesitated to buy tickets. This was a mainly all-strings concert, but the event the listeners’ health needed! The Italian baroquians, Vivaldi, Corelli and successors, showed that strings can do almost anything you want and need. None of Sunday’s audience went away hungry. None failed to have their senses exercised and souls uplifted.

After the final applause, I spoke to a man for whom Strauss’s Metamorphosen had done nothing, sitting next to a woman who had ‘got it’. But he went home with a programme brochure. Inside it, Gibbons’ blow-by-blow account of this piece the man did not know. He could read it, then search online to hear it revealed to him in more flesh, in his own deed of discovery.

From his conductor’s rostrum, between the pieces, Gibbons helps his audience with the music by talking to them about it with humour and extra insight. Conductors generally still don’t do this.

Gibbons the Teacher has earned his audience’s trust if the music is new to them. Their ticket includes this learning and these, his gifts to them, in this fundamental WSO concert process. His words from the podium, plus the programme brochure’s contents he has written inside it, plus Paul Villeneuve’s ‘If you enjoyed that piece of music, then try this next’ column, plus perhaps an interview with the soloist inside it – plus the orchestra’s London-pedigree skill icing the cake – add up to an unmatchable cultural product for Worthing arts punters.

Even the orchestra themselves – some members young, others with Methuselah-long experience – also gain in expertise. Here are versatile London classical musicians, among world leaders in their field, unbeatable sight-readers, forever on top of their game in WSO uniform because, as Gibbons assured Sunday’s followers, they like the challenges he sets them.

They got another in Strauss’ rarely performed late masterpiece, Metamorphosen, because it is for strings only, in 23 specific parts, like the 40-part Tallis Motet, Spem in Alium. An orchestra is ultimately only as good as its strings. Wind and brass can shine tellingly in brilliant shafts of light, even whole sunny intervals. But the strings, as well as starring in their own moments, must bear the overall load throughout, with unbroken excellence.

An experienced conductor does not dare risk a majority all-strings concert without full belief in his players. And Strauss requires a top-notch 23 of them, all capable of working independently a great deal during Metamorphosen’s 25 minutes of concentration. That’s concerto or symphony length.

The WSO passed the test. To attempt this piece is uncommon enough among London or major-city orchestras. To pull it off like this in the provinces amounts to a new benchmark statement about WSO to its regional rivals.

Remarkable and indicative was that orchestral leader Julian Leaper told me afterwards he knew of only two of the 23 who had played it before – neither of them him. What a testimony this was. This is not an autumn piece but sustained and permanent personal Straussian grieving for iconic German arts destroyed by horrific allied bombing in the controversial anti-civilian raids, late in WW2, on Dresden and Strauss’ home city, Munich.

The bricks and mortar soul of German opera, ballet and symphony, the Teutonic triumphs of Strauss and his predecessors in the two cities, and the decimation of their arts-loving populations.

Metamorphosen seems surely a second misnomer on this programme until one sees that Strauss, in tragic reverse, was observing a dematerialisation of a humane society. It’s music of agonised memories and images through shattered lenses and distorted prisms. Indeed, a companion of mine whose first language is German told me, “I could hear Schumann and Brahms also in there.”

A short quote from Beethoven’s C minor ‘Eroica’ Funeral March was non-cruclal if you missed it, amid the overall final desolation, drifting towards its final, deeply scarred chord of C minor, inconsolable with its rootless bass.

As in the Tallis Fantasia, Gibbons and the WSO let the music repeatedly grip you, then release you free into an ether of imagination and vision. A correspondent of mine said afterwards, “The extraordinary intensity and subtlety of both pieces were almost shocking.”

If ever The Assembly Hall is decommissioned, demolished or bombed, fans there on Sunday, as on countless other days listening to WSO, will agonise equivalently.

I cannot end without, below, saluting the WSO strings. Gibbons was the only one bowing to the applause but they should have been doing so with him, as one unit, in unison, mission accomplished, together with him. Lamentably, it seems to be symphony orchestra players’ almost unwavering fate to have to stand like self-effacing servants as their true efforts are being loudly recognised and saluted.

WSO on Sunday – Violins: Julian Leaper*, Tim Warburton, Liz Partridge, Sue Briscoe, Nicola Bates, Iva Fleischhansova, Leo Payne; Mark Butler*, Marina Solarek, Rachel Bunn, Jenny Thurston, Nicola Goodwin, Adrian Charlesworth, Orpheus Leander.

Violas: Timothy Welch*, Justin Ward, Stephen Giles, Lis Peskett, Heather Bourne. Cellos: Miriam Lowbury*, Ben Davies^, Anita Strevens, Vonny Parsons, Jade Woodhouse. Basses: Richard Watson, Adam Precious^, Eddie Hurcombe.

*Section leaders’ Quartet in Tallis Fantasia. ^had played the Strauss before, thought Leaper

Richard Amey

Music coming next:

October 9, Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra & Choir with The Merry Opera Company, (Assembly Hall, 6pm): Gilbert & Sullivan, The Mikado. Conductor, Dominic Grier, who brings quality G&S performance back to Worthing

November 13, WSO ‘Salute The Brave’ concert (Assembly Hall, 2.45pm), mezzo Eirlys Myfanwy Davies* (London Welsh Singer of the Year 2017); conductor, Gibbons.

More essential Vaughan Williams – his post-war Pastoral Symphony*, borne of his own front-line field hospital ambulance driving traumas in WW1 and probably a vision of a consequentially depopulated English countryside. Memorable final movement wordlessly voicing perhaps the collective wilderness of bereaved mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives, lovers – or maybe sounding as their overall guardian angel?.

Elgar, Sea Pictures*, poems set, including one by his wife Caroline

Eric Coates, The Dambusters March

Sheldon Bair (world premiere), The Homefront 1944* (quoting three English hymns in setting a mother’s wartime letter to her sister whose son had gone missing in action, later recorded lost at sea in a bomber);

William Alwyn, Symphony No 5, a tight work of beauty, inspired by 17th Century polymath Norwich figurehead in physics, philosophy, botany and archaeology – Sir Thomas Browne.

A future Remembrance Concert might be a profound moment to reprise Metamorphosen . . .