Worthing concert - a deserved salute for a bold conductor

‘Salute The Brave’ concert for Remembrance Day. Worthing Symphony Orchestra at Assembly Hall, Sunday 13 November (2.45); leader Julian Leaper, conductor John Gibbons, mezzo soprano* Harriet Williams. William Alwyn, Symphony No 5 (Hydriotaphia). Edward Elgar, Sea Pictures*: Sea Slumber (Roden Noel), In Haven (Lady Alice Elgar), Sabbath Morning at Sea (Elizabeth Barrett Browning), Where Corals Lie (Dr Richard Garnett), The Swimmer (Adam Lindsay Gordon). Eric Coates, Dambusters’ March. Sheldon Bair, Homefront 1944*(world premier). Ralph Vaughan Williams, A Pastoral Symphony*

John Gibbons himself deserves salute as a bold conductor in Britain on this day made sombre still by the gravest conflict our world has witnessed since 1945. Why? He was not frightened of giving his public of something specifically important to hear, assimilate and digest on this day. Before completing this concert drawing on composers all of a native English tongue, he told his audience that, of Vaughan Williams’ nine Symphonies, this third one, A Pastoral Symphony, was being the least performed in this, the composer’s 150th anniversary year.

A Pastoral Symphony is surely made for a British audience particularly on this day of national tribute, when yet a third world war may be in the making. As a witness testament to all-out conflict, this Symphony is an uncannily absorbing, undulating and sublimely seamless musical vision, needing no pictures, film or voiceover – only its hearers’ awareness of life’s living, and of acute war suffering dirtying a beautiful planet. The overriding reason for such conductor’s courage was Gibbons’ certainty that this WSO audience he has cultivated over more than 20 years trusts his judgment. Here’s another reason for salute.

While his nearest Sussex counterparts conspicuously experiment on their audience with eye-catching music from various under-tapped genres, turning a new page, the ever fertile own furrow Gibbons ploughs widens as it matures. He programmes against the common grain but his last two concerts have introduced an immersive concert experience.

Instead of various pieces culminating in a conventionally loud, joyous, open-hearted pay-off climax, his final goal is a highly enriching but unfamiliar piece of music he knows his audience is now ready to take on.

Last month, four pieces, all for strings only, two with an added cor anglais, all easy-going or atmospheric, prepared the ear and mind for the edgier, closing Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss. This month, the path to A Pastoral Symphony passed through more direct and brightly-scored music. But again, like the Strauss, the destination piece was more contemplative and deeper in feeling, as the composer shared difficult personal rather second-hand experience.

And the cor anglais, the ever-haunting wind instrument most ingrained within A Pastoral Symphony’s sound texture opposite the more luminous flutes, subliminally linked the two concerts. October’s orchestral colour palette duly prepared everyone for November’s equally intense climax.

So, how did Gibbons assemble Sunday’s absorbing enjoyment and involvement? First, a Symphony only a handful of people will have heard before: Alwyn’s 15-minute Fifth entertained, excited, dazzled, illuminated and impressed its new ears in a sequence of four distinct scenes. Then Elgar’s sea-themed song cycle masterpiece many knew, but no means everybody: Gibbons the easy Elgarian and WSO ensured the music sank deep into Worthing seasiders’ hearts. Its magnificent orchestration and sensual motion tweaked up the thrill factor, with a featured mezzo soprano’s presence surrounded by orchestral sound and coaxing the audience to the edge of their seats.

After the interval, a hugely famous film theme, Elgar-influenced, glorifying new allied war weaponry and daring deed of delivery. Coates’s Dambusters bomber squadron lifted the concert airborne, leaving The Sleepy Lagoon far below on its desert island. Hanging above the orchestra were four forces flags and a silhouetted solders-and-poppy banner, the Assembly Hall just 50 yards from Worthing’s war memorial. WSO were exuberant, loud and proud. The audience cheered. Next, something lasting nine concentrated minutes was heard in the world for the first time: American composer Sheldon Bair had a deeply poignant family wartime letter to convey in his The Homefront 1944. Tragedy and loss impending, the singer – a mother awaiting news of a missing airman son and telling her sister in a letter – again drew intent listening. Bair’s musical voice connected comfortably and a deliberately exposed single American expletive was the only shock in a work of tense beauty, preparatory to what came next.

Then finally, it was A Pastoral Symphony, begun mid-war in 1916. Music direct from the WWI front by a military ambulance-man – RVW himself at 42. His duty: to collect up literally the battlefield pieces, then later his own artillery action as a lieutenant. The composer’s personal, elusive, but deep unloading of his own retrospection, introspection and understatement of his hands-on experience of human devastation strewn across tormented French and Greek landscapes, to which the Symphony’s concept bestows universality.

Music somehow rhapsodic and rapturous of life and of fields, woods and byways, yet bleakened by dismay and resignation about far-reaching loss and, probably, human destiny. A Pastoral Symphony of a singular sort. In it we visualise and treasure our own Sussex landscapes, some of which the Surrey-based RVW walked. The Symphony, hypnotic in feel and (again) motion, sustained in flow, seems also to suggest wartime human destruction being enveloped, slowly buried, absorbed and overgrown by the dispassionate organic environment we cherish – or not. Whereas Elgar’s Cello Concerto, despite its own pastoral feel in several places, speaks, reminds and is driven by war’s devastation on domestic society and friendships far beyond conflict’s end.

WSO performed A Pastoral wonderfully and in caring faith of its unique beauty. Principals Dave Lee (horn), Monica McCarron (flute) and Tim Hawes (trumpet) brought in smoothly their key moments. On Gibbons’ recommendation, to display the instrument, Hawes stood while playing his special longer and valveless Baroque trumpet, on which he told me he performs stuff like Beethoven’s Eroica with period orchestras.

The distant wordless soprano, singing offstage, bookending the last movement is the work’s clinching element. In this performance I felt needed to be less operatic, more withdrawn and enigmatic in expression. It surely symbolises several things. She could be several different affected personages – even a ruling deity. Find, listen, and imagine the possibilities yourself. The WSO, through Gibbons, are well Alwyn-acquinted. They bristled, crackled, barked and growled in their growing affinity with this fluent music’s constant benefit from its veteran film-music composer’s expertise. The 5th Symphony’s title Hydriotaphia is that of Norwich native Thomas Browne’s 1658 elegy on death, in urn burial, eliciting an Alwyn vision of many flames. The WSO made these flicker, surge and rise prolifically in the music. There came big brass gloom; then different bells, first tolling to the mourning, later culminating in majestic jubilation.

The WSO were 57 redoubtables, including triple flutes, oboes and clarinets. Mezzo Harriet Williams replaced the indisposed Eirlys Myfanwy Davies for a busy WSO debut in three items. Elgar’s Sea Pictures never fails to stir. Williams, projecting responsive tone, expression and presence from her crowded stage, immediately rewarded the hearer with her sleepy feel in Sea Slumber, and her In Haven was quietly-spoken and gentle in delivery, just as was the poet, Elgar’s ardently loyal wife. And Williams was strongly blended inside the orchestral surges and swells of Sabbath Morning and The Swimmer. No wonder the singer who gave its premier dressed as a mermaid.

In the Bain premiere, Williams became its first interpreter. Bain meets Gibbons at Northampton’s annual Malcolm Arnold Festival and hails from Maryland’s Harford County with a decorated career in music education. But he conducts the Susquehanna Symphony Orchestra he founded and, alongside those commitments, composes. In The Homefront 1944 (begun in 2017), a missing-in-action son Gene, whose last take-off left behind an aerodrome in Norwich (the city of Sea Pictures’ 1899 premiere), was Bain’s own uncle. And so, now, the family’s letter is also preserved musically, in often transparent orchestration notable for the timpani’s quietly pervading role, sometimes in heartbeat sync, and with empathetic glockenspiel, string quartet and solo trumpet colour inside the work’s unostentatious drama. My one unfulfilled wish was for the letter text to be in the concert brochure, which valuably included the poems Elgar had set. We’d been told the subject but depended on the singer for the words written. Let this be a prerequisite in the Bain work’s future performances. But so much enlightenment to take away from this rich concert’s content – and sound. In this faithful acoustic, the WSO’s Elgarian sea climaxes with gong and bass drum evoking near-fathomless depth, plus the bells in the Alwyn and Bain, will for many strike memorably awesome.

Richard Amey

Next WSO (same venue and conductor):

Traditional New Year Concert, Sunday 8 January (2.45) including waltzes, marches, polkas and an overture from Johann Strauss II, Waldteufel and von Suppe.

I Got Rhythm concert, Friday 27 January (7.30): Borodin’s Polotsvian Dances (at last at WSO!), Arnold’s Symphony No 4, Gershwin’s An American in Paris, I Got Rhythm, Rhapsody in Blue (Maria Marchant piano).