Worthing Symphony Orchestra review: intimacy and beauty draw audience together in a close-shared reverie

Towards The Light Concert, Worthing Symphony Orchestra at The Assembly Hall; Ian Fountain, piano; Julian Leaper, leader; John Gibbons, conductor, artistic director.

Mozart, Divertimento No 11 in D K251; Beethoven, Piano Concerto No 2 in Bb; Mozart, finale from Divertimento ‘The Musical Joke’ K522; Schubert, Symphony No 5 in Bb.

Sitting down in a large room to play a piece on the piano to, say, 30 silent listeners means you decide how different those people will feel when you finish. You have the power. What will you play? Ian Fountain’s decision transformed the surroundings as well as the mood. Not in the five minutes his choice lasted, but from the first notes that broke that silence of anticipation after it was realised he’d decided to play an encore.

The Assembly Hall with around 300 people seemed shrunk 10 times smaller by an intimacy and beauty that drew the people together in a close-shared reverie. Not unlike that which, for the promise of that experience, had the Viennese hurrying to some private house for a hosted summer afternoon or winter evening ‘Schubertiad’. Once the poets and poetry readers, and the singers of his songs and opera arias sat down, leaving Franz Schubert there alone at the piano, just a single Impromptu of his would be all he needed to play.

How to save money at the cinema - all you need to know

To hear one of them for the first time can change your world. You’re at your first Schubertiad, and hooked. ‘Schwammerl’ (‘Tubby’ – Schubert’s Bohemian friends’ nickname for him) was the short, bespectacled, sometimes penniless hero who disturbed and melted audience hearts.

Any Worthing ‘first-time Schubertiaders’ thus converted on Sunday found that Schubert’s piano music, as his songs, is about feeling, imagination, romance, dance, adventure, pain and laughter, and ultimately the unmasking of pretence and the de-crusting of protective personal exteriors.

However, in decades of concert-going I cannot recall a single Schubert piano encore in an orchestral concert. Fountain told me he didn’t pick Schubert simply because one of his favourite symphonies would follow. He just felt like playing this, the second Impromptu the four of the second set Opus 142/D935. It’s in Ab, it’s a sort of hymn to happiness, and Fountain and I agreed the second set of the two Impromptus has the deeper music.

Have you seen Cyrano at the cinema yet?

Fountain played it, surrounded on stage by 24 silent WSO instrumentalists plus conductor, and before that speechless audience, some maybe first falling in love with the music – because Fountain was brought back again as applause continued.

Still boyish-faced under greying hair, Fountain shared the composer’s spectacles but, upwards, (like Alfred Brendel) seems half Schubert’s height again. He was back in Worthing, having down the years joined WSO in three previous concertos and been a Sussex International Piano Competition juror.

He’s a piano professor at the Royal Academy of Music, where he helped bring forth the Polish pianist known to Naxos records, WSO and International Interview Concerts audiences, Anna Szalucka. At this concert, he had followed up both Brahms Concertos and the first Tchaikovsky with the first one Beethoven wrote to try out on Vienna as a self-promoting display piece.

This classical-period WSO programme looked a relaxed, even benign one, a post-lockdown recovery with four pieces applying the balm. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 2 performances are often more historically aware, remembering the weaker contemporary pianos in 1794 and seeking to highlight this concerto’s recurring sprightly tread, untroubled spirit and easy-going outlook.

Fountain and John Gibbons, however, with a modern, brightly powerful and sonorous concert Steinway, produced a performance that backtracked in approach and mixed into the audience wellbeing therapy the familiar beefy and sinuous accents of Beethoven’s own piano virtuoso years and fiery younger temperament.

The sustain pedal appearing at around that time, Fountain’s use of it brought the Romantic atmosphere Beethoven was gradually ushering in. Fountain wasn’t down the fortepiano period practice path, so we had some boisterous left-hand emphasis and some right-hand passages of almost Lisztian sweep.

They opened the piece sternly but the second tune flowed like the smooth first warm custard of winter. A wider contrast between loud and soft was frequently marked. Languorous goodnight kisses and lingering caress ended their middle movement. Then they alarm-called from sleep the vivaciously finale, giving its playful main tune mischief and abandon, and had the in-between bits prancing and galloping with ebullience.

“I thought I was in a conversation with Beethoven – and he was in a good mood,” smiled one audience member.

More fun came in the second half. Mozart took the Mick in the second of his two Divertimentos on the menu, written 11 years apart. The later one we call The Musical Joke lampoons dull, mediocre music composition and struck British fame as TV’s popular Horse of the Year Show theme. A silly bassoon trill, clichéd horn fanfares, boring elementary other ideas, a fugue too feeble to leave first base, a development of apparent boring conformity, a tune all-too blandly manipulated. Yet all within a sure-touch compositional structure while tongue fills cheek.

John Gibbons appears a Mozart latecomer, seemingly alerted finally by his Naxos 2015/2018 Concerto recordings with veteran Turkish pianist Idil Biret. But with as yet a non-institutionalised perspective, today he dared include two Divertimenti in a symphony concert – adding to his career catalogue of rewarding, mould-breaking programming. He gave us a flashback to first-fundamentals Mozart, to spot his personal brand in his obligation to write easily-digested entertainment, which from him emerged in trademark elegant, fluent and busy music.

As normal in Mozart’s pre-Vienna days in his birthplace Salzburg, the Divertimenti in D was written to order, meeting demand for sociable music for a social celebration, helping to create mainly a chatty, upbeat and jovial atmosphere.

These Divertimenti, often for just a handful of instruments, have long since been expanded by others for small orchestras, although Gibbons, did not quite have the courage to revive the actual sound experience by performing with just their original oboe, two horns, two violins, viola and double-bass (the one in D) or the two horns and string quartet (Musical Joke).

Whereas the WSO’s Divertimento in D feasted on Chris O’Neil’s often high oboe, their Schubert 5th Symphony luxuriated in Monica McCarron’s gold flute. It’s a neat and concise piece which in routine hands can drift pleasantly and uneventfully by, but Gibbons ensured it all stayed vital and ready to assert.

His opening movement was vigorous, his second suave. Both lime-lighted more of McCarron and O’Neil and we heard Gavin McNaughton’s bassoon leading the singing counterpoint. On the slower movement, twin horns Richard Steggall and Jane Hanna brought the curtain peacefully down, then starred in the ‘hunting’ Minuet which seems to foresee characteristic Weber.

Then the strings took over in the sometimes Haydnesque though essentially Italianate finale, ceaselessly demanding of their stamina. Wise Gibbons touches were concluding the Minute with no last-minute slowdown, and rejecting the latter repeat, which tends to outstay the welcome and gild the lily.

Richard Amey

The downloadable or online-readable Spring 2022 edition of WSO’s Music Matters magazine is out here: https://www.worthingsymphony.org.uk/_files/ugd/eeb4cc_ee67a697af384875a203d725fd8bcbd9.pdf

The WSO’s Spring Mini-Season details are here (Sundays, 2.45pm, Assembly Hall – tickets 01903 206206 or at wtam.uk ):

March 13, ‘Mainly Mozart’: Elgar, Serenade for Strings; Mozart, Concerto for Flute & Harp in C K299 (Monica McCarron, flute; Elizabeth Green, harp); Adagio & Fugue in C minor K546; Haydn, Symphony No 36 in Eb; Mozart, Piano Concerto No 6 in Bb K238 (Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, piano). Extremely rare chance to hear the last two works.

April 24 ‘Romantic Classics’: Beethoven, Overture ‘Egmont’; Bruch, Violin Concerto No 1 in G minor (Christian Garajner de Sa, violin); Mendelssohn, Symphony No 4 in A ‘Italian’. NB: veteran guest conductor, Hilary Davan Wetto (associate conductor with London Mozart Players; recordings with RPO, LPO).Rising star violinist, 27, Portuguese-Italian, poetic and explosive; exclusive pupil of Tasmin Little, long-term of Maurice Hasson.

May 22 ‘May Jubilations’: Elgar, Imperial March; Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No 3 in D minor (Dinara Klinton, piano); Rossini, Overture ‘William Tell’; Dvorak, Symphony No 8 in G. Klinton originally scheduled for this when pandemic lockdown began.

Have you read: This is why the impact of Covid on the theatre could be huge For the latest breaking news where you live in Sussex, follow us on Twitter @Sussex_World and like us on Facebook @SussexWorldUK

Culture Spark set to ignite Chichester district arts and community celebration

Celebrating one of Britain’s most beloved performers, Dame Vera Lynn

A book about loss and hope

A remarkable tale of recovery from a rare form of cancer

New book inspired by days out with the family