Worthing Symphony Orchestra – “The finale came excitingly urgent, edgy”

Plain bread and butter classical? No. Always aiming for more than that. John Gibbons and his WSO serve pickles, jams and savouries on top. Have been for years. Often, they provide just one standard slice, but it’s wholemeal, and spicier, rarer, more intriguing added courses that send listeners away extra-nourished.

Sometimes, though, they will revert to overture-concerto-symphony, to give core classical its always potent airing. But there will be one or two less familiar popular pieces. Their afternoon tea shop had 498 customers on Sunday, happy to have that old staple diet garnished with crisps or cream.

The crisps came still in their crackly packet as Gibbons hoisted The Ruins of Athens Overture out the mainstream backwater of LP or CD filler with its smiling face, racy demeanour and anxiety not to outstay its welcome. It quickly set the stage for the main course concerto. Bright, crisp and crackly with dips of yohurt was where the WSO performance should have been – and it was.

The cream was Max Reger’s smooth and relaxing tone poem, creating his own 1913 copy of an Arnold Böcklin painting. It depicts a hermit playing the fiddle with bemused but compassionate cherubs looking in on his lonely awareness of truth and beauty. Perhaps they’re there initially to commiserate with his solitude, but may be hovering over the thought that perhaps they ought to start dancing to his music and rightly reward him.

Black tied-and-tailed WSO leader Julian Leaper, in the gently pleasing solo part, could have been appropriately costumed in Böcklin’s red hooded cloak for full effect, and Gibbons (a Reger fellow organist) quipped so. But, alas, habitual classical orchestral concert presentation keeps missing these niceties. Maybe the WSO Sunday tea shop should stock glacé cherries and strawberries.

But as a result, the WSO audience could be seeking further Reger on their musical quest. One of Reger’s co-behaviourally rude Germans was Johannes Brahms – reminding us some musicians aren’t totally nice people! But it appears not to tarnish Brahms’ music. He was enough of a progressive conservative to blend his backward-admiring formal rigour with a great deal of the world’s most beautiful music, structurally strengthened that way, and landing him in surely the classical world’s favourite top 10.

If you discover Brahms young, then his First Piano Concerto stays with you always. You cherish its young-man’s expression of constant grapple with one’s emotions and fondest impulses in the face of life’s difficulties, setbacks and others’ expectations or opposite perceptions. It’s a symphonic Concerto from the outset and the soloist is up against it.

Watching either Brahms Piano Concerto, especially in their first movements, don’t be startled at how often the soloist’s posterior lifts up off the piano stool. Summoning the power for 45 minutes to combat even Brahms’ modestly sized orchestra is a physical job. It demands as much strength and presence for the final furlong as for the leap out of the starting stall. This hit me, seeing Brendel do Brahms’ Second at the Royal Festival Hall in my student days. Coincidentally, he and Fountain are performers so tall there’s scarcely room for their knees under the keyboard.

Ian Fountain deals in large, testing concertos. Once he had assessed how his body felt that afternoon, having already rehearsed it in earnest with WSO that morning, he became ever further in charge and on top of his task. And, as a seasoned distance runner hitting the closing straight (musically, in the coda) he kicked to set the new faster tempo, it was the rest of the race field – the orchestra – who were wondering what stamina they’d got left.

Brahms, Schumann’s ‘fully-armed Minerva’, composed this at 25, in his physical prime as an already fine touring pianist who performed it . . . a prime he lost when performing less, in the middle age that Fountain is just entering. Fountain had a crowd to engage – not only the Worthing audience but also at least four visiting students there I noticed, there to support him as their own piano professor at the Royal Academy of Music in Marylebone. The two young women sitting next to me, Korean and Thai, had kept their presence a secret from him.

Self-obsessed soloists may cocoon themselves with the conductor for the performance but the team player like Fountain watches what else is going on around them in the orchestra that, even if it’s not important to his own role, it’s there to be enjoyed. That showed through, alongside all that he had to ensure was accomplished on his keyboard.

Gibbons and the WSO depicted an almost hysterical wringing of hands and tearing at hair in the music’s opening maelstrom of turmoil. The first movement was partly a tale of two Brahmsian horns in guiding star roles – horn being with clarinet and cello his favourite orchestral instrument. WSO’s No 3 of their four horns, Richard Steggall, was the solitary romantic voice beckoning from forest, deep. Then later No 1 Dave Lee’s sound was punctuatingly lusty, cast as the battling pianist’s companion when the music reached for some final answer or consolation.

Fountain’s pedalling in the slow second movement shaped the music’s tenderly luminous moments and I was heartened to read in John Gander’s programme notes, thanks to a quote by Brahms, of an alternative explanation of this movement whose emotions appear under a sublime control. It’s been assumed that its dedication is to the late Robert Schumann’s tragic memory but the possibility is now that it’s really a picture of Schumann’s widow Clara, the female giant of leading 19th Century European pianism and musicianship. The slow movement of Brahms Second Concerto is already accepted as a portrait of her, voiced through its solo cello.

His and her relationship fuels eternal speculation but arguably most important to him was her role as a critical sounding board for each of his new pieces, plus her probably self-sacrificial concern that he kept his personal domestic freedom and independence, to preserve his creative spark and power.

The finale came excitingly urgent, edgy, alternatingly jagged and slick, strengthening the orchestra, conductor and soloist’s grip on the issues still at large but now with daylight penetrating. As they stormed on and the end swung into view, I think I spotted in the final horn calls over a long piano trill, that No 1 answers No 2. Would that they could be placed on opposite sides of the stage, heralding the victor bursting through the home gates.

After Reger, Beethoven’s 8th Symphony kept the whole meal German, and provided the concert’s lighter entertainment. Beethoven: light? entertainment? Yes! His separate Symphonies 3, 5 and 9 are about issues or ideas of intense urgency. But 1, 2, 4, 6 (Pastoral), 7 and 8 are definitely entertainment. Beethoven is looking to amuse and engage but in No 8 he’s continually after having fun. He allows nothing weighty to distract him and instead he’ll parody seriousness.

People can reverentially dress up Beethoven in sober vestments and snootily dismiss No 8 as ‘Little’, while misunderstanding how humour is cleverest in brevity. And in this treasure of No 8, Beethoven is witty and funny in a constant flow of small chunks and brief comments.

First movement: “I’m in a really good mood, welcome to the show. Yes, this is a symphony but it’s played by jokers and clowns. There’s no boring bishop cracking the whip! We can do whatever we like! Trust me . . .”

Second movement: “No slow movement in this symphony! Tough. Nothing’s going to be loved-up today! Let’s get to the stables, take the horses out and hear the trotting hooves dancing!”

Third movement: “Yes, OK. It’s a minuet. But no posh ballroom. Think of the dancers as commedia dell’arte characters being gracious! Do you like my two horns [Jane Hanna and Dave Lee] from my Eroica Symphony, sipping coffee together?”

Fourth Movement: “You’ve not heard a final like this from me, have you? No! Welcome to my games party. Hide and seek, kiss chase, hunt the thimble, tag, musical chairs. You can take part in all of them! And by the end you’ll be happily exhausted!”

Beethoven’s not a stand-up. He can still be the gruff and grumpy type, but he’s now accustomed to being stone deaf. He’s loosened up a lot, thanks to his Pastoral and his Seventh, and he’s happier than in his younger days to have Haydn grinning over his shoulder.

The WSO players know this piece and what it says, and they were spot-on. Veteran bassoonist Gavin McNaughton inevitably bounced and chuckled at the heart of much of the humour and here Beethoven influenced Prokofiev. But here’s a tip I learned for next time you see No 8 performed. In the last two movements, concentrate on the timpani. They’re often playing the right notes back to front. It’s wrong, it’s fun, it’s right, it’s humour. And Robert Millett showed on Sunday, rather like a great comedian, how skilful you’ve actually got to be.

REVIEW BY Richard Amey.

Next Worthing Symphony Orchestra (same conductor, venue, time), Sunday 26 March, ‘Celtic Connections’ concert: Karl Jenkins, Palladio; William Wordsworth, Variations on a Scottish Theme; Siegfried Idyll; Frederick Delius, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring; EJ Moeran, Whythorne’s Shadow; Percy Grainger, Irish Tune From County Derry; Paul Lewis, Tauranga Concerto (clarinet Ian Scott). A tapas of music for spring, from our home islands, including WSO’s own Scottish wind soloist, heard in Weber after lockdown, in a Paul Lewis piece bound to bring enjoyment. Tickets: https://wtm.uk/events/wso-celtic-connections/

Next Worthing Choral Society (conductor Aedan Kerney, assist cond Sam Barton; St George’s Church, Worthing BN11 2DS, 7.30) Sunday 11 March, ‘Songs of Hope, Songs of Joy’: including music by Elgar, Clara Schumann, Tippett (spirituals), Ayres, Fanshawe, Sarah MacDonald, Kerney. With Natalie Clifton-Griffith soprano, Hamish Dustagheer organ & keyboard. Tickets: www.trybooking.co.uk/CBRO

Next Boundstone Chorus with the Choir of Sompting Village Primary School and the Call Me Al Jazz Quintet (conductor Aedan Kerney; St Michael and All Angel’s Church, Lancing; 7.30) Saturday 25 March: Alexander L’Estrange and Joanna Forbes, ‘Freedom! – The Power of Song’. Powerfully and emotively celebrating communal singing’s vital bringing-together of people in solidarity, and changing lives for good during upheaval, struggle and change – examples: Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement, suffragette marches, trench soldiers in WW1, the Baltic ‘singing revolution’. Tickets: https://www.theboundstonechorus.co.uk/booking

Next International Interview Concert (at the @artspaces@sionschool venue, Gratwicke Rd, Worthing BN11 4BL; 3pm) Sunday 2 April: Maya Irgalina solo piano: Guest Interviewer, Ask A Question, Mystery Music Spot and full programme of (not in order): Ravel, Une Barque sur l’Ocean; Federico Mompou, Le Lac; Nikolai Kapustin, Paraphrase on ‘Aquarela do Brasil’; Jazz Variations; Uehara, The Tom and Jerry Show; Beethoven, Tempest Piano Sonata; Schubert (transcribed Liszt): Ständchen, Der Doppelgänger, Die Erlkönig. Classical-romantic, impressionist and entertaining classical-jazz. With conversations with Maya Irgalina and interactive features in between. Tickets: www.seetickets.com/promoter/the-interview-concerts/17812