REVIEW: Worthing Symphony Orchestra, ‘This Sceptred Isle’ concert at Assembly Hall

Harold Whibley, A Sussex Overture; William Walton, Coronation March Crown Imperial; Sergei Rachmaninov, Rhapsody on a Theme of Nicolo Paganini; Edward Elgar, Symphony No 1.

It was not John Cage who had WSO fans clanking the turnstiles to match their orchestra’s previous best season’s attendance of 600. The answer will follow, but the American composer was not even on the performance programme. Then, however, the government announced that 15 minutes into this concert they would test-broadcast a Britain-wide national emergency signal, to smartphones even in ‘silent’ mode.

The WSO conductor John Gibbons knew concert disruption was inevitable, and the signal musically minimalist. So, after Whibley’s Overture, chatting to the audience, he switched on his phone explaining he was calling up the score of his special edited version of Cage’s notorious 4’33 – that piano piece of 4min 33sec silence. Something equally static, though less alarming, arguably more revealing. Forthwith, Gibbons opened the piano lid and sat on the stool. [Hey, let’s go for broke and hear it on an 8ft Steinway concert grand!]

On cue, through his phone, and a slight musical advance on the content of Cage’s 1952 curiosity, came the government test signal for all to hear. He prank turned a disadvantage in on itself and added dimension to the sense of amusement and informality Gibbons brings to WSO concerts in his verbal repartee between pieces – albeit hitherto in comments and quips.

It automatically involved all the listening audience who, thus opened up, warmed instantly to returning piano soloist Arta Arnicane’s broad-smiling stage presence. And the connectivity culminated during the final ovation for the orchestra’s Elgar symphony when Gibbons, Simon Rattle-style, rather than pointing to them from the rostrum, visited personally each section of the orchestra to raise them for their deserved individual applause. It was an extra-fulsome farewell to the concert season close.

Amid trying times, people seek classical music’s medicine. Since the current cost of living crisis kicked in, WSO audiences have swollen, as also Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra have found. WSO’s autumn audiences still lagged 5% below pre-Covid average. But since Christmas they have averaged up 22%, lifting overall ticket sales this season 8% up on their pre-Covid average. Steered by artistic director Gibbons’ astutely adventurous programming for consolidation and growth, the WSO in recovery have provided ministry and begun to prosper. Again on Sunday, the Assembly Hall reached 75% capacity.

New-Year Strausses, January Gershwin and now April Rachmaninov have been the imported medication, supplementing a foundation of efficacious British fresh air from Vaughan Williams, Walton, Alwyn, Elgar, Jenkins, Wordsworth, Delius, Moeran, and the Sussex pens of Paul Lewis and Harold Whibley. These have been core composers of this WSO season – not merely home-grown talent in a Premiership football team, making up the numbers around expensive foreign imports Beethoven Brahms, Borodin, Dvorak, Reger, Strausses various including R, Gershwin and the 150-years-old Rachmaninov.

Some of it is Sussex sea air. The items by Lewis and Whibley gasped first breath in Pevensey and Winchelsea. Gibbons, whose specialism in British music needs occasional re-emphasis – he is no dabbler – resuscitated Whibley at this very concert. A Kent-born Oxford classics graduate, Whibley was conservatoire-trained but professionally a reluctant Inland Revenue civil servant, latterly relocated to Worthing. From the 1950s until his 1984 death, he lived at 5 Parkfield Road. He became on Sunday almost certainly the first composer performed by WSO who actually passed away in the orchestra’s home town.

The two youngest of his four children, both brought up at that Tarring address, Rosalind (80, educated at the then Sion Convent) and John (77, at Worthing High) were among a party spanning three generations of the Whibley family tree at Sunday’s concert –arriving from Dorchester, Derbyshire, Chichester and London. Cellist John, a member of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra under John Barbirolli’s tenure, told me he’d found the 1938 Sussex Overture manuscript 15 years ago. His son Daniel is a 7ft tall double-bassist in the BBC Philharmonic. When he, too, was with the Hallé, Daniel showed A Sussex Overture to director Sir Mark Elder. Enamoured, Elder recorded it privately with the Hallé as a gift for composer Harold’s surviving wife, Christaine, on her 100th birthday.

Another grandson, BBC Concert Orchestra percussionist Stephen, then showed the work to a guest conductor called Gibbons, who on Sunday gave very probably its first professional public performance.

The WSO happily took A Sussex Overture under their wing. It’s rousing, coherent, enjoyable, and worthy of their future repertoire. Its 9mins, in full orchestra, show signs of composition and orchestration lessons well-learned at the Royal College of Music under Frank Bridge and Gordon Jacob. Its style, flavour and character is British-veined , makes perfect sense and is immediately effective and entertaining – a hit on first hearing. It bounces and bounds gruffly in, then, throwing and sharing tunes around the instruments, it’s ready to dance and party, as well as to relax and make friends for itself. It liberated the audience.

Whibley raised the curtain on a suitably pre-Charles III Coronation pairing of English knights – Walton and Elgar, framing the late Rachmaninov Rhapsody masterwork with its golden, world-winning fleeting few minutes of repose and arousal in its variation 18. WSO took the Lancastrian Walton’s Crown Imperial marching into one of the zeniths of native-composed British ceremonial glory. They made a big, big sound, with Gibbons’ direction avoiding swagger and over-assertion, and going for a straight-down-the-line, imposing and priceless regal musical headpiece, so ripe for ceremonial TV coverage and the British tourist industry! Just as he is so tellingly in his film music, Walton delvers exactly what the moment or occasion needs.

Then the WSO took their season to its final denouement, in the Worcester man’s First Symphony. Gibbons’ Elgar stands high in Worthing’s fruits of the 25 years as director to be celebrated next season. This, he told us, was his father’s favourite indulgence and his chosen funeral music. This was recently fulfilled, accompanying the coffin’s church departure and its entombment outside – and this the conductor’s first performing encounter with the Symphony since that loss. As usual, Gibbons, while sharing such personal significances, in performance lets the music speak its own language. Elgar wrote sympathetically and in tribute to all orchestral musicians and today was when the men and women of WSO spoke for both men.

If you bought the programme magazine at this concert, sit at home and read its blow-by-blow narrative of this Elgar No 1. If possible as it is also playing, recognise the vast gestation, creation and realisation in the 10 years to 1908 of a new 50min symphony. A British symphony that enervated and instantly won unprecedented, fullest foreign acceptance and praise, in salute of Elgar’s own advancing of European musical culture beyond the gravitational drag of its 19th Century German masters. In yet another landmark performance, Gibbons and the WSO placed before us that moment of achievement in dedicated, unflagging sumptuous detail, rigour and strength.

And so to ‘Rach’s Rhap’! Almost exactly 13 years ago, Arta Arnicane sat at the piano, summoned and gathered her concentrated forces, then outclassed the eager field in the first Sussex International Piano Competition – on this Worthing stage, both solo and in concerto partnership with this orchestra and director. Awaiting the jury verdict, which gave her the title to take back to Latvia, she interviewed with me on the stage before the Worthing audience. This animated conversation laid the foundation for her instant and then deepening connection with them at each of her subsequent concert visits to WSO.

On Sunday, she took that stage again, in a wide, sleeveless and characteristically geometoric black and glitter-gold gown. There was the familiar, immediate, relieved smile of a long-lost returning absentee. For half an hour, she was Worthing’s once again.

She told me afterwards: “I have this memory. It is special here. It’s like home [remember Nicola Benedetti saying the same?]. John gives you such support, and the space to be yourself. And I want the audience to be there because they, John, the orchestra and me . . . we are all making music together.

“The Rhapsody has been far harder for me to learn than in the days when I had 9 hours’ daily practice at college. I’ve now a family home to keep up, a musician husband [German cellist Florian Arnicans], a new 18-month-old son [Albert], on top of which suddenly we’ve needed two changes of home. But this piece has one of my favourite themes [the 18th variation] which is absolute magic when it arrives. It takes me into the clouds! But I suddenly have to regain reality for the fast sections coming next and the twisting and turning final pages. The piece generates so many emotions it gives me goosebumps. It goes very deep.”

Arnicane, all long arms and ensemble alertness, projecting the ironies, pouncing on the witticisms, preserving the nuances, with sudden smiles in joy and exhilaration she made the notes dart, dive, soar, prance, pirouette then pour across her audience.

With orchestra and director listening then following on, Arnicane unfolded No 18’s spontaneous romance. No Hollywood swell or gush from the orchestra. More a natural sense of pure discovery, as though happening on a delicate flower hidden in the undergrowth. The audience gave back Arnicane three long curtain calls, during which her extended chat, hugs and kisses with the Worthing Symphony Society member bringing her floral gift only endeared her more to them.

They’d just witnessed only her first public performance with an orchestra of this warhorse work, this tormenting technical taskmaster. Almost breezily in places, it sounded like it could have been her dozenth. But no, she was immediately off to Mexico to give only her second. Worthing, ever delighted, ever amazed, will hope for more such happy returns. And she promises she’ll bring Albert next time.

Richard Amey

Footnotes:

Arta Arnicane portrait by Anna Galejeva

Arta Arnicane is preparing next for performance Mozart’s 19th Piano Concerto in F major K459. She and Florian have a third piano-cello album out, this called Fairytale, with music from two more of their choice Latvian composers, Paul Juon and Jānis Kepītis. www.primaclassic.com

Next classical – all in the new June 10-18 Worthing Festival:

Saturday 10 June at St Michael's Church, South Lancing (7.30): The Boundstone Chorus, Summer Concert conducted by Aedan Kerney. Celebrating the Chorus’ 40 years and the Coronation of Charles III. https://www.theboundstonechorus.co.uk/booking

Sunday 11 June at The Assembly Hall (3): Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra, Summer Concert, conductor Dominic Grier. Wagner, Tristan Prelude & Liebestod; Richard Strauss, Four Last Songs (both Nadine Benjamin MBE, soprano); Tchaikovsky, Symphony No 5. A blockbuster concert at any time of year. https://www.worthingphil.co.uk/concerts

Saturday 17 June at St George's Church, Worthing (4): Worthing Choral Society Summer Concert. ‘Mozart Vespers with Musical Cocktails’, conducted by Aedan Kerney and Sam Barton. Vespers movements including the popular Laudate Dominum, with other flavours in between, including Goodall’s The Lord is my Shepherd, Elgar’s My Love Dwelt In a Northern Land, Gorecki’s Totus Tuus, and a Ron Hinchcliffe new work premiere. https://www.worthingchoral.org.uk/Concerts/