REVIEW: Remembrance Sunday concert, Worthing Symphony Orchestra, Assembly Hall, Sunday, November 8.

"IT'S VERY hard to play. There are some exposed passages. A lot of it is awkward and in the second movement you have to know a lot about articulation and pedalling."
By The Newsroom
Published 12th Nov 2009, 08:58 BST
Updated 8th Jun 2018, 01:06 BST

The trials pianists go through to quench the public thirst for Rakhmaninov's famous Second Piano Concerto. Anthony Hewitt, at 38, was performing it professionally for only the second time in his career. He started learning it at age five but first gave it 13 years ago.

There's no substitute for playing experience and, he admitted: "I did find it a lot easier to play this time around."

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The crowd of 550 let him know his hard work was worthwhile. A cheering ovation awaited he, conductor John Gibbons and the WSO after a performance of not only controlled passion but pianistic subtlety, and a deeply Russian atmosphere. Hewitt would like to return to play No 3.

A Bsendorfer piano was in action, one of several different makes the WSO will try out while the mature resident Steinway awaits some attention.

This Remembrance programme began with a spankingly full-blooded reading of William Walton's wartime film music, Spitfire Prelude and Fugue. It handed over then to two more composers unwittingly betraying their affection and indivisible empathy for their homeland. First Rakhmaninov, then Elgar.

Commitment and intensity

Gibbons not only shares this British composer's nationality and old-gold Wolverine soccer allegiance. He is drenched to the skin in his music and he and the WSO united with huge commitment and intensity in Elgar's First Symphony to give a performance which, surpassing Tchaikowsky's Fifth in the previous concert, will dominate the memory of this present season.

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The flexibilities and felicities of tempo and variations in mood and feeling '“ as a windy, unsettled British cloudscape constantly alters the light '” are the staple Elgarian challenge to his interpreters. Gibbons and his forces pulled off an account founded on only one rehearsal but stoked by Gibbons sure handling of the score and the players' love and respect for it.

He last conducted it here 10 years ago, with a lesser WSO band than he has now. The impact of this performance, which after 65 minutes rightly drew a prolonged and fervent audience reception, amounted to a bold statement of this orchestra's calibre.

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