REVIEW: Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra offer Musical Pictures

Berlioz, Roman Carnival Overture; Bruch, Violin Concerto No 1 in Gm; Debussy, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune; Mussorgsky (orchestrated by Ravel), Pictures at an Exhibition. Encore: Schalaster, Moldavian Dance.

“It’s the extended orchestral solo every serious flautist wishes and hopes they can get to play in a concert. And yes, I feel I have benefited from having waited so long for this to happen. Rather than had I got the chance much younger, I’ve now had the chance to hear it played many times and ways by other people, and to learn from them. It’s not hard to play. It’s more about breath control.”

The speaker, WPO’s Marion Peskett, played her dream role on Sunday, in Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. She’s either cast as the nature god Pan, piping lazy, life-affirming mischief through a summer afternoon forest, or she’s a faun instinctively responding to the sweltering, vibrating wooded world around him, and encountering his mounting new experience of female attraction. Or she is both? The languishing flute repeatedly sets the scene and tone with its long, mysterious, meandering and musing feelings and signals through the barely rustling foliage, or carried on the gentlest French zephyrs to waiting other ears?

The orchestra is the wild realm all around the drowsy faun, and is urged by Debussy to maintain unbroken for 10 minutes this sensory spell by playing, not just ‘très expressif’ but also, at every key point, ‘doux’ – sweet, soft, gentle, mellow. It’s a French composer’s musical instruction to his players that’s rare and uninhibitedly explicit, and produces music the world hadn’t heard before the historical and revolutionary moment in 1894, of Debussy’s instinctively intense and beautifully calculated interpretation of Stéphane Mallarmé poem.

This is was the artistic obligation of flautist Marion Peskett – herself a composer – and in its semi-improvisational way, she calmly captured the dreamy solitariness and the dawning feeling of a yearning young spirit, in tremulous wonder, then gradual daring, as the faun imagines his first steps towards his life-bestowing destiny. And it was the orchestra’s task to evoke the atmosphere of the mammal, insect and bird life, vegetation and heat surrounding him, to have Pan’s nymphs tease him, to depict the faun’s chuckles of amusement, then to usher him into sleep when the climate and the idyll, for the time being, tames him.

And the WPO did preserve the spell, possessing as they do now the capacity for concentrated, quiet playing and the arresting effect that can project. They created the faun’s cocooned world, and shone the tenderest beams of sonic sunlight to spotlight their flautist in her own moment of musical destiny. Penny Atkins’ cor anglais, Clare Thornton-Wood’s oboe and Julie Schofield’s clarinet called from the forest, the often muted horns and strings wove its alluring, perspiring atmosphere, and Heather Wrighton’s harp (combining Debussy’s scoring for two harps) released the ripples and tingles of sensual rapture – and tenderly applied, along with Alonso Mendoza’s tiny antique cymbals, the magical closing notes.

Eliciting and steering WPO’s animated canvas was guest conductor Denise Ham, a diminutive figure in silky dark trouser suit, with lengthy baton and simple arm movement betraying a distillation of long rostrum experience. The author of worldwide-selling DVD, ‘The Craft of Conducting’, she not only initially studied in summer school with the late George Hurst (died 2012), but married him. Her conducting teaching post at The Royal Academy is now executed by WPO musical director Dominic Grier. The two are colleagues and Grier wanted his WPO to perform with her this time for the different experience they’d gain.

For WPO, double bassist and organist Luke Haydn didn’t elaborate but avowed, quite proudly, “Well, she got these results! . . .” For herself, Ham said: “They are very, very responsive, very willing and a very happy orchestra. They engaged well with the music, which is down to Dominic, and they have a big body of strings, which shows that people want to join this orchestra. Next season will stretch them further and be marvellous.”

Denise Ham brought to WPO a Hurst encore he’d purloined, she told me, from a visiting Russian orchestra. Unannounced and a complete surprise – encores not being a frequent orchestral habit – and with Ham conducting with her free hand relaxing casually on the rostrum rail, the Schalaster Moldovian Dance’s fun and celebration romped and cavorted around the hall like a late but welcome gatecrasher. It delighted, and it clinched a more than generous WPO concert package – one fit for a longer-established event than the Worthing Festival which, on this its opening weekend, is in its second year of infancy.

Everything had commenced at 2pm with a lively Pre-Concert Talk by Dominic Grier about his 10 years as MD with WPO plus, in some depth, the concert’s musical content – all in an interview, chat and discussion with this writer. It may be the first such audience-illuminating event offered by either of Worthing’s two orchestras and was enthusiastically received by its unexpectedly sizeable maiden audience in the adjacent Richmond Room.

Out on the stage, Ham’s directorial control brought a successfully tight-reined exuberance from WPO for the brilliant Berlioz Overture, Roman Carnival. Apt enough this year, it’s a box of musical romance, fun and fireworks that in any posible future Worthing Festival ought ideally to be given outdoors in the town centre! WPO seized on those livewire musical box items, while revealing a warmth of sound that could be a developing characteristic quality of theirs.

The verve and versatility they needed through the afternoon climaxed in the Mussorgsky Pictures At An Exhibition, whose global popularity was partially established by a Worthing international musician commemorated by a blue plaque on The Assembly Hall front wall. That person being Maybridge virtuoso of the ivories, Keith Emerson. His own Mussorgsky Pictures orchestration for keyboards and synthesiser, bass and percussion, took the piece around the world’s rock stadia in his trio Emerson Lake & Palmer. Resultantly, several rock-bred generations whistle its tunes at the drop of a hat and go to hear it at orchestral concerts.

Sunday offered extra detail for the eagle-eyed. First horn John Peskett played Bydlo’s toiling song of the cart-drawing oxen on a tenor tuba – a coiled tube valve instrument played horizontally, unlike a differently-angled euphonium or Wagner tuba. The treasured alto saxophone solo outside The Old Castle came in a melancholy dark glow from Danish multi-instrumentalist Laura Kjaergaard-Grier on a seat near the double basses (upstage right). She’s also a percussionist and at the end beat the Great Gate of Kiev gong in the metal and wood kitchen (downstage left).

Twice, she dematerialised, unseen, from one diametrically opposite side of the stage, then to re-materialise at the other. In performance, having sung her troubadour’s song at The Old Castle gate, she switched over to the cymbals and triangle department. Then during the prolonged audience reaction at the very end – first she took the collective bow among the percussionists, then her solo bow with sax in hand,, back in that playing opposite seat. It’s a big, wide stage. How did she do it? And by what invisible route? She must be able to sprint for Denmark. And I reckon she must know a secret ancient smugglers’ passage beneath or behind the stage. I believe the nostrils of the town’s history hound, Chris Hare, should investigate.

The whole WPO instantly rose to the test of Ravel’s exceptional and often individually-exposing orchestral showpiece. The grotesque first Picture, The Gnome, needed the percussion department’s more bizarre woodwork – xylophone, clapper and ratchet (1950s football rattle). The muted strings subtly created a blurred veil of reverie around The Old Castle’s brooding saxophone. The awesomely unnerving heavy brass of the subterranean Catacombs had us shuddering at the bottomless thought of the silent massed skulls of Rome’s dead, arrayed like in a warehouse on vast shelves and staring through the half light. Catacombs is one of the suddenly deceased 39-year-old artist Viktor Hartmann’s six surviving Pictures of the 10 Mussorgsky picked from the posthumous exhibition. The Pre-Concert Talk audience saw printouts.

Another exciting insight in the Talk was Grier’s news for Ravel’s admirers of his ‘French’ orchestration, that there exists now an authentic counter-punch of a subsequent, highly Russianised new orchestration by Vladimir Ashkenazy. Its 2006 recording by the Philharmonia has Ashkenazy conducting it, and separately performing Mussorgsky’s original piano version.

Too numerous to record were the plaudits earned so many WPO musicians in reaching for the top of their game in the Exhibition Pictures and there may not be any more occasions to applaud two of the three young joint-leader violinists. In their WPO farewell appearances, Sunday’s leader, the Watford-based Preston Yeo, now has too full and ascendant a professional gig diary to remain, and June Lee is now permanently a sub-principal in Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s second violins.

Lee signed off on Sunday in the solo role of the universally beloved Bruch Violin Concerto, and with the WPO alongside in superb form. The South Korean’s committed performance, so absorbing to watch and hear, sat interestingly in the overall sound. That WPO warmth, perhaps unsurprisingly, also pervaded her playing. Lee beguilingly lent the work’s fans the emotional uplift they came for, in “the richest and most seductive” of the four great German violin concertos – the contemporary 19th century soloist Joseph Joachim’s words, recounted in cellist Andy Fryer’s WPO programme brochure notes,

She moved to Britain and the Royal College of Music during the pandemic and in her repertoire has recently added this Bruch to the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and Saint-Saens’ Introduction & Rondo Capriccioso. What’s she longing to be performing next? “The Tchaikovsky Concerto” was her instant reply. “I played the first movement in my auditions for the WPO and the Bournemouth SO.” Might that happen for her in a future return concert performance with WSO?

Richard Amey

After the concert interval, Dominic Grier announced to the Hall audience WPO’s 2024-25 season (Assembly Hall, Sundays at 3pm, Grier conducting unless stated), tickets from www.WTM.uk See also here: https://www.worthingphil.org.uk/2024-25-season-overview

Sunday 6 October 2024 ‘Autumn Classics’ – Beethoven: Leonore Overture No. 3; Ansel Chaloner-Hughes: Florestan (composer in residence, new work); Rossini: Bassoon Concerto; Dvořák: Symphony No. 8 in G major. Siping Guo, bassoon.

Sunday 24 November 2024 ‘Orchestral Transformation’ – Stravinsky: Suite from 'The Firebird' (1919 Version); Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major; Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra. Ekaterina Grabova, piano.

Sunday 15 December 2024 ‘A Fairytale Christmas’ – with Worthing Choral Society (Music director, Aedan Kerney; Assistant Conductor, Sam Barton) and Sompting Village Primary School Choir. A fun-filled family concert , seasonal favourites, popular classics, sing-along carols for all. Including selections from The Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella.

Sunday 9 February 2025 ‘Symphonies and Serenades’ – Sibelius: Symphony No. 3 in C major; Britten: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings; Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F minor. Magnus Walker, tenor; John Peskett, horn.

Sunday 23 March 2025 ‘Symphonic Dances’ – Richard Strauss: Suite from Der Rosenkavalier; Graham Fitkin, Recorder Concerto; Rachmaninov, Symphonic Dances. Daniel Swani, recorders.

Saturday 5 April 2025 ‘Duruflé’s Requiem’ at St George’s Church, Worthing, 7.30pm, WPO strings, 3 trumpets, timpani, harp, organ, with Brighton16 Chamber Choir; Matthew Jelf, conductor. Vaughan Williams: Mass in G minor; Howells: Elegy for String Orchestra; Duruflé: Requiem Mass.

Saturday 7 June 2025, 7.30pm in 3rd Worthing Festival – ‘Bernstein’s Candide’, semi-staged, with The Merry Opera Company and Worthing Philharmonic Chorus. Grier also stage director.

(Saturday 14 June 2025 Possible repeat performance at London’s Cadogan Hall, to be confirmed)