The biggest day in Worthing Symphony Orchestra's post-pandemic re-emergence

Alexander Borodin, Polovtsian Dances (from Act 2 of opera Prince Igor); Malcolm Arnold, Symphony No 4; George Gershwin, Rhapsody In Blue*, I Got Rhythm*, An American on Paris. Also WSO Children’s Concert, in association with West Sussex Music (11.30am, same venue no soloist)

Spectacular. That’s how you’ll often hear loud, energetic and descriptive music described. How come? It’s not visible. Ahh, but if it’s taking place live, in front of you, especially if it is a full orchestra, then it’s a spectacle, and one that’s sought after, once experienced. Visually, yes, when listening to music, you can imagine colour and activity. But that’s not actually seeing.

Friday was the biggest day in WSO’s post-pandemic re-emergence. More than 1,300 people saw and heard them. Some could hardly believe their eyes as well as their ears. Not just the morning’s 800-plus children, teachers and assistants.

The evening’s 559 crowd was a quarter larger than their pre-pandemic average, director John Gibbons and his fully professional WSO didn’t just maintain their high regional artistic and performing stature. They increased it with a glittering and bubbling evening show of quite daring, but instinctively selected breadth and richness, even by their own standards. Each piece ended in cheers and whoops for conductor, leader and band, ensured by Gibbons’ helpful, friendly and encouraging verbal introductions, with his additional info, news or topical comment just as entertaining.

Spectacular? Even the music titles were eye-popping. If the name Malcolm Arnold looked near-anonymous to some, his proved a real orchestral showpiece. And there was another surprise visual package: pianist Maria Marchant (exactly why, later). Let the story now unfold, with the pieces treated in order. I might not be alone in for years hankering after the chance to experience, live, the Polovtsian Dances. Russian chemist Borodin also got his musical formulae right in his all-too-short 54 years.

Explosive, propulsive, powerful and empowering, in depiction of the 10th Century invading Turkish tribe’s withering dance display for their Russian captives, the gut-pummelling and pounding percussion of the men allied with the melting melodies of the gliding maidens to ravish the senses. The WSO brass and horns glinted as knives and sabres, the strings, harp and flutes seduced like voile, the clarinets and bassoons whirled, scampered and pirouetted like wild village jesters and pranksters.

In several stunning sections, the WSO demonstrated how Borodin here compositionally nailed the primal. What a debt Stravinsky owed him. Around 30 years later, Les Ballets Russes staged Prince Igor Act 2 for Paris in 1909, Fokine the choreographer. Four seasons after that, Stravinsky came up with The Rite of Spring for Russes director Diaghilev, gave the musical world new-reality shock treatment and made his name. The Polovtsians need no leg-up from the Kismet show stage or love-struck strangers in paradise. Might there one day be a WSO repeat, with stage room to add the chorus? In English translation will do!

The men of post-war British classical musical establishment thought they would similarly shake audiences into their own remote and cerebral academic sense of modern musical reality. Almost criminally, as we now know. A victim was Malcolm Arnold. Think Bridge Over The River Kwai (Colonel Bogey) and St Trinians and dozens more. He could make film music dazzle the blind – and also make them laugh.

Requested by the BBC, his Fourth Symphony had London’s Royal Festival Hall audience on its feet at its 1961 premier. Now it captivated, enthralled and invigorated a cheering WSO audience in 2023. But in 1961, the critics all-but destroyed it, and Arnold with it. Why? “Simple. They hated him,” Sussex composer Paul Lewis told me after the WSO performance and their own audience’s obvious verdict. Lewis had been there at the RFH.

The 2021 Arnold centenary invoked time-distanced explanation from many, including writers Norman Lebrecht and Simon Heffer. Their combined assessment arrives from our more sympathetic age. Arnold, a jazz trumpeter and tunemaker, bipolar to our-day medical awareness, with an unstable personal life wrecked also by a wine-and-women weakness, was horribly too prolific and popular for the establishment and their protected wannabee composers high-mindedly boycotting melody and other pleasures.

Arnold was apparently deemed a ‘mere’ orchestral player, awkwardly for them an Oscar winner (Kwai), an ‘indesirably’ tonal symphonist, an embarrassingly effective musical communicator and entertainer for whom composition seemed, to them, to be far too easy. The beleaguered composer accumulated only black marks and animosity from the powers-that-were – who lie irrelevant to today’s audiences now voicing their own verdict on discovering work that’s “the missing dimension on British music” [Lebrecht].

And given the chance by Gibbons. Worthing declared on Friday that Arnold has something rewarding for them. Film composers like he and John Williams present Technicolor drama and emotion able to be watched, live in action as well as on screen.

In this Fourth Symphony, the 58-string WSO blanketed the stage like a vast floral meadow of varied sound. To his auidience, Gibbons had explained its symphonic ethos of empathy with the outsider, racially or otherwise, and its goal of integration. Arnold echoes the volatile Stateside musical vernacular of Bernstein’s West Side Story – set in Puerto Rico or indeed any tribal flashpoint. Arnold employs its street bongo drums and woodblocks, sneering and posturing brass, alarmed or soothing woodwind, gasping or caressing strings, and stacks of mysterious emotion and confrontational tension in between.

WSO tuned-percussionist Matt Turner emerged a star of not only this but the whole evening on xylophone and glockenspiel. After the interval, principal clarinet Ian Scott joined him with his sleazy back-alley intro to Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, to signal a massive switch of mood and era with his ad lib upward-sliding cry divided arrestingly in two.

A young lady in long, partially tied-back dark hair and full-length, short-sleeved gold-glitter gown had taken the stage. But she wasn’t perched, statuesquely composed, in charismatic classical style on the piano stool. Her upper body and arms were constantly animated and she’d uncoil to swoop onto the keys for her next musical comment or statement.

Maria Marchant is also a conductor. Moving to music rather than sitting is natural and liberating. As Gershwin’s familiar American jazz and blues took the evening back to the 1920s, straddling New York and Paris, she made us imagine this was her city club night out and, boy, was she going to enjoy herself! She swayed, rocked and smiled to herself, conductor and orchestra, even the audience, between her immensely taxing musical entries. Then she delivered the fun, suavity, bravura and virtuosity with vigorous attack and relish, and at times near-abandon.

She projected the character and guise of each new theme, she plunged into the bits where everyone played. Gershwin gave her more crossed-hands stuff than a cool – or even a high-octane jazzer – would execute. And in its true spirit, she ended one firecracker cadenza literally turning around to look leader Julian Leaper in the eye as she handed the music over to he and his strings.

All of this happening truly ‘in the moment’ of live performance. You’d have got none of this visual engagement from a disc, download, or radio show, nor in such wide detail on TV. Live, it was infectious and compelling for everyone. Marchant ratcheted up the excitement in the demanding follow-up piece, the variations on I Got Rhythm, when three saxophones joined second clarinettist Alan Andrews to complete a sax quartet and multiply the gleam of the brass.

Were Gershwin getting grimy through overuse these days, Marchant scrubbed him clean. And in final triumph she left the audience to become pretend Americans in Paris, and the WSO to round off their orchestral spectacular with vibrant street-scene sounds and pictures of day and night. Here principal trumpet Tim Hawes, adding his idiomatic wah-wah touches, then adding the late climactic tune, reminded us he’d been a key element in WSO’s Gershwin sounds and gestures. Even tuba player Andrew Kershaw had his liberation, near the end of a musical prescription for a dose of the “joie de vivre” Gibbons suggested we all need in these times.

The fine WSO programme brochure, a collectable and virtual giveaway £3 mine of musical information, told us Gershwin spent days hunting Paris for taxi car horns he felt needed to be in tune for the American in Paris premiere. I once heard Gibbons advise a Radio 4 late-evening interviewer that the ‘Parp-Parps’ most definitely did NOT need not be in tune. But WSO percussionist Julian Poole’s taxi horns were. I was disappointed!

That morning, a sixth WSO Children’s Concert had startled, astonished and delighted another bubbling, full house of excited school and home-educated 7s-11s. They reacted to the music even more open-heartedly than in any of this normally annual event since its 2017 inauguration. The children cheered and applauded the orchestra as soon as they began taking the stage, and spontaneously clapped to the beat in several items. They were congratulated by Gibbons with their quiet, attentive listening to the one quiet and relaxed piece, the Delius Sleigh Ride. They gaped when Sam Freeman stood and flexed his bass trombone. They gasped as the four horn players stood and displayed their shining golden instruments.

Gibbons, with his “magic wand” baton, conducted upbeat items from the New Year concert, some of the Polovtsian Dances, and others including Doreen Carwithen’s dance for farmers, Suffolk Morris, another fun Gibbons adaptation of Haydn’s 94th Symphony (the Surprise movement), and his wind and brass arrangement of Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag.

Life-shaping first experiences took place. Mischievous boys were reduced to awestruck stillness. One Home-Ed father jubilantly reported his son hadn’t taken his eyes off the percussion department and had declared thenceforth he was going to become a drummer. See here for more reaction and pictures: https://www.westsussexmusic.co.uk/2023/02/worthing-schools-surprise-symphony/

Richard Amey

Next Worthing Symphony Orchestra: ‘Beethoven & Brahms’ concert, Sunday February 26 (2.45): Beethoven, Overture to The Ruins of Athens; Brahms, Piano Concerto No 1 (piano Ian Fountain); Max Reger, The Hermit Fiddler (No 1 of Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklein Pictures, Op128); Beethoven Symphony No 8. Heart-churning Johannes; deeply placid Max; tongue-in-cheek Ludwig.

Next Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra (conductor Dominic Grier; Assembly Hall, 3pm): Elgar, Overture Cockaigne (‘In London Town’); Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 2 (piano Berniya Hamie); Walton, Symphony No 1. A cherry pick from the topmost British orchestral music, framing the “Brief Encounter” concerto which needs no movie to be the world’s favourite.