REVIEW: Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra celebrate 75 years

The WPO at 75 – Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra concert at The Assembly Hall, Saturday 23 March (7.30). WPO (83 players): leader Preston Yeo, conductor/music director Dominic Grier, soloists Alissa Firsova piano (WPO president), Stuart Orme baritone. Worthing Choral Society (53 voices): MD, Aedan Kerney MBE; associate MD, Sam Barton. The Boundstone Chorus (55 voices): musical director, Aedan Kerney MBE; associate MD Mattea Leow.

Carl Maria von Weber, Overture to opera Der Freischütz; Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Concerto No 5 in Eb ‘Emperor’ (encore: Rachmaninov, Prelude No 10 in Gb, Op23); Alissa Firsova (conducted Firsova), To Spring, for large orchestra and choir; William Walton, oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast.

Intended glorification and some startling innovation being a child of necessity, plus artistic imagination, came multi-woven into a substantial anniversary celebration concert that was extraordinary even to customary expectations. First its scale, for a British provincial town: an orchestra of 83, two choirs totalling 107, four collaborating musical directors, one vocal soloist, and a concert pianist-composer-director doing all three. The 197 busiest personnel from Worthing’s most active classical music community included 117 women.

Secondly, the experience for everyone there should stay in the memory – for the things it wasn’t, that made it something even better than it was. The music intended to take its audience into the forest, then later confront it with a vision of Spring conducted by its composer – Alissa Firsova, the WPO president, after playing the Emperor – then shock with the declamation and shouts of these 107 voices and those 83 instruments, as another decadent leader of a civilisation bit the dust.

With war-making, international or domestic party-political, closing in around us, this wasn’t a set of musical works deliberately to mirror this. But if you don’t like weapons, armies, rulers, deity handwriting on the wall, assassination, rejoicing, then maybe look away now? Yes, I’m being a bit too graphic here, but great music as our faithful antidote isn’t all opium and balm. Sometimes it depicts unrest and conflict as well as decrying or bemoaning it. Sometimes it merely alludes to it. But it does not shut its eyes to violence, the great plague of human existence.

What WASN’T this concert? A conventional offering of classical music, listeners in rows all down the hall, each instrument in its usual place, soloists delivering the expected goods then bowing and disappearing, the audience saluting then vanishing.

Confronting this audience was a hall floor half-covered by audience seating, HALF BY THE ORCHESTRA. Instead of the orchestra on stage were 107 choir seats, the Wurlitzer organ,and – what’s this? The Assembly Hall’s Steinway concert grand piano, glossily resplendent in its isolation, stood on its own stage tier, ABOVE and BEHIND the orchestra, in front of the choir. Shouldn’t it be at the front of the orchestra, surrounded by strings and under the conductor’s baton?

Not when the hired alternative grand piano is delivered the day before the concert, and is rejected as not up for the task. But when in the first place the in-house Steinway has no easy or affordable transportation route to reach the hall floor, and with no other suitable piano available at such short notice, WPO chairman David Holmes’s only-possible solution took on life. Its unconventional stage placing scared pianist Alissa Firsova and Dominic Grier, the WPO president and musical director. But first Grier, then Firsova, saw unforeseen advantage, and shared that with the orchestra.

“My first reaction was No Way!” confessed Firsova. “It was going to look like a flying circus-type thing, like performing on a floating stage. But I had no choice but to work with that, Dominic was very accommodating, and rehearsed with me the practicalities, alone by ourselves.

“And it turned out I could still see quite a lot of the orchestra, especially many of the strings even though the wind players and some of the cellos and violas in front of me had their backs to me. And the orchestra really liked it because they could hear the piano much more than normal. So I ended up really loving it, too.

“I had the advantage of being able to project the piano’s colours and harmonics, resonating through the stage and ringing across the extra space around it.”

Weber’s 19th century Der Freischütz Overture sets the forest scene for a contest between rural marksmen. Weber’s horns unfold misty mystery which then coloured my listening to their role in the following Emperor Piano Concerto. In both pieces the WPO showed their now-recognised rising mettle. This was the London-based Firsova’s fourth solo appearance with WPO.

She reported to me this. “As well as being a fine musician, Dominic [Grier] has a gift for orchestral training and is following in the footsteps of his Royal Academy teacher Colin Metters. It’s incredible what Dominic is doing with the Worthing Philharmonic, which I’ve noticed since I did Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto with them eight years ago. He’s turning them into a professional orchestra and they are playing ever more exciting repertoire.

“Working with them is different, though. They are so nice and friendly. They’re not doing this because it’s their job, so there is more freedom to make the music you’re trying to make.”

Firsova brought extra of that. So many people know the Emperor better than any other piano concerto. Imagine, then, their amazement when Firsova held the sustain pedal the final Eb chord of the first movement indefinitely on after the orchestra fell silent. Not what Beethoven’s publishers allowed – but he, were he in the audience now, might well have applauded. The slow movement, hushed, private and secret, cast in a subtly related B major chord, stole in from among the trees with therefore no break in the music. An unprecedented effect.

Firsova’s explanation: “I was talking with a friend about how Beethoven enjoyed experimenting with the then new sustain pedal that pianos came with. Beethoven marked the closing section ‘always with pedal’, then asks the strings to start the second movement with their mutes on, to veil their sound. My piano, sustaining in its own [acoustic] space, allowed me to project the long-dying chord better.

“Dominic came round to the idea but didn’t forewarn the orchestra, so that it came as a unique surprise as much to them as it would to the audience.”

“Beethoven wrote the Emperor in Vienna under siege from Napoleon [sometimes sheltering under the stairs, hands over his ears, seeing the bombarding destruction around caused by the man he once admired]. I see the slow movement as his melancholic vision of a cloud coming over the city and its culture. So the transition we created is heard as though the second movement emerges from somewhere far away, as moments of peace after the battle.”

Interpretation. Freedom. Two Beethovenian watchwords were followed in a single act. It made this an Emperor performance of a lifetime for those present. Talking two days later with Firsova, my own reading of the Emperor reformed and refocused, not because of this audaciously adventurous artistic move of hers, but thanks to the Concerto’s presentation the whole audience witnessed. The immensity of its title befits the Concerto’s scale and today it matched the piano and the soloist, in refuting, for me, any notion that Beethoven here is pitting the piano against the orchestra, as so many concertos do, not only his own Third and Fourth.

Dressed in a black trouser suit, her sleeve cuffs of silver pulled up as she set about her heroic task, Firsova in this commanding stage position was ruler over all she surveyed, repeatedly, and repeatedly again, musically throwing down the gauntlet to the orchestra. She would complete a concluding phrase or statement with a natural flourish of the hand or arm and immediately turn to look down for the orchestra’s response.

Beethoven the peerless pianist of his city’s age, instead of arguing with his orchestral forces from the piano stool, was now as though on horseback leading his willing Viennese forces into resistant defence of their cultural realm. He’s up there issuing orders, deciding tactics, changing angles of attack (setting the key, calling for stealthy softness or all-out loud assault, switching to new keys away from enemy grasp).

Yet here was music-making not to sober up the frivolous but to arrest, uplift, invigorate and delight. There were fewer Firsova frowns of intensity for her orchestra than smiles of comradeship and enjoyment – the stuff of chamber musician interaction, except wielding bigger weapons and louder forces.

Interpretationally, this slow second movement is many things to many people but its essential romance set a template for its later greatest cinema equivalents. After it, though, does battle resume with dawn’s arrival? No? Why not? I think Beethoven is after all, yet again, taking us from stress and duress into ultimate daylight and deliverance. I see the finale as one of his two drinking song sons – the other being the Violin Concerto finale. Musical brothers to their vocal sister, to come, The Ode To Joy.

Firsova’s teasing opening bars invited the orchestra and Assembly Hall to romp in WPO celebration. And she led the drinking all the way until the rustic dancing wound down with barely a drop of energy left. “In preparation”, she confided, “I boosted my stamina with Hanon No 6 finger-building exercises, so I could really go for it. The music is so explosive. I have to drink a lot of coffee when I play it. Beethoven must have been drinking 6-10 cups a day!”

Grier’s conducting kept tight rein of the military rhythms of Beethoven’s marching relish, and the unusual distance between he and Firsova posed them no problem in synchronising the spot-on start of the recapitulation. Her playing showed character, grace and aplomb, verve and endeavour. Yet from the delirium of such abandon, music is ready next to sober you up. She was born into an émigré Russian family shortly to flee Soviet Moscow for Devon.

She spoke to the Assembly Hall about the WPO, the current wars, the unheeded past lessons, with escalating emotion before giving an Assembly Hall concert rarity: an encore. She offered as “a prayer for the world”, a pensive and pained Rachmaninov Prelude [see top]. But after the interval she re-inflated the spirits by conducting her startling own William Blake setting of To Spring. Inspired by her father’s First Symphony (about the seasons) and his 2021 death from Covid, it showed in her the genetic line of compositional and Blakean instinct unerringly having passed on.

It was brief, it called on all the instruments and choral voices, and it impacted like a vast, multi-textured and faceted, all-encompassing view of Spring in full spate; presented like a large imposing mural, yet alive and vibrant; a vision moving with the wind, swaying with the new foliage, glowing in its flowerings, pulsating with the excitement and the longed-for, hope-filling, life-giving-and-renewing elements of Spring. Like a massed glimpse, continents-wide – from Devon to the Steppes?

Large classical choirs are in ageing long-term trouble with younger blood influx a never-ending challenge. To hear an adequate performance in the provinces by non-professional town singers of the extremely testing Belshazzar’s Feast is already a disappearing phenomenon. Will this ambitious performance prove Worthing’s last go? Just that possibility will ingrain its future recollection among Saturday’s audience. It could never be the accurate, super-polished result you’d pay top money (and arguably shelve your sense of disbelief) to hear in the capital or major cities of this country from the throats of the best available, recruited for scores of miles around.

Orchestrally, it’s a massive firework display in Walton technicolour, crackling, erupting, exploding with immense power that fuels fervour and ferocity in the voices. The WPO were revelling in it. The voices were at their limit but rising to the occasion and exceeding expectations.

Biblical Babylon’s crumbling glory collapses as King Belshazzar’s era of luxury and excess is axed in front of his own feasting thousands. I ask, would the public urging and final rejoicing, the barbaric baying massed street crowds, be perfectly pitched and regimented in strict metered utterance? And be conducted from a high balcony in the square, by someone using a musical score? Would the crowd have their own music books? The strain we heard was in that sense authentic. You could say cinematic. It was certainly exciting. At full stretch, a job well done.

The admirable sustained and elongated rehearsal work by these choirs and directors was rewarded by the big audience reaction. Which continued so thrilled that after the ovations for the baritone Stuart Orme and the quartet of music directors, when it was time lastly for the orchestral leader to depart – normally to applause often little more than a polite afterthought – Preston Yeo suddenly and extra deservedly this day became a hailed celebrity.

Richard Amey

Next Concerts - all at The Assembly Hall, tickets from wtm.uk

Saturday 20 April, Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra with The Merry Opera Company – 7.30pm; stage director John Ramster, conductor Dominic Grier. Mozart, opera The Magic Flute. Fully staged performance. After WPO’s concert above, how will the Assembly Hall look for this one?

Sunday 21 April, Worthing Symphony Orchestra ‘Dave Lee Quartet’ Concert – 2.45pm; conductor John Gibbons. Mozart, Overture to The Magic Flute; Peter Warlock, Capriol Suite; Robert Schumann, Konzertstücke for Four Horns and Orchestra (Dave Lee Quartet); Roussel, Sinfonietta Op52; Beethoven, Symphony No 5. Two Magic Flute Overtures in two days! A big weekend for the trombone.

Sunday 19 May, Worthing Symphony Orchestra – 2.45pm; conductor John Gibbons. Glinka, Overture Ruslan and Ludmilla; Scriabin, Reverie; Chopin, Piano Concerto No 2 (Maria Marchant, piano); Brahms, Symphony No 1. Gibbons’ favourite ‘get ’em going’ overture! Is this his first Scriabin? Thinking this must be the first Chopin No 2 with WSO since Varvara Tarasova won the 2015 Sussex International Piano Competition with it.

Sunday 9 June, Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra – 3pm; conductor Dominic Grier. Berlioz, overture Roman Carnival; Bruch, Violin Concerto No 1 (June Lee violin); Debussy, Prélude de l’Après Midi d’un Faune; Mussorgsky (orchestrated by Ravel), Pictures At An Exhibition.