REVIEW: Worthing Symphony Orchestra in concert with Celtic Connections

Be assured. Ian Scott of Perth, Scotland, is one of the most friendly, convivial, helpful and welcoming orchestral musicians on a performing day I’ve known. But his profile portrait in Sunday’s concert programme magazine, despite his laughter lines, was a trifle forbidding. Eyes narrowed against the sunlight, tight-lipped, half a smile, half a clansman’s gritty battlefield countenance. His role this day involved personal sacrifice. Condemned to his dressing room all afternoon until the final piece, the Tuaranga Concerto, dedicated to him by freshly octogenarian Sussex composer, the Cheery Chuckling Irrepressible Paul Lewis. For Scott, no enjoyment taking part in any of the forerunning six pieces, several with delicious clarinet parts. Worse still, excluded from Wordsworth’s variations on With A Hundred Pipers and An’ A’ – the song celebrating Bonnie Prince Charlie’s capture of Sassenach border town, Carlisle.

Principal clarinet of the WSO, Royal Ballet and Rambert, guest principal with the London and Royal Philharmonics, BBC Symphony and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Scott inhabits the orchestral high lands. This was his second solo appearance with WSO, his first the Weber Concertino in October 2021 after pandemic lockdown ended. Consummate ease and aplomb simply oozed out of him throughout Lewis’ three memoirs from a romantic New Zealand holiday – of idyllic pastoral morning walking, a mountain sunset, then musical theatre dance’s pranks and japes.

A work spawned in NZ by Lewis buying Ian Scott’s CD of British Concertos, Scott premiered it with Izmir State SO Turkey in 2011. It’s vintage Lewis, the film and TV series composer of classic Monty Python, Sponge Bob Square Pants and Hairy Bikers hilarity. The walking is jauntily happy with skipping rhythms and sunny skies before the home door closes behind the returning couple. Long-breathing strings spread the sundown for the clarinet to decorate and intensify until Julian Leaper’s intimate solo violin joins in conversation and night descends.

Bouyant tunes and steps, sparked by Baycourt Theatre show’s jazzy ‘Jitterbug’ dance number, have the excited clarinet chattering, fluttering, sliding and squealing in delight. Richard Watson takes a sudden spotlight as a solo double bass resuscitating the energy after a late pause for breath. And soon the surprise, fun ending is a gesture only a visual composer like Lewis would dare. He has the orchestra finally sinking to the floor in collective comic exhaustion. Soon, no doubt, to resume the dancing after a rejuvenating cocktail or, in Scott’s case, a Māori whiskey?

Paul told me: “As a composer, I’m a populariser and an entertainer. I see no harm in making people happy. I’m not tormented by composer’s problems. It’s just as valid to say ‘I’m happy’. Why is it superficial to be cheerful? Ian had a big solo part in Pandora’s Box, my score for the 1928 silent film about Berlin low life, commissioned by the Royal Ballet in 2007, and Ian played it so brilliantly that I wanted to write something for him.”

Lewis is a composer for wellbeing today. “TV’s taught me to send the audience away whistling the tune, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t in the concert hall.” Some 20% of WSO fans missed this medicine, and by-passed this concert which captured the WSO in charming domestic mood, spreading the message of spring hours after the clocks sprang.

This needed only 24 easy-going musicians– 16 strings, 7 winds and a single light percussionist – to convey the signs of re-blooming Scottish heather, spring’s precious first cuckoo (will we hear one at all this year?) beside Fred Delius’ flowing French river Loing, Danny Boy’s Air richly-harmonised, and Moeran’s madrigalian melodies seasoned with Norfolk and Irish herbs. Moeran, Sir Karl Jenkins and Scott being Celts, the concert theme also had folksong linkages.

The WSO cast variously waited in the wings to take part. Gower native Jenkins’ Palladium was for strings only. For the Hundred Pipers variations the winds came onstage, plus a singular principal horn Dave Lee (he, curiously, force of habit, signalling downbeats as if leading an invisible horn section). Then it was full ensemble for the Wagner, percussion absent for Delius, but then just two horns with the strings for the Grainger. One wondered if coming next was Haydn’s Farewell Symphony finale – during which the musicians depart one by one. But the two pieces more flimsily Celtic-connected grabbed special attention. In its Diamonds advert soundtrack context, Jenkins’ Palladium’s opening movement can sound over-assertive and contrived. In concert, no. Here it makes sense in celebrating Italian architect Andrea Palladio’s ethos of quite severe mathematical order and harmony.

After the opening march, in the slow movement leader Leaper’s solo violin became articulate and concludingly shared quiet conversation with 2nd violins principal Jacqueline Roche. Fast tempo and vigour resumed, with the WSO dancing in rock-hard squareness with motor rhythms foretelling the onset of minimalism. I have been waiting in long frustration to hear a live performance of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. Young parents, it should be on your children’s sleeptime playlist! Here is Wagner in new fatherly bliss, creating a surprise birthday gift for his wife (Liszt’s daughter) and baby son to hear inside their house, the musicians playing downstairs, the trumpeter legendarily having rehearsed his part secretly on a boat out in the middle of a lake. In the music, parental sighs and ‘Ahhs’; sleeping and drowsy awakening; the frequent pulsing of the new mother’s joyful, exhausted heart; hints of forthcoming Siegriedian opera heroism (perhaps, too, in the son’s real life?), an heraldic climax topped by the gleam of that trumpet, and a prolonged preparation for sleep.

To include Siegfried Idyll among these other works instrumentally, John Gibbons would be asking principal trumpet Tim Hawes to drive from London to Worthing to play for just a few minutes, incurring full fee. Instead, the musical director kept percussionist Chris Blundell on stage and when he topped the moment with his glockenspiel in the trumpet’s place, instead it married perfectly with the idea of enchantment with infanthood in half-light. Jane Hanna and Dave Lee needed to be in top form on their unforgiving French horns in this exposed situation of being, arguably unlike the trumpet, musically indispensible in a preciously small ensemble. They were.

Anyone who sorely missed this latest WSO golden memory landmark performance will need to either wait years for perhaps, just perhaps, a return, or raise a collective clamour Gibbons will be unable ignore. Unless, that is, like Sunday, WSO decide sometimes to become ‘Worthing Chamber Orchestra’ once or twice a season, not only to balance the hand-to-mouth books, but to persuade their heavyweight-loving fans that greatness and uplift from music also comes from starker instrumental numbers, and less proves more.

Meantime, when WSO go large again in April, be ready for your next telling Ian Scott clarinet moment. It’s light years away from any Scots victory or defeat. It’s in English music! Elgar’s slow movement ends in magical quiet with the goodnight caress of his but two gentle notes. If necessary, you can sneeze or cough half a minute after that.

Richard Amey

Next WSO Concert (season closer at The Assembly Hall, 2.45pm) Sunday 23 April; conductor John Gibbons, soloist Arta Arnicane piano. Walton, Crown Imperial; Harold Whibley, Sussex Overture; Rachmaninov, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini; Elgar, Symphony No 1 in Ab. The popular Latvian pianist from Zurich rejoins the team with whom she won the inaugural Sussex International Piano Competition here in 2010, and she has performed with several times since – even as an emergency celeste player.

Gibbons says he programmed the Queen’s coronation piece Crown Imperial before the nation picked the following month for their King’s accession. Sublime anticipation! This chap Whibley died in Worthing in 1984, leaving this obscure Overture the audience will implicitly trust is worth hearing under Gibbons’ baton. But the orb and sceptre of this concert is Gibbons and Elgar – the former being safe hands for the latter. A truly big piece that turned European heads so suddenly they got neck cricks. Not a work provincial orchestras often dare, but all-pro WSO are among the best, and this conductor is about to raise his stock. Don’t miss it. Tickets

Next Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra Concert (at Assembly Hall, 3pm) Sunday June 11, conductor Dominic Grier, soprano Nadine Benjamin MBE*). Wagner, *Prelude & Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde; Richard Strauss, *Four Last Songs; Tchaikovsky, Symphony No 5 in E minor. A star soloist singing two enormous classics, back to back – plus the biggest favourite of Tchaikovsky’s seven symphonies. In the film and exhibition worlds they’d label this concert a blockbuster. The inaugural Worthing Festival initiated by the new (first) Labour Council from June 10-18 got lucky with this giant offering. Tickets

Next International Interview Concert (at the @artspaces@sionschool venue, Gratwicke Rd, Worthing BN11 4BL; 3pm) Sunday 2 April: Maya Irgalina solo piano: Guest Interviewer, Ask A Question, Mystery Music Spot and a remarkable, full programme of (not in order): Ravel, Une Barque sur l’Ocean; Federico Mompou, Le Lac; Nikolai Kapustin, Paraphrase on ‘Aquarela do Brazil’; Jazz Variations; Uehara, The Tom and Jerry Show; Beethoven, ‘’Tempest’ Piano Sonata; Schubert (transcribed Liszt): Ständchen, Der Doppelgänger, Die Erlkönig. Impressionist, entertaining jazzy-classical, Classical-romantic. Conversations with Maya Irgalina and interactive features in between. Value for money! Tickets