Cards on the table: I have no doctrinal religious beliefs but that doesn’t mean I can’t have the sort of spiritual experience which comes with being deeply moved by a glorious performance of JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion, arguably the best musical presentation of this story of all time. And the combined forces of a chamber version of BPO split into two orchestras including two organs plus double choir and six soloists gave a magnificent account of the work.

The performance was 95 percent excellent but I am not going to dwell here on the occasional ragged entry or the few bars here and there when the chorus, or a pair of soloists, wasn’t quite together. Such minor mishaps are inevitable in a live performance of a work of this length and complexity. Instead I shall focus, in no particular order on some of the things which made it a really rather special afternoon.

First was the singing of Matthew Brook as Christus. He brings enormous gravitas along with vulnerabity. He delivers bottom notes with such measured richness that at times it sounds tearful and the listener feels every shred of his agony. I have rarely heard Eli, Eli lama, lama a sabthani delivered with such painful power. And what a good idea to position him behind the orchestra in front of the choir stage right with James Oxley as a fine Evangelist opposite him at stage left.

Then there was Peter Adams, principal cello in the first orchestra – lead accompanist for much of the recitative. He plays with outstandingly sensitive panache and the cello and organ working together as Jesus dies was haunting. For ja fleilich wil in uns das Fleisch und Blut he laid down his cello and picked up a bass viol – some impressively nifty finger work and an arrestingly beautiful sound.

Countertenor, Patrick Terry gave us three fine arias in the second half . I am mildly synaesthetic about voices and voice types and, for me, Terry’s voice is cream with faint beige freckles – as opposed to Oxley’s clear azure blue high tenor.

I shed tears when bass, Ashley Riches, got to the lilting 6|8 of Mach dich, mein Herz rein. It’s one of the best moments in the piece anyway coming as it does at the end of the Crucifixion section and immediately before the Burial section. Riches sang it with wistful, valedictory warmth – pretty special.

And so to the huge choir. The acoustic in the Dome is such that, at this performance, the sound resounded without the choral singing ever being overborne by the orchestra (although some of the solo work from the front was sometimes less well balanced). Occasionally split into choir 1 and Choir 2 and with small solos being sung by six singers near the front, Brighton Festival Chorus was impressive. The sound is variously rich, angry, powerful and, especially in the chorales, colourfully blended.

Conducting from an organ and without baton, Robert Howarth stood at the front and kept this huge juggernaut on track – gently giving prominence to the relevant instruments and singers without ever losing a shred of the piece’s coherence and message. St Matthew Passion is much more than the sum of its parts and this performance really brought that out.

Brighton Philharmonic’s programming, is becoming ever more imaginatively adventurous under Music Director Joanna MacGregor’s leadership. I don’t remember a choral concert of this magnitude in the past. Please let’s have more of them.

Susan Elkin

Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve just been a witness to something rather special? On Saturday evening I was overwhelmed by that sensation. The programme featured a Premiere performance of a piece by Christopher Churcher as winner of the Musica Viva Composition Competition and the Southbank Sinfonia which is made up of thirty-five of the best of this year’s conservatoire leavers. These chosen leavers make up the Sinfonia for one year, giving a chance for the talented musicians to showcase themselves and to work together in a unique ensemble for a year under the leadership of Mark Forkgen. The concert I was witnessing was therefore made up entirely of young people, apart from its conductor and the pianist for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4., the enormously talented Robert Taub, Professor of Music at Plymouth University, who featured in an earlier review of mine. And what a treat that was to see those focused, earnest faces and listen to their already extraordinary talents.

The programme began with nineteen year-old Churcher’s Premiere, called Breakwater. For this piece he had chosen to describe in a very visual way the musical journey of the River Tamar from source to Plymouth Sound, until it reaches the end, at the Breakwater which divides the Sound from the open sea. The composition conjures up strong images throughout, starting with soft vibrations from the string section, gradually blending with the woodwind which gives a sense of expectation as the water moves from a trickle to a gathering of volume and expectation. Gradually urgency increases until you hear the water overflowing the lip of the upper reaches, the violas creating drips and drops in a charmingly light-hearted touch against the background of the other instruments, until the river swells further in stature and joyfulness when the brass section joins in. Finally, as it heads towards the sea it grows and expands until a more peaceful conjunction of waters is reached.

Churcher’s programme notes give detailed descriptions of how he started from visuals, using drone images, before ‘translating’ the visuals into an orchestral score. The result is a delight. This is a young composer who, although this was his first orchestral piece, has already composed a number of choral pieces. At present in his first year at Oxford, I shall enjoy seeing and hearing his development over time, for this is a young man who will go far.

After the quite short introductory piece, we moved on to two works by Beethoven – his Piano Concerto No.4 in G major and, after an interval, his Symphony No 7 in A Major.
The Piano Concerto, featuring Robert Taub as soloist, was a good complementary work to follow Churcher’s Breakwater. The first movement is full of speedy runs up and down the keyboard, as if that river we ‘saw’ earlier had reached a still-urgent maturity. There is an unusual opening featuring the piano alone, followed by orchestra without piano for a fair length of time, until the piano re-enters. Playing with the central motif, it is largely a treble sound that characterises this movement, those instruments with a lower register only joining in when there are crescendos so that, like a river, the piano flows along between the banks of the orchestral instruments.

There is a clear connection between first and second movements as the demanding octaves from the piano towards the end of that movement are picked up by the first entrance of brass and timpani in this second movement but with the third movement we move from the peaceful almost religious sounds of the end of the second movement into joy and playfulness once more. Beethoven, emphasised by Taub’s interpretation, plays with speed and momentum, introducing abrupt changes in both as well as continuing to develop the main motif first introduced in the first movement.

Robert Taub, as clear and enthusiastic a teacher as he is a performer, pointed out the fact that the work should be seen as one organic whole, each movement complementing and enhancing the one before. As before, I was struck by Taub’s quiet command of his instrument and, because this was not as last time, a solo performance, I was also struck by how closely conductor and soloist worked together, Conductor Mark Forkgen, watching and listening quietly to Taub’s changes of pace and translating these to the attentive orchestra.

The final work was the Symphony No 7, so no more soloist but instead we could admire the togetherness of the orchestra and the way that Forkden guided them through the piece. Also noticeable was the quiet encouragement he gave throughout to the players, turning from one side to the other so that every instrumentalist felt kindly observed and encouraged.

Here is another playful piece, full of joy and jokey moments, such as the hiccupping rhythms and falling broken arpeggios characteristic of this work. The slight feeling of unbalance these rhythmic jokes lend to the work add to the sensation that this is a youthful piece, a helter-skelter, though it was composed towards the end of Beethoven’s life when his deafness was gathering momentum and he was beset by problems. Not that there aren’t darker moments, sudden ominous crescendos, but these are lightened by happy tunes full of sunlight and a feeling of spring and the first movement ends in triumph, a celebration of victory over the darkness.

The tiptoeing quietness of the second movement, with a central melody weaving in and out, creating a golden mesh of notes which rise in volume until the whole fabric is revealed, gives way to restless rhythms that dip in and out of fugue and even round-like structuring. Contrast this with the last two movements, the delicacy and lightness of touch of the third movement – even from the French Horns, where such controlled softness is not easy – who bat the romp between groups of instruments, strings to woodwind and back, leading to the crazy helter-skelter of the last movement. Here the instruments appear to chase each other in a catch-as-catch-can, chasing each other up and down interspersed with heavily accented, dramatic falters and breaks. The whole movement doesn’t sound so much like a happy tumble as an over-balancing, falling and staggering until it speeds up to a breathless end.

All of this was managed beautifully by a conductor who knew where he was going and how to extract every nuance out of this difficult work. The slower than usual beginning made sense as it led to the tumbling triumph of the end and emphasised the youthful exuberance of the whole evening’s entertainment. A wonderful and exhilarating evening.

Jeni Whittaker

There can be few more uplifting ways of finishing a concert than with a moving, joyous account of Beethoven’s glorious Symphony no 7, recently found in a poll to be the most popular of all his symphonies.

Brian Wright treated the first movement as a fairly gentle vivace which allowed all the glorious detail to sail through with some especially lovely work from flautist Anna Binney whose flute clearly agrees with Wagner that this symphony is the apotheosis of the dance. The allegretto, arguably one of the best movements Beethoven ever wrote with that insistent rhythm and its built-up layers, was sonorous and tender. And the finale was played with as much brio and slick panache as I’ve heard it played anywhere. Earworms were the order of the day during my drive home to London.

Of course the Saint-Saens’s first cello concerto, played in this performance without breaks, is much less well known. Soloist, Maciej Kutakowski has a deceptively relaxed stage persona – frequently catching the eye of the leader or conductor with a half smile. But his insouciant manner belies the passion of his playing. In a piece full of contrasts we got some magnificent lyrical playing especially in the third movement and the lightness of the cello sound over muted strings in the central allegretto was expertly judged. Then, after joking pleasantly with the audience he played, as an encore, Grazyna Bacewicz’s Polish Caprice which is short, snappy and enjoyably virtuosic.

The evening had begun with Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale. Effectively a mini-symphony with a movement missing, it’s a piece which doesn’t get as many outings as it should so well done MSO for introducing it to audience members who might not have heard it before. I admired the resolute playing, especially strings, in the overture; the dynamic colour and gentle warmth which Wright stressed in the second movement and the melodious energy of the finale.

Susan Elkin

Well you can’t fault BPO for sailing into unfamiliar waters (and forests, fields, mountains and deserts) in its mission to attract new audiences. And as a strategy, it worked because the Dome was fuller than I’ve seen it in a long time for this programme of Rolf Wallin, John Luther Adams, Philip Glass, Jonny Greenwood and Einojuhani Rautavaara with accompanying screened visuals by artist Kathy Hinde.

It is very unusual for me to attend and review a concert in which almost every note is unfamiliar but, apart from Glassworks, which occupied the prime spot immediately before the interval, and with which I have nodding acquaintance, that’s how it was on this occasion.

Both the John Luther Adams (born 1953) works were hauntingly played. His four songbird songs make haunting use of two piccolos and ambulant ocarinas with lots of evocative percussion – all front stage in half light. Later his Drums of Winter for four drummers was beautifully played with percussionists almost dancing around their instruments. And how they manage those complex cross rhythms with such precision I shall never know.

Glassworks is, of course, where you’d start if you wanted to teach students what minimalism actually is. Scored for 12 players plus piano and harpsichord it comprises five quite colourful movements each in a different mood but all based on characteristic repeated motifs with minimal changes. It’s either your thing or it isn’t. The woman behind me who’d clearly never heard it before muttered at the end “Well that was relaxing”, I suspect she meant boring. It was, however, very well played especially by the cellos in the fourth movement below the clarinet solo which conductor Sian Edwards really brought out. I wonder, irreverently, though how many audience members thought we were heading into the Downton Abbey theme music when they head Joanna MacGregor, BPO’s artistic director, playing the opening section on piano?

Also in the programme was Wallin’s Twine, a marimba/xylophone duet with some excitable glissandi played with panache towards the end and a suite of music from Johnny Greenwood’s score for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood in which there were some suitably chilling moments especially in the first movement Open Spaces. And the evening ended with a concerto for birds by Rautavaara – shades of The Pines of Rome as it might have been if written by Sibelius. The lyrical middle movement was warmly played. This final item was the only time in the whole concert that we saw and heard a full orchestra.

So what about Kathy Hinde’s contribution to all this? Throughout the concert the audience watched a big screen at the back of the stage on which unfolded continuously changing images. Often it was birds because that’s her speciality. We saw lots of vultures during the Greenwood and cranes and murmurations of starlings during the Rautavaara – for example. Now I’m certain that Hinde is excellent at what she does but if I go to a concert I want to listen to the music and not be distracted by anything else. The trouble with visual accompaniment is that it dominates other senses as Walt Disney knew all too well when he made Fantasia. Moreover I like to see the players and, in order for the screen to shine, the lighting was such at this concert that instrumentalists were in shadow. No wonder we had to wait at the beginning of the second half while a back stage person checked that all the stand lights were working.

This concert was, moreover, not quite as long as the famous Beethoven marathon on 22 December 1808 in Vienna but it ran until 10.15 which is too long in my view. It would have been better with one, or even two, works fewer. I wasn’t particularly surprised that the elderly couple in front of me left at the interval.

Susan Elkin

The Musicians of all Saints is a professional group founded to bring live music to Lewes although they also play elsewhere. I had heard their strings section before in a Brighton church so I was interested to hear them on home turf. The All Saints Centre is an imaginative church conversion within which the main space has a warm and clear acoustic along with good sight lines.

The trouble with that clarity is that you can hear every note from every section and the occasional, inevitable bit of raggedness or scratchy playing resounds as strongly as the excellent passages. And it was a distinctly bijoux chamber group on this occasion – four first violins, three seconds, two violas, three celli and one double bass – so there was absolutely nowhere to hide.

We began with the ever-charming Mozart’s Divertimento in B flat K137. I really liked the sparkiness that Andrew Sherwood found in the central allegro and the third movement used dynamic contrast attractively but there were woolly moments in the opening andante until it settled.

There was some confusion about the playing order which then departed from the printed programme giving us three works before the interval and one after. So next came Elgar’s Serenade for Strings – pleasingly rhythrnic in the opening movement and a larghetto with plenty of Elgarian plangency. In many ways the middle movement here was the high spot of the concert. It’s much harder to control than the outer movements but it was beautifully played here with some fine work from the violas.

I’m a sucker for bassoon concertos – I love that mellow reediness. But this one was new to me. Lev Knipper, a Russian, died in 1970 the same year that this concerto premiered so it must have been one of his last works. Although Ian Glen seemed to play it well enough, I found it a rather dreary, samey work apart from the lively second movement which has some delightful 3|4 melody from the bassoon with strings underneath – and the sound was nicely balanced. Glen is, we were told, recovering from a serious cycling accident which probably accounts for his very nervous start in duet with the principal cello. All credit, to him, as Sherwood observed to the audience, for being back at work so soon.

Finally, after the interval, we got Janacek’s Suite for Strings with its six short contrasting movements. I particularly enjoyed the plaintive lyricism Sherwood brought out in the second movement and the precision of the deceptively simple folk dance-like melody in the third. The fifth movement is an adagio but was played at lento in this performance. Its very exposed legato passages were warmly played and pretty tight. Shereen Godber is evidently a strong leader.

On a personal note, I’ve been attending classical music concerts for many (best not to count) decades and have been reviewing them for 30 years. This was the first time I’ve ever been “told off” by a fellow audience member for unacceptable behaviour. The person in front objected to the sound of my turning an occasional page in my notebook. She barked “shhh” at me while the music was playing and then said in the interval, “”Stop rustling those papers, I can’t stand it”. I’m still reflecting on whether or not she was justified. Thoughts, anyone?

Susan Elkin

A joyful evening with a warm intimate atmosphere, despite the large audience, was created last night by the Welsh National Opera Orchestra on tour. Different members of the orchestra stepped forward and told us about each piece, often with entertaining anecdotes and jokes. This all added to the fun and sense of celebration, fed by those most sparkling of melodies, familiar to all, which enlivened nineteenth century Vienna and still casts a sprinkling of good-humoured magic today.

The large orchestra was led by concertmaster David Adams, the lead violinist who kept the orchestra together with his bow, his head and even his feet at times. Just occasionally, where there were extreme changes in pace, he allowed the other first violinists to hold the fort and stood up to conduct for a few bars. This, however, was an orchestra used to each other and the programme, who were admirably together in both timing and obvious enjoyment.

The programme began with three pieces from Johann Strauss II’s The Gypsy Baron. It made for a rousing opening and featured the first of five arias sung by baritone Dafyyd Allen, a recent graduate of the Royal College of Music and finalist in the 2022 Welsh Singers Competition. From the quality and variety of his singing tone this is a young man destined to go far. Here was a swashbuckling opening from the Gypsy Baron himself, but My yearning, My Obsession from Korngold’s The Dead City showed Allen’s range and ability to show tenderness, while his rendering of the character of the famous violinist and composer Paganini, well known as a lover of women, captures the character of the boastful lothario well in Lehar’s aria ‘Girls were made to love and kiss’ from the opera Paganini.

Works by Johann Strauss II took up the most part of the programme but there were two pieces by Josef Strauss, including a polka called Chatterboxes, based on the prattling of the composer’s own ten-year-old daughter. The piece was a lot of fun and sounded exactly like its title.

Fun was the key word for the whole evening. Particular high spots were another Johann Strauss II piece, a polka entitled In Krapfen’s Woods, which featured a cuckoo and other trilling birds, rendered by a soloist who moved around the audience and ended up cuckooing in the ears of the cellos and double basses. At the end the rousing and familiar Radetzky March by Johann Strauss, taken at a rattling pace, had the cellists whirling their instruments like ballerinas on points.

Hard not to envisage whirling waltzers too dancing around the floor during the famous Blue Danube, a piece of music even envied by Strauss’s friend Johannes Brahms who, when Strauss dedicated his waltz Be Embraced, You Millions to him, wrote in Strauss’s daughter’s autograph book the first two musical lines of The Blue Danube followed by the words ‘Alas! Not by Johannes Brahms.’ There can be no greater accolade for a piece of music that has delighted millions and is famous the world over.

I had friends who didn’t want to come to such a ‘light’ programme but they lost a treat by missing it, and luckily there were many who came just because the pieces are familiar, knowing that a live performance is so very different always from a recording: so much more alive and exciting, fed by the build up of concentration from players and audience into a fizzing celebration. We all left feeling, as the concert master David Adams had said when he introduced Be Embraced, You Millions, that we’d received a warm hug to take us through a cold January and beyond.

Jeni Whitaker

The second half of Nodoka Okisawa’s debut concert with the Philharmonia gave us the freshest most thoughtful account of Brahms Symphony No 1 I’ve heard in a long time. She has a neatly confident conducting style and is, evidently full of ideas.

This performance gave us, for example, crystal clear pizzicato in the opening movement (and later in the symphony), a superbly evocative oboe solo in the andante and leader Zsolt-Tihamer Visontay’s solo at the end of the andante was beautiful especially in the final arpeggio – dying away into the silence. Moreover, very much her own woman, she took the fourth movement unusually slowly and milked the emotional “Brahmsian” moments, especially the horn solo, for all they were worth – and that’s not fashionable. Okisawa is very good at judging pauses and balancing lightness with lush legato. All in all this 1868 symphony was made to sound newly minted – 155 years after its premiere and that’s quite an achievement.

Visontay, incidentally, is a fascinating player and leader to watch. He is too tall to fold easily into his chair and he dances continually with his feet (clad on this occasion in very shiny shoes) which often leave the ground as the musical drama soars. And his rapport with the orchestra is warmly palpable.

Before the interval Michael Collins seduced the audience with a spirited account of Weber’s clarinet concerto – lots of creamy F minor. Collins, every inch a chamber musician, constantly turned to conductor or leader reminding me that it’s actually quite unnatural to play a concerto facing the audience with your back to the people you’re working with. He found oodles of lyrical beauty in the Mozartian middle movement, especially in the duet with the horn, and I enjoyed the merry insouciance he brought to the very familiar Rondo: Allegretto.

The concert opened with a relatively subdued performance of Weber’s Overture, Der Frieschutz. It took the orchestra, working with a conductor who is new to it, a few moments to settle and there were one or two ragged entries but from then on this concert was both interesting and arresting.

Susan Elkin