CHILDREN from 10 primary schools and other being taught at home were hit for six in The Assembly Hall last week. Totalling nearly 800 including their teachers, they were bowled over by Worthing Symphony Orchestra and conductor John Gibbons.

Free of charge as usual, the 40-piece orchestra invited them for this fourth such new concert in the three years they have been established. The object? As composer Edward Elgar would have put it: to “knock ‘em flat” with their first experience of the sound of a live professional symphony orchestra.

And Elgar helped them, with three of his Enigma Variations about his friends – one a woman, Ysobel, whom Elgar was teaching to play the viola. Another about a blustering heavy-handed man he was teaching to play the piano. The other about an organist’s bulldog, Dan, jumping into the river to retrieve a stick and shaking himself dry on bank afterwards and barking in triumph.

The children, organised by music teaching and instruments hub, West Sussex Music, were welcomed into WSO’s huge den by Rosie Secker, who got the hundreds singing together. Then the orchestra, in formal evening dress, took the stage, and sprang straight out of trap, tambourine rattling, with the Cossack Dance from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker.

Gibbons, now 21 years the WSO artistic director and conductor, introduced the music. He smuggled a tuba and three sliding trombones into his own jokey arrangement of the famous movement of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony. William Alwyn got the WSO Scottish Dancing, then Dvorak took the children onto the night time of his New World.

The Suffolk Morris dancers of Doreen Carwithen got them going again. Sussex composer Paul Lewis suddenly had them trembling to his Abject Terror sequence from Spongebob Squarepants. Then Gibbons trained them to clap soft then loud to Strauss’s Radetsky March.

If there had been room to dance, a Highland Festival –cum-celidh-cum-military parade would surely have broken out among the children and teachers. But the dance floor lay beneath the seating so instead everyone sat, many children absorbed or transfixed, others semi- disbelieving, others jubilant and revelling at the fun and wonder of their experience.

All led up to a seriously exciting finish in which the WSO – the children now ready for anything – blazed, crashed and eventually strutted out the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

John Gibbons said: “It was thrilling to see a sea of enthusiastic young faces at the WSO Schools Concert on Thursday morning.

“It always brings joy to me and the orchestra to watch their excited reactions to each piece that we play for them – from the power of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, the subtle surprises in the Haydn and the beauty of the cor anglais in Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony.

“I was also pleased to meet a group of Home Educated children and their parents who had obviously got an enormous amount out of the concert.”

Cumbrian saxophonist Jess Gillam, a musical celebrity at 20, who has twice soloed with WSO, wrote to The Guardian this week. School music cuts, she warns, threaten fundamental life-giving creativity, understanding and enjoyment.

These occasional WSO concerts – this one the first for a year – constitute an educational oasis for so many school children. And what about the other thousands for whom there is no room in the hall?

Richard Amey

London Coliseum, Monday 11 February 2019

ENO and Philip Glass have become a powerful partnership, and in a time when audiences can be thin on the ground his works are immensely popular – and rightly so. Phelim McDermott’s immersive production of Akhnaten returned to the Coliseum last night in all its splendour and visual appeal.

When it first opened in 2016 the jugglers seemed like an interesting idea but possibly additional to the narrative. Seeing them again I was far more aware of the visual impact they make as a whole. Time and again they are like fountains, as if the Pharaoh is surrounding himself with light and life. The parallel with Louis XIV is subtly drawn and creates a stronger link with the ancient past that was at first obvious.

Musically this is as secure as ever, under Karen Kamensek’s deft work in the pit, controlling not only the large orchestra but the many choral groups scattered both on and off stage. Anthony Roth Costanzo returns as Akhnaten, his virile counter-tenor easily riding the large orchestral forces, but finding the gentle intimacy for his prayer at the end of Act Two. Rebecca Bottone returns as Queen Tye but Katie Stevenson is new to the role of Nefertiti, bringing a relaxed regality to her performance.

Tom Pye’s designs are as fine as I recall them to be and are persuasively lit by Gary James.

I wonder when we might see Einstein on the Beach?

Mote Hall, Maidstone, 2 February 2019

Three big works meant an enlarged orchestra (85 players) which included four percussionists, piano, celeste and harp as well as big string sections. And they were all in pretty good form despite the off-puttingly cold weather (which had cost the orchestra a rehearsal, Brian Wright informed us at the beginning) and the sparser than sometimes audience.

The star of the evening was American soprano April Fredrick who sang Wagner’s gut-wrenching Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde followed by Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. She is an unusually charismatic performer, engaging herself emotionally from the first bar of that arresting Wagnerian string passage – nicely played here by MSO players rising in a body to the occasion. By the time Fredrick actually began to sing (off-book) I was mesmerised by the power of her voice, her control and her communication of musical passion. She had me on the edge of my seat and in tears.

Strauss’s Four Last Songs is a very special valedictory work and it was quite a treat to hear (and see) this final homage to the composer’s soprano wife and their long marriage performed so well. Fredrick sang Fruhling (Spring) with smiling eyes and joy in every note before finding mellow melodiousness in the lovely low register, sostenuto notes of September. She then gave us poignant assertion of that beautiful tune in Beim Schlafengehen (Going to Sleep) which she sang through tearful smiles. Finally came a resolute, immaculately sung, sombre Im Abendrot (At Sunset) with Andy Bridges doing a splendid job with muted tuba and Wright managing the pianissimo ending with adept tenderness as it dies away.

And so to Shostakovich’s magnificent fifth symphony. Wright provided masses of D minor mystery in the opening movement and made sure we heard lots of orchestral colour including drama from the xylophone and fine flute and clarinet solos. Also noteworthy was the crisp pizzicato work in the allegretto and the sensitivity the orchestra achieved in the largo. Shostakovich, of course, knew a thing or two about contrast and Wright took the loud, rhythmic, grandiloquent finale at a suitably cracking pace. This striking movement is always a field day for the timpanist whose part is anything but subtle and Owain Williams was clearly enjoying himself. No wonder he looked exhausted at the end.

Susan Elkin