Fairlight Hall, Saturday 4 May 2019

Fumiya Koido, winner of this year’s Hastings International Piano Concerto Competition, made a fleeting visit at the weekend but was here just long enough to squeeze in a morning concert in the recital room at Fairlight Hall.

He opened with Bach’s BWV849 from the Well-Tempered Clavier giving it a romanticised gloss which hinted at the riches to come even if it might not have been to more puritan tastes. Brahms’ Variations on an original theme Op21 suited him far better and he brought great fluidity and sensitivity to his phrasing, and the sudden moments of power and authority. There was a surprising lightness of touch in the opening of Beethoven’s Sonata No 31 with a hauntingly beautiful central Adagio before the crisper tones of the Fuga.

After the interval, and a chance to take in the stunning views from the terrace, he returned to Brahms with the Four Pieces Op119. Here he brought us fine diversity of texture and energy, with moments of superb calm and reflection. The final Rhapsody was probably the most familiar work in the recital and very well received.

The performance ended with works by Scriabin which are obviously close to his heart. The Sonata No2 Op19 was again beautifully shaped, the overarching structure of the opening Andante crystal clear before the onslaught on the final Presto. Scriabin’s Vers la flamme is a more complex piece and a strange choice for the end of the concert and was starkly in contrast to the softly drifting encore though even that caught us all unawares as it launched into an unexpectedly enthusiastic conclusion.

A pleasing morning and let us hope we hear from him again soon.

St Mary in the Castle, Friday 3 May 2019

Hastings Philharmonic’s The Challenge of Change came to an exciting climax on Friday with the largest professional orchestra the town has seen in many years and the final of the Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Composition Competition.

The two familiar works which formed the buffer zone for the new compositions proved absolute winners. Aysen Ulucan was the fiery soloist in Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. Fast, heart-on-sleeve and deeply romantic, her playing was often indulgent in all the right ways, sweeping us away on a cloud of intense, immersive emotion. The applause at the end of the first movement was genuinely spontaneous and quite justified. The finale was exhilaratingly fast and accurate, the orchestra keeping up with ease as all swept towards the climax.

At the end of the concert, while the judges were making their decision, we heard Stravinsky’s 1919 Firebird Suite. The range of colour here was very impressive as was the dynamic impact. Solo voices were very effective, with harp and bassoon particularly noteworthy.

The competition limited composers to about eight minutes each and their starting point was the life of Ataturk, whose anniversary fell in 2018, when the competition was launched. 136 composers responded from whom six were chosen to complete their works for performance on 3 May. In an informal session prior to the concert four of the composers spoke about their work and Marcio da Silva explained the brief rehearsal time the orchestra had had with the six new scores.

Though taking very different approaches to the Turkish leader, the scores had a remarkable similarity in outcome, using a wide range of tonal and dynamic effects – emotional impact seeming to be more important than any narrative development or melodic engagement. The audience were asked to vote for their favourite which went to American composer Carlos Bandera and the judges panel chose Welsh composer Luciano Williamson’s Kemal at Gallipoli as the overall winner. His atmospheric piece focused on the night before the charge at Gallipoli.

Hastings Philharmonic goes from strength to strength and their next event could hardly be more different with an evening of English Madrigals at Christ Church, St Leonards, on 22 June.

Photos © Peter Mould 

Kino-Teatr, St Leonards, 1 May 2019

The second event brought us to the Kino-Teatr and a chamber music recital of works by female composers. The concept of change was more elusive here though as with the previous evening it was the structure of the pieces rather than the content which drew attention to itself. Fanny Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio gives the weight of the melodic development to the piano and violin, often leaving the cello as a bass line support, whereas Lili Boulanger’s two piano trios actually open with the cello and seem better balanced. Their acerbic writing, after the earlier romanticism, was also challenging and engaging.

The evening had opened with a sonata for violin and piano by Clara Schumann, followed by her Sechs lieder Op13. Counter-tenor Alex Pullinger seemed an unusual choice for this song cycle – his voice is closer to a genuine male soprano than many counter-tenors – and rises to the top register with ease. He seemed rather more at home with Rebecca Clarke’s songs, which sit comfortably in the late romantic world of Vaughn Williams and Finzi.

The performers were all familiar to Hastings Philharmonic, with HIPCC winner Roman Kosyakov at the piano, Angela Jung, violin, and Will Robertson, cello.

Though there was no problem with the performance, the audience were left very much in the dark as to what was actually about to happen. The single programme sheet simply listed generic works and composers, with no indication of their actual titles or number of movements. As a result we had no idea when a work was completed and had to wait until the soloists turned to us and smiled to show it was over! Given the intimacy of the venue, it might have been easier for the soloists to at least tell us what they were about to play and, where the song cycles were concerned, how many songs we were to hear. A small matter but one which could so easily have been attended to.

The Beacon, Hastings, 30 April 2019

Hastings Philharmonic has launched an exciting new venture this spring which brought an enthusiastic gathering together at The Beacon for an evening of Poetry and Music. Under the banner of The Challenge of Change musician Marcio da Silva and poet Antony Mair approached the concept of change – but did so from very different perspectives.

The five musical items were drawn from the full range of Western classical music, starting in the modal world of Gregorian Chant and evolving through polyphony and classical harmony to the fractured discords of Luciano Berio. The focus was primarily on the way musical structure has changed over the centuries. While the notes and the voices remain essentially the same, the way the scores are organised becomes increasingly complex and demanding upon both the singers and the audience.  Hastings Philharmonic Chamber Choir, singing unaccompanied, demonstrated with considerable skill the intricacies of the writing as well as its emotional impact.

For the poets, change was a matter of content rather than form. The eight poets involved had been asked to draw on something from the canon and to use this alongside some of their own work to highlight different perspectives of change. The content itself was fascinating, ranging across having a baby, the menopause, ending a relationship, coming out to growing old. What may have been surprising was the apparent lack of any relationship to changes in the structure of verse over the last five hundred years as reflected in the music. The only item which could really be considered to be from the canon was Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot, and even this was gently dismissed as old-fashioned. Though the content of many of the poems was engaging – Robin Houghton on menopause being particularly so, and Judith Shaw’s ending of relationships – it was difficult to assess how the poems worked as poems without seeing them on the page. As virtually everything, with the exception of Sandy Andrews’ Japanese verses, seemed to be in free verse, there was little sense of how poetry itself has changed in the way that music certainly has.

As an opening gambit this was a splendid evening and one worth repeating, if only to investigate more deeply the strong connections between music and verse, and perhaps the way in which poetic form affects musical structure.