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