{"id":4454,"date":"2018-07-03T09:31:17","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T08:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.larkreviews.co.uk\/?p=4454"},"modified":"2018-07-03T09:31:17","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T08:31:17","slug":"last-night-of-the-bexhill-proms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/?p=4454","title":{"rendered":"Last Night of the Bexhill Proms"},"content":{"rendered":"

De La Warr Pavilion, Sunday 1 July 2018<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

An hour with Rodgers and Hammerstein is, on a glorious summer evening by the sea, a welcome reminder of just what a skilled melodist and sophisticated orchestrator Richard Rodgers was.\u00a0 No wonder so many of his songs are right under our collective skin and deep in the loyal Bexhill audience members who enthusiastically filled the De La Warr Pavilion to the gunwhales for this concert.<\/p>\n

The first half took us through well chosen extracts from Oklahoma, The Sound of Music, Carousel<\/em> and South Pacific<\/em> \u2013 in a whole range of moods and formats. Rene Bloice-Sanders, a fine operatic tenor whose resonance and intonation is spot on, sang \u201cOh, What a Beautiful Morning\u201d and \u201cSome Enchanted Evening\u201d with carefully controlled warmth and nicely managed dynamic. Lucy Ashton\u2019s smiling personality comes through as strongly as her rich soprano voice and she seemed to be enjoying \u201cI\u2019m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair\u201d as much as the audience and choir were.<\/p>\n

The Bexhill Festival Choir, trained and led by Lorraine Barry, meanwhile did a sterling back-up job. Mostly they achieved a rich tone \u2013 with only occasional thinness in the more challenging bits \u2013 and it\u2019s encouraging to see amateur singers working with such verve, heads and eyes up.<\/p>\n

That confidence was at least in part due to Ken Roberts who is an assertively supportive conductor \u2013 giving the choir almost full attention when they\u2019re singing. He also coaxed a pretty good sound out of the 40 musicians in the orchestra although there were signs that some of the music was under-rehearsed. The Carousel Waltz<\/em> is a medley and every musician knows that these are some of the hardest things to bring off because the joins are so tricky \u2013 and in this performance the trickiness sometimes showed. Elsewhere in the concert some of the instrumental solo work would have benefited from a bit more work behind the scenes too.<\/p>\n

Ken Roberts \u2013 whose link chat was arguably unnecessary anyway \u2013 really should cut the ageist jokes too. I\u2019ve heard him before making unfunny comments about age and it does not go down well \u2013 probably the only moments in the whole evening when there was a momentary sour note.<\/p>\n

The second half provided the party that most people in the audience had come for, having bought or brought their little union flags ready to wave. Now, to be honest, all that jingoistic stuff, however tongue-in-cheek, isn\u2019t my cup of tea. I identify strongly with Elgar who loathed \u00a0Benson\u2019s words to Pomp and Circumstance March No 1<\/em>\u00a0 (although it didn\u2019t stop him enjoying the royalties). Nonetheless it was good to hear Coates\u2019s nostalgically familiar Calling All<\/em> Workers<\/em> played with crisp affection. It\u2019s fun too to hear Henry Wood\u2019s Sea Songs<\/em> played live because the orchestration is so colourful. And the audience was having a whale of a time.<\/p>\n

Susan Elkin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

De La Warr Pavilion, Sunday 1 July 2018 An hour with Rodgers and Hammerstein is, on a glorious summer evening by the sea, a welcome reminder of just what a skilled melodist and sophisticated orchestrator Richard Rodgers was.\u00a0 No wonder … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4454"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4455,"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4454\/revisions\/4455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.larkreviews.wickedlemon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}