Review: outstanding seasonal offering from Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra

An 81-year-old Ferring widow conducted Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra in Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride at this stirring event. Audience member Christine Roberts, bereaved only three weeks earlier, had the Assembly Hall cheering her on after she won the chance by accident with a raffle ticket she said she’d hoped would win her a box of chocolates.

Since Andre Previn on TV with the London Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s made orchestral conducting look easy, ordinary people have been dreaming of having a go themselves. Each year at their Christmas Concert, WPO randomly award someone the opportunity to take over conductor Dominic Grier’s baton to conduct Anderson’s Festive favourite.

And Mrs Roberts had bought hers immediately before mine: it could have been me! But that would have been an injustice. She told me she’d sung in the Worthing Philharmonic Choir under Jan Cervenka from 1968 for seven years and during the years since, has been a regular audience member at the concerts of both WPO and Worthing Symphony Orchestra.

In this annual WPO feast of multi-coloured orchestral musicians, many in red tops, sweaters and Santa or reindeer headgear, conductor in red bow tie and cummerbund, this was one of several cockle-warming features. In another, Grier also got to have a go – at singing. While directing an arrangement of Jule Styne’s Let It Snow, he took the mic and delivered the lyrics in his trained tenor. In yet another, Worthing Choral Society singer Charlie Barrow came downstage likewise but microphone-less in Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.

There was much more. Sompting Village Primary School Choir took their part in another performance of WPO flautist Marion Peskett’s Christmas Songs, of the Angel, the Shepherd, the Camel and of naturalist poet John Clare. Then the children stole the concert’s singing diction honours in When Children Ruled the World, from Whistle Down The Wind in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage-musical arrangement. The school passionately believes in performing arts in children’s full personal development.

There was yet more. An internationally performing 25-year-old German multi-musician from the Black Forest wrote to Grier a year ago, saying he’d moved to Worthing. Kai Vollprecht was quickly installed as WPO’s resident composer. Here came first fruits of that in his orchestral contribution to the afternoon, Christmas Is Here, with he, at the piano.

“I like to compose around a theme, word or idea, and take the listener on a narrative,” Vollprecht told me, after his new carol had conveyed the good news through its Christmas story. The singers exchange their wonder at what’s been heard, seen and now known. Then the music culminates in a final invitation to let the boy child in his adult fulfilment become real “to all who would believe”.

I expect a repeat come next year because this event is one without qualm about delivering again what captures and renews spontaneous and welcome Yuletide wonder in its listeners. Meantime, expect a bigger Vollprecht piece at a regular WPO concert, maybe later in 2024. “I played a lot in jazz and pop bands but there was something in the music I couldn’t find, which inspired me to write my own. I’m interested in combining the worlds of orchestral with the electronic.”

Under special lighting, cheery and excellent concert compere John Clayton then read the familiar poem The Night Before Christmas – reminding us of the many evocative lines that follow the renowned ‘nothing stirred, not even a mouse’. Then Worthing Choral Society, a cappella, gave Charles Wood’s venerable Ding Dong Merrily On High with the accomplishment of a lifetime’s acquaintance in singing of it. Clayton had already added the dimension of a reading with Luke’s account to the backdrop of Gary Fryer’s orchestral piece, The Nativity.

And still more. Grier pinpointed the desire for common cultural nostalgia at Christmas by including instrumental 1950s Broadway medleys from My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. These and his own recent Christmas scene-setting orchestral discoveries by Gary Fryer, plus staple Hely-Hutchinson and Anderson, established the concert’s individually special and uplifting festive musical sweep.

The audience, as well as joining in familiar congregational carols, and encountering James M. Stephenson’s A Holly And Jolly Singalong, had their own parts to sing in Good King Wenceslas (high and low, female and male) and Rutter’s The Twelve Days of Christmas (from Five Gold Rings! onwards).

See below the whole list of what was enjoyed. Reading this, do you get the community feel of this event? Christmas concerts by orchestras and big choirs were commonplace post-war and followed formulae that dulled before the century turned. My first visit to a 2020s WPO Christmas concert told me several things about where we Worthing British are now on this.

There remains and continues a need for Christmas to be celebrated. Not on TV but live, like this, in-person; secularly but with traditional material, the newer and the very new, and not only European; and in a way that the town’s own people don’t just willingly spectate, but partake and contribute. WPO provide this – with their own innovative drive and excellence enriching and extending expectations; and with their Conducting Sleigh Ride Raffle Prize opening their world up to anyone, in not merely a gesture but an outward sharing with its community.

This Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra pre-Christmas Concert and Worthing Symphony’s Viennese New Year are matching annual festive seasonal offerings in this town that are regionally outstanding in their artistic stature and social provision. And post-pandemic the warming public, in comparable attendance numbers, have shown they want both.

Broadway medleys (arr Russell Bennett): My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music.

Christmas music: Hely-Hutchinson, Prelude on Adeste Fideles; Anderson, A Christmas Festival, Sleigh Ride; Gary Fry, O Come O Come Emmanuel, The Nativity, Deck The Hall; A Most Wonderful Christmas (arr Robert Sheldon).

Songs: Kai Vollprecht, Christmas Is Here (world premiere); Rutter, Star Carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas; Marion Peskett (arr Fedor Vrtacnik), Angel’s Song, Shepherd’s Song, Camel’s Song, First Born; Berlin (arr Deyner), White Christmas; Jule Styne (arr Vrtacnik), Let It Snow (Dominic Grier vocal); Stephenson, A Holly And Jolly Singalong; When Children Ruled The World (arr A. Lloyd Webber).

Carols: Dong Dong Merrily on High (arr Wood; conductor Aedan Kerney); Good King Wenceslas; Hark The Herald (with Willcocks/Grier fanfare);

Readings: The Night Before Christmas, gospel accounts the Bethlehem head-count and the nativity.

Richard Amey

Next orchestral concerts

Worthing Symphony – Sunday 7 January (Assembly Hall, 2.45), New Year Concert; leader Julian Leaper, conductor John Gibbons. Their popular annual celebration of the operetta stage and dance floor favourites of vintage Vienna. Including Johnn Strauss II: Blue Danube Waltz, Thunder and Lightning Polka, Gypsy Baron Overture, Champagne Polka; Josef Strauss, Feuerfest, Chatterbox and Aquarella Polkas; Johann Strauss I, Radetsky March.

Worthing Symphony – Sunday 4 February (Assembly Hall, 2.45); leader Julian Leaper, conductor John Gibbons, piano soloist, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason. Dvorak, Czech Suite; Mozart, Piano Concerto No 23 in A K488; Dina Appeldoorn, Pastorale; Mendelssohn, Symphony No 4 ‘Italian’. The zippy alongside the zoozy beautiful, with a romantic Dutch piece echoing the Dvorak countryside feel between the essentially desirable Mozart and Mendelssohn delights of Vienna and Italia.

Worthing Philharmonic – Sunday 11 February (Assembly Hall, 3pm), Nordic Adventures Concert – A Hero’s Journey in Music; leader June Lee, conductor Dominic Grier, violin solo Preston Yeo. Nielsen, Helios Overture; Sibelius, Violin Concerto; Grieg, Peer Gynt exerpts; Alfven, Swedish Rhapsody No 2. A concert theme about to reveal itself, with chance for normal leader Preston Yeo to show his artistry in Scandinavian territory with which Philharmonic are increasingly identifying, and where Grier seems fully at home.

Tickets from WTM (01903 206206) or at the door

(Next International Interview Concert: Sunday 17 March (@rtsspaces@sionschool, Worthing; 3pm): concert details tbc)