Two world premières and new-to-Rochdale arrangements of classics enriched the musical feast served up in style in Rochdale Parish Church on 7 May by the New London Chamber Ensemble at this penultimate concert in the Rochdale Music Society’s 2010-11 season.
The ensemble members, Robert Manasse (flute), Melanie Ragge (oboe), Neyire Ashworth (clarinet), Stephen Stirling (horn) and Adam Mackenzie (bassoon) are all distinguished soloists and orchestral section leaders who come together from time to time to provide audiences with the fine fare of music in wide-ranging styles performed – sometimes choreographed – with the ultimate in technical precision and interpretive discernment.
An arrangement of one of Mozart’s pieces for barrel organ began the concert in ebullient, street-wise fashion. More delicately presented and with delicious tonal colouring, a selection of movements Ravel’s Mother Goose suite followed. Then Mozart returned in the form of his Serenade in C minor, which brought the first half of the concert to a handsome conclusion. To begin the second half the players positioned themselves among the audience in different areas of the nave as they engaged in an enchanting performance of the oddball, American street musician Moodog’s “Birds of Paradise”.
Then they seated themselves to give the first performance of my Wind Quintet (2004), which was warmly received by the attentive audience. I have to say that the performance exceeded my imagination. And I am enormously grateful to these splendid musicians for having spent the considerable time and energy needed to bring to such a colourful and vibrant surface the inner conversations in musical terms that a composer seeks to share when putting notes on paper! I found myself asking, “Did I write that?” as they moved seemingly effortlessly and convincingly through the intricate web of melodic and harmonic challenges I had presented them with!
Ending the concert with Jim Parker’s “Mississippi Five” was just the right thing to round off an evening which had given obvious pleasure to audience and players alike. This five movement suite of tributes to classic jazz features was expertly executed with each player contributing his or her moment of bravura to a total display of the most New Orléans street-wise finesse.
The last concert in this Rochdale Music Society season will take place on Saturday, June 11th in St. Andrew’s Church, Smith Street, Rochdale at 7.30pm, when the artistes will be Lucille Burns (flute) and Vincent Lindsey-Clark (guitar).
OLDHAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Sunday, November 21st 2010 in the Great Hall of The Hulme Grammar Schools, Oldham
A spirited and polished performance by of Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 by the Oldham Symphony Orchestra (Leader Ann Heeks, Conductor Richard Waldock) constituted the first half of the OSO’s autumn concert given in the Great Hall of The Hulme Grammar Schools on Sunday evening, 21 November.
This particular symphony was Haydn’s last, and probably greatest, contribution to the genre. Composed at the peak of his artistic career during a residence in London, it was first performed there in 1795. "The whole company was thoroughly pleased and so was I. I made 4000 gulden on this evening: such a thing is possible only in England.” he wrote afterwards in his diary. Would that such an obviously large audience had turned out to have the privilege of hearing the OSO’s and musically rewarding performance! For it is indeed an energetic and a spacious work, abounding in a wide range of arresting ideas and intriguing ways of treating them. Haydn was a man of great musical vision and good humour, whose delight in exploring the sounds that can be made by the modest orchestral resources at his disposal was clearly shared by the conductor as he secured a memorable account of this delightful music by the members of the OSO.
That Richard Waldock’s association with these players continues to bring out the best in them was indisputably demonstrated by their fine performance of Brahms’ First Symphony filling the second half of this memorable concert.
His first symphony had been the outcome of considerable soul-searching on Brahms’ part over many years, and many of the stresses and strains of his composing it can be experienced by the receptive listener to this work, which turned out to be a full-throated assertion of his right to be heard as a symphonist in the grand tradition of Beethoven and Schubert. From its long, bold, searching opening to its final, commanding flourishes, Brahms the romantic, artist in music, strives here for classical (formal) perfection. Like Haydn before him, Brahms paid his debt to the past by taking what he had inherited and valued into fresh areas of artistic vision and to new levels of technical demands without leaving his listeners out of sight of aim or range of feeling. So his strings soar melodiously beyond the heights of Beethoven, but never go over the top into sentimentality. His three-only trombones, which have been kept waiting in the wings until this moment, are summoned on to the stage in the finale to herald a bright, tonal future which stretches out beyond the potentially confusing massed ranks of tubas and other brass instruments called for by Wagner (and some of his more flamboyant contemporaries whose music is now largely forgotten).
Performed with remarkable concentration and intensity by the Oldham Symphony Orchestra, this flagship work came to a breath-taking conclusion, and was rightly applauded vigorously by the appreciative audience.
OLDHAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Sunday, June 28th 2009 in the Great Hall of the Hulme Grammar School, Oldham
Husband and wife, Ken and Ann Heeks, proved how strong the musical bond between them remains after more than forty years of marriage when they were the soloists together in the Concerto for Clarinet(Ken) and Viola (Ann) by Max Bruch which formed the centrepiece of Oldham Symphony Orchestra’s summer concert on June 28th in the great hall of The Hulme Grammar Schools. The warmth of their understanding was obvious to all as they engaged with the sunny melodies this music gave them to exchange in loving conversation. Ann is the regular leader of the Oldham Symphony Orchestra. Ken has been principal clarinet in the Huddersfield Philharmonic Orchestra for the past 30 years.
The orchestra, which gets better and better under the undemonstrative but assured baton of Richard Waldock, provided a splendidly controlled background contribution to this happy performance.
The concert had begun with the world première of Fantasy Infantile by Tim Jackson, a work specially commissioned by the orchestra. The composer’s programme note speaks of the music being a celebration of the birth of his son, George, and its main substance being a set of variations on three well-known nursery tunes: “Nellie the elephant”, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”. These only really surface with any audible clarity towards the end of the work, when they are “superimposed upon each other at three different speeds”. The music moves from its mysteriously languid opening to a bright and spirited conclusion by way of a sequence of paragraphs that might be said to track - in musical terms – significant stages in the physical development of a new life from conception to the point beyond birth of beginning to be delightfully aware of surroundings other than a mother’s body.
The second half of the concert was devoted to a performance of Rachmaninov’s First Symphony. Once thought to have died its death after a first, disastrous performance in 1897, this work now takes its rightful place among symphonic works of seminal importance in the development of the symphony in Russia. Richard Waldock guided his players through a very satisfying account of the complex interplay of intensely passionate ideas which underpin the four-movement structure of this powerful expression of humanity confronting inevitable death.
OLDHAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA on Sunday, November 22nd 2009 in the Great Hall of the Hulme Grammar School, Oldham
At the age of only 18 Joseph Donmall, Crompton House pupil, stole the hearts of an appreciative audience when he was the accomplished soloist in the Cello Concerto in C by Haydn in a concert given by the Oldham Symphony Orchestra led by Anne Heeks and conducted by Adam Robinson in the great hall of the Hulme Grammar School on Sunday evening November 22nd.
The concert had begun with a finely balanced performance of Borodin’s evocative and colourful “Inthe Steppes of Central Asia”. It ended with a vibrant account of Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony which left us in no doubt that this immensely powerful work springs from the heart of a man who at the time of its composition found himself having to face up to some of life’s most painful challenges, and doing so with courage and dignity.
Full marks to all concerned for this delightful musical offering on the feast day of music’s patron saint, Cecilia.
OLDHAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Sunday, June 27th 2010 in the Great Hall of the Hulme Grammar School, Oldham
The Oldham Symphony Orchestra has, in recent years, achieved considerable success with adventurous programming and readiness to include the works of local composers and performers in its concerts. With the names of only Mendelssohn and Beethoven on their programme on this occasion, it may at first sight seem to have marked a reversal to a less audience challenging evening. Nothing could, I think, be further from the truth, when you consider that the works involved were Beethoven’sViolin Concerto andMendelsshon’s Reformation Symphony.
Such a combination of familiar and unfamiliar German music might not have proved all that palatable to an audience possibly still bewailing the woeful performance of England’s footballers in their World Cup defeat a few hours earlier! But for those who, undeterred, found themselves in the Great Hall of the Hulme Grammar School on Sunday evening last it provided a delightful experience. The Oldham Symphony Orchestra (Leader: Ann Heeks) gets better and better under the baton of Richard Waldock. Ensemble is secure. Individual instruments display with confidence in exposed moments.
For the first half of the concert it was joined by accomplished violinist Adi Brett, who gave an enchanting and powerful account of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (1806) . With its expansive and dramatic first movement, its almost unbearably tranquil slow movement and deliciously exhuberant finale this work - which actually languished after its first, ill-favoured performance until Mendelssohn revived it in 1844 with the youngster Joachim as soloist – calls for considerable depth of understanding and care in performance. Richard Waldock brought out the very best in his players to match the artistry of the soloist.
In the second half of the concert we were given a rare chance to experience the still youthful Mendelssohn’s symphonic take on the Lutheranism in which he had been raised. His ReformationSymphony of 1830-32 was written for the 300th Anniversary of the publication of the Augsburg Confession. Not published until 1868, some years after Mendelssohn’s death, and not performed with anything like the frequency of his later Italian Symphony or his earlier symphonies for string orchestra, it deserves its airings. The OSO showed why by its uncompromising commitment to the music’s inventiveness and celebratory atmosphere.
The struggles of the Reformation world are, perhaps, to be remarked in the ‘con fuoco’ of the first movement, but their outcome is peaceful, and the orchestra made this clear, just as they gave a convincing account of the dignified jollity of the second movement and the pious ‘song without words’ that forms a third movement leading into a triumphant finale. This last movement includes fugal sections suggestive of Mendelssohn’s great Lutheran churchman predecessor, J.S.Bach. It is rounded off by a full-blown statement of the familiar Lutheran chorale, “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott”, to which the orchestra gave itself whole-heartedly.
The next OSO concert will be held in the same place on Sunday, November 21st, and include a Haydn and a Brahms Symphony.
ROCHDALE MUSIC SOCIETY CONCERT 08.05.2010 7.30pm Heywood Civic Centre
Saxophone and classical guitar is not a usual concert combination, and the repertory for such a duo, whilst growing with new works being commissioned or offered by contemporary composers, is hardly extensive. Even allowing for adaptations of music originally conceived for other, more common partnerships – flute or clarinet with keyboard of some kind, for instance – there is a long way to go before such contrasting instrumental personalities are likely be regarded as natural partners for a full concert programme of music-making. Added to which the power to engage and retain the willing attention of an audience secure in knowledge of what it likes but uncertain of whether it will like what it is about to hear next, is something of a mystery. It was a tribute to the artistic accomplishment of the enterprising Irishman, Gerard McChrystal (saxophone), and the Australian, Craig Ogden (Guitar), that they commanded the attention of the Rochdale Music Society concert’s audience in the Heywood Civic Centre on Saturday, May 8th for nearly two hours. Time seemed to pass very quickly when filled with the delightful sonorities revealed in the course of the close encounter of their potentially rival instruments.
An increasing number of composers today are finding the challenge presented by such a dynamically contrasting partnership one which excites their imagination. Among them is Andy Scott – himself a renowned guitarist and educator based here in the North-west – with whose Nemesis the concert began. This understated end-time music whetted the appetite for more of the same kind of melodically suggestive, rhythmically challenging and in the end decidedly relaxing musical magic. Such Baroque-like sophistication would seem to be the order of the day, as was shown by the introspective Cloud Eight by the Australian Stuart Greenbaum, Ian Ballamy’sFigment and Mark Pasieczny’sWinter’s Tale.
The concert was not without its more easily recognisable musical features. Three movements from the suite ‘Histoire du Tango’ by the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, provided an interesting look back over some sixty years of development in the tango genre from 1900 to 1960, and a deliciously sweet work entitled Pé De Moleque (‘Peanut brittle’) by the Brazilian Celso Machado proved a very popular item in the second half. Equally well received was the tightly controlled impudence of the German Ulrich Schultheiss’sNo Rest.
The concert ended - to much applause from an appreciative audience - with the three-movement Shannon Suite by the Irishman Ciarán Farrell.Loughs Allen, Ree and Derg, tobe encountered along the course of Ireland’s longest river, are the inspiration for this readily accessible descriptive music with its Celtic aura and accent.
ROCHDALE MUSIC SOCIETY &THE NORTH WEST COMPOSERS ASSOCIATION JOINT CONCERT in Rochdale Parish Church Thursday, October 7th 2010 at 7.30pm
The 2010-2011season of concerts presented by the Rochdale Music Society began on Thursday, October 7th with a programme illustrative of the lively mixture of styles to be encountered among the music of composers who belong to the North West Composers Association. The concert of music by North West Composers revealed the good acoustic properties of the building, which lends itself perfectly to the kind of instrumental and vocal sounds enjoyed this by the attentive and appreciative audience on this first collaborative occasion bringing the RMS and NWCA together.
Piano music by Colin Bayliss (chairman of the NWCA) and David Forshaw (Secretary NWCA) was deftly played by Christopher Pulleyn and the composer respectively. John Peace joined Christopher in some energetic duets by Graham Marshall (Vice-Chairman NWCA), whose ‘Five Whimsies’ were sung with great sympathy by the countertenor David Solomons and Pietà an icon for organ performed with conviction by Parish Church Master of the Music, Phlip Lowe.
David Solomons ( also a member of the NWCA ) accompanied himself on the guitar in performances of four delightfully whimsical songs of his own.
Geoffrey Kimpton (Treasurer NWCA) was the committed viola soloist in his own arrangement of a substantial and lyrical four-movement work he wrote originally for cello and piano, ‘Scope’, in which he was accompanied by John Peace.
Flautist Lesley Reading played the first movement of a Sonatina for Flute and piano by Colin Bayliss, and also joined Graham Marshall in his Haitian Lullaby with Variants for Flute and guitar, a work written earlier this year as part of a disasters’ fund-raising project by the Delian Society, an internet group of composers from all over the world. The harpsichord voicing of an electronic keyboard made a perfectly acceptable substitute for the guitar in this balanced performance.
This was the first time that Rochdale’s ancient Parish Church of St. Chad had been used as a venue for an RMS concert. It will not be the last. A further concert in St. Chad’s is already planned for May 7th 2011, when members of the New London Chamber Ensemble will include in a varied programme the world première of local composer Graham Marshall’s Wind Quintet, ‘Moods’.
ROCHDALE MUSIC SOCIETY CONCERT 08.05.2010 7.30pm Heywood Civic Centre
ROCHDALE MUSIC SOCIETY