Review: Worthing Choral Society offer Mozart Vespers with Musical Cocktails

‘Mozart Vespers with Musical Cocktails’ concert in Worthing Festival by Worthing Choral Society at St George’s Church, Saturday 17 June 2023; organ Hamish Dustagheer, conductors Aedan Kerney (Mozart, Solemn Vespers of a Confessor K339; and Hinchcliffe) & Sam Barton (the others). Solo ensemble: Fiona Crane, Lis Lankester, Tina Smith (sopranos), Tamsin Cundy, Ruth Gillies (altos), Charlie Burrows, Peter Lankester (tenors), David McAuliffe, Richard Tanner (basses).

Vesper 1, The Lord Said (Psalm 110); Howard Goodall, The Lord is My Shepherd; Vesper 2, Praise Ye The Lord (111); Górecki, Totally Yours, Maria; Widor, Toccata from Organ Symphony No 5; Vesper 3 , Blessed is the Man (112); Coleridge-Taylor, The Lee Shore.

Vesper 4,Praise The Lord O Sons (113); Sam Barton, Ave Maria; Elgar, My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land; Alfred Lefébure-Wély, Sortie in Eb for organ; Vesper 5, Praise the Lord (117); Robert Hinchcliffe, According to Sirach (soprano solo, Ruth Gillies); Vesper 6, My Soul Doth Magnify (Luke 1, 46-55); Goodall, Love Divine.

A range of musical riches, an array of voices, glistening organ . . . does that remind of the 2023 King Charles Coronation? On the proportionate scale and appeal of Worthing Choral Society’s nearly 70 voices plus manuals and pedals in the new Worthing Festival, the description applies here, too. Add the word ‘daring’ and you have a high-quality town festival offering.

Its bravery and success lay in the various juxtapositions, from realigned angles, of the six-fold Vespers, one of Mozart’s signature Salzburg works on his verge of Vienna greatness, with a variety of mostly shorter, differently coloured pieces from later eras. The Vespers were a test of stamina, courage, dynamic light and shade, musical attack and Latin diction for the singers, while imperturbable organist Hamish Dustagheer had his own challenge of playing and voicing Mozart’s six orchestral transcriptions. For Dustagheer, so intensively employed, it must have been almost a relaxation for him to play his two French solo pieces. Both had an element of fun. Lefébure-Wély’s Sortie sometimes nodded at the European fairground organ sound that director Aedan Kerney – in one of his several informative explanations and remarks to the audience – pointed out was a specialist claim-to-fame of Worthing’s twinned German town of Waldkirch. The glittering, cascading Widor Toccata must be second only to Bach’s gothic Prelude and Fugue in D minor in Tom, Dick and Harry’s most well-known organ pieces. Dustagheer performed it from memory and assured me afterwards of its enduring popularity. It’s requested for four of the nine weddings he’ll be playing this summer.

This concert’s 15 different musical items maintained a pace and interest that scarcely flagged. Its ‘cocktails’ between the Mozart ‘mains’ all held a relaxed interest, some hymnal, some songlike, all carefully chosen contrasts to the Vespers with their weightier contrapuntal (multiple) musical lines, characteristically joyous melody and inherent strength of form stemming from the texts of their five praise-giving Psalms and final Magnificat.

The ‘cocktails’ provided effective and reflective stretches of not only textural alternative, such as Górecki’s chordal and also chant-like Totus Tuus sum Maria (a piece all the more memorable for this simplification of utterance), but smoother listening through less-demanding Elgar and Coleridge-Taylor, and the less-complex Goodall. The two newest works, by Barton and Hinchcliffe, naturally asked for audience concentration, and rewarded it.

The concert first half had genuine excitement [Mozart titles here in Latin]. The choir’s full-throttle Dixit Dominus handed over to a happy and gentle sharing of Goodall’s Lord’s Prayer, written in 2000. After WCS’s buoyantly striding Confitebor threw Totus Tuus into a relief of arresting absorption, Widor’s instant exuberance almost shocked the ear and Dustagheer duly drew cheers at its end. The testing Beatus vir, as an assertion of righteousness, would have been a forceful conventional end to the first half of the afternoon.

But the pattern of always a ‘cocktail’ to come continued with Coleridge-Taylor’s The Lee Shore, which contained the only sustained unsettling message among the ‘cocktails’. The poem’s storm-stricken distress, sonically blending European musical idiom with post-slave trade Creole, seemed watered down, rather too intimate and understated by the composer. Might he have better set it as dramatic choral-orchestral tone poem? Had pneumonia not carried him off at 37 – as the engaging programme brochure informed us – could Surrey-buried Samuel in later maturity have returned to it with this intent?

We learned that The Magic Flute was merely the last manifestation of Mozart’s predilection for trombones (in his own concluding 36th year). His Laudate pueri came 12 years earlier and here – no orchestra – Kerney explained the choir’s need to imply the instrumental sonority in their lower lines that the trombones actually double when present in performance.

WCS associate conductor and tenor Sam Barton is only 36 himself. His own Ave Maria appropriately included here a snatch of his own tenor voice. But this late 2020 pandemic lockdown composition made its mark with carefully placed upper-vocal note clustering to illuminate words within its semi-plainchant feel. The choir also had to manage some important octaves.

Later, WCS unexpectedly presented Barton as an alternative soloist to the familiar and beloved soprano in Laudate Dominum. Dustagheer’s inner parts, not inaptly, brought a more bubbly feel than would the smoother orchestral strings. For the tender choral entry, Kerney’s tempo eased and soothed as it moved to the final Amen.

With this and the Magnificat, Mozart framed the premiere of East Sussex-based composer Robert Hinchcliffe’s According to Sirach, in its transcription substituting piano (Dustagheer) for a chamber orchestra. It extensively revels in the physical, natural world, its first half being floridly festive in its marvelling celebration, then its second reflecting on this, until its carefree final summation.

Not calling on guest soloists, WCS had confidently cast from its own ranks the auxiliary solo vocal group creating Mozart’s highlight-texturing of his Vespers. Now revealed was a new WCS soprano in the largest solo role of the afternoon. Ruth Gillies, who only recently has moved south to Worthing, gave the Hinchcliffe real luminescence in its celebration of Old Testament earth- awareness. She is from Westerhope, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she sang with the Sage Gateshead-based Quay Voices mixed youth choir, and reached National Youth Choirs of Great Britain. Her range gives her alto and soprano presence.

To conclude a concert staged experimentally by WCS for the first time on a Saturday afternoon, they returned to Goodall and his Love Divine, all Loves Excelling. Set to his own melody it enabled the choir to cherish a final calm in singing its own evening hymn. Goodall inserts a restful wordless link to the combined third and fourth verses, and his repeated final calling and falling phrase of “praise” iterated the recurring key word of this programme. A word so apposite, as the choir’s home town arts community celebrates collectively and publicly for the first time the fullness of its own artistic personality and endeavour.

Richard Amey

Pictures by Dale Overton

Worthing Choral Society dates in 2023:

Saturday 25 November – 4pm St George’s Church – WCS ‘Wassail: Carols of Comfort & Joy’ – Aedan Kerney & Sam Barton with Alexander L’Estrange and the ‘Call Me Al’ Quintet, Chesswood Primary School Choir.

Sunday 17 December – 3pm Assembly Hall – WPO / WCS ‘Christmas on Broadway’ family concert – conductors Dominic Grier & Aedan Kerney with Sompting Village Primary School Choir

Including music by Anderson, Berlin, Lowe, Rodgers, Hely-Hutchinson, Kai Viollprecht, Rutter, Marion Peskett

https://www.worthingchoral.org.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/WorthingChoralSociety/