Ensemble Photo Simon Jenner
Simon Jenner, June 14th 2025
The final Sussex Musicians concert go off to a summery start with Sherrie Spunks (soprano).and Katy Friese-Greene on piano. First up Jerry Bock (1928-2010) in a catchy dark hued piece ‘Far From the Home I Love.’ Spunks is winning and Friese-Greene sensitive to her delicacy of timbre. Spinks is just starting out and this is adventurous repertoire.
Stephen Flaherty (born 1960) follows with a number from Ragtime. ‘Your Daddy’s Son’s heartbreaker if impossible choices about a newborn son entering on a vocalise. Languorous melismas and balladic telling with fine retains with quite a part for piano. A fine musical standard.
Kurt Weill follows with two numbers from the 1941 Lady in the Dark. ‘One Life to Live’ is light-hearted. More Broadway than Weill. But there’s more Weill in ‘My Ship’. Spinks clearly relishes all this as she starts out.
Finally a vocal version from Borodin. Kismet to be precise. ‘And This is My Beloved’ riding on the notturno from his String Quartet No. 2. Nice plagiarism from Robert Wright and George Forrest who unsurprisingly didn’t go on to set Broadway alight with anything else. Spinks enjoys the rather highly-placed soprano part and seems even more confident in her middle register. A charming recital, but far more important- adventuring into a lesser-known corner.
Sarah Henderson-Sharon plays three items. Beethoven’s Op 79 Piano Sonata in G. Just the first movement. This is short enough for the whole Sonata to be played but the Presto alla tedesca is a pretty unusual marking for a first movement. It’s an underrated work looking forward in it’s good-humoured compression to mop 90.and 109. It’s cheerful opening in future notes gives way to legato passages and changes of dominant and minor.
Henderson-Sharon is new here and very welcome indeed. She gets the clean classical almost neo-classical lines just right.
Beethoven was by this time (as in his Symphony No.8) revisiting a classical works he’d left behind; but heavier with the weight of where he’s been. Henderson-Sharon keeps this airborne and singing. A delight.
Then Scriabin Prelude in D Op 11/5. Zhanna Kemp was reflecting in how difficult Scriabin is to play because of the way he places fingerling. This piece is certainly early and not as characteristic as some pieces from this period. It harks back to Scriabin’s beloved Chopin. But also a heat haze if high Russian romanticism. Wonderful to hear this comparative rarity.
Mana-Zucca (1885-1981) was in fact a long-lived virtuoso Zukerman whose The Zoaves’ Drill is less well-known than done if her toccata-like ices played by Cherkassky among others. This off-key Toccata like piece celebrates the bravery but f on an orientalist exploitative perspective the exoticism of the Zoaves. In musical terms, tis deploys a slightly normal 1920s palette not unallied to Prokofiev and more mildly, Poulenc. It’s engaging and there should be a disc I’d Mana-Zucca more readily available. A lost minor master. Henderson-Sharon is a revelation..
Zhanna Kemp is known as soloist, piano duet performer and accompanist. Today she brings the youn soprano Valeria Guidotti for two Bel Canto standards.
First is Luigi Arditi(1822-1903) newton me with a perky song. A delightful diversion of comedic fluency from some of his more dramatic pieces, this is pure coloratura in a blaze of dotted notes and summer.
Bellini’s ‘Il fervido desiderio’ is more sentimental, full of a light pathos where you hope things might be resolved. Here there’s more line and shaded shift of minor and key. And some held notes arched around melancholy; and held there. It’s incipiently the bourgeois sentimentality taking over from romanticism. Not that Bellini dying before he was 34 in 1835 lived to see it..
A perky cheeky number full of whips and lilts and dotted rhythms Donizetti’s ‘Me voglio fa ‘na casa’ is exuberant, summery and seemingly a world from his operas. Guidotti ha a powerful but pure voice and Kemp judges everything beautifully. A budding partnership some of us have seen before.
The second half as such was filled with Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds in E flat K452, squeezed in between his Piano Concertos 16 and 17. Hardly surprising it’s seen as a quasi-concerto. Indeed Mozart thought it his finest thing to date.
This is true chamber playing. Stephen Engelhard leads in piano, with Alex Pearson’s characterful oboe, Stella Knight’s expressive clarinet, Natasha Witts’ powerful and superbly ripe horn, and Sam Christie’s chuckling and nicely pointed bassoon. It’s notoriously difficult to balance these instruments and the ensemble do well – there’s a few moments so chromatic that a slight shift sends the sonority down an early 20th century Viennese chromatic wormhole!
Tempi are brisk in the opening Allegro moderato but allowing eddies and sudden tuttis to erupt naturally. There’s pace and energy and slightly wild smirking edge to the performance. In a word confident mostly idiomatic playing.
The slow movement a Larghetto, exposed more solo playing – oboe, bassoon and clarinet in particular. Slow Tempus can expose enharmonic moments and a few such creep into the texture like a 20th century nudge. What it reminds us of though is Mozart’s miraculous harmonic steadiness. Spun as many voices like plates as he may, he always harmonises. Here the slow movement reminds us how finely judged that is.
The finale, an Allegretto sees the oboe again take the lead from the piano. Nicely pointed and not rushed, it recalls the concerto rondo finales either side of this quintet.
There’s a jaunt and rustic crunch to this movement that’s as infectious as the finale of the Oboe Quartet K370. Except this is a more various more fiendishly tricky balance of instruments to get right. Engelhard keeps everything moving. It’s a delight. Ripe and with some lovely trills from oboe and clarinet to round off with the other three instruments. A fine end to the season.
Ensemble. Chapel Royal SMC Brighton. Photo Simon Jenner
Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) as the greatest Spanish composer is far better known. His ‘Jota’ is the fourth from his 7 Canciones populares espanos. A couple are keeping their love hidden, a very Spanish theme.
Straight away the familiar brilliance, the complex rhythms playing off against the popular seeming melody and it’s greater contrasts proclaim an altogether greater mastery, tuneful as it’s predecessor was. King and Vince relish the far greater interplay afforded including piano solos and King herself seems more at home in the mix of declamatory fire and sky wot if the piece.
The moderately well-known Panko Sorozabal 1897-1988) like several Spanish composers lived past 90. From earlier in his career, 1936, ‘Np puede ser’ from his Zarzuela La Tabernera del Puerto. A man reflects on his beloved being bad-mouthed as a trollop. Likewise she reflects on the same accusations. It’s a very serious song for the genre. And very fine.
Sebastian Yradier (1809-65) is from that lost couple of generations of Spanish music, though the great prodigy Arriaga was just three years his senior, dying at 20.
His famous ‘La Paloma’ written in 1852 is about an intermediary or chaperone between loves. Made famous by the ill-fated Archduke Maximillian who also asked for it as a last request before bring shot in Mexico in 1867 (the conclusion to Napoleon III’s ignominious ‘Mexican Adventure’). A swaying and relatively simple piece it’s also memorable, using the habanera rhythm.
Joaquin Valberde (1875-1918) died relatively Yung but being id the Falla generation is a more complex composer, who early death has obscured him further. His ‘Clavelitos’ treats of a woman who is as much of a flirt as her liver, but is perhaps more in love. All about carnations a d costing up, it dates from 1907. The popular Spanish rhythms that would inform Falla’s mature music are apparent in this delirious hymn to self-recognition.
Ensemble Chapel Royal SMC Brighton. Photo Simon Jenner
Alex Sinclair plays two contrasting late Romantic works.
Gabriel Fauré’s Nocturne No. 6 in D flat major Op 63 from 1884 – once oddly recorded in Berlin by Wilhelm Kempff in 1945 – is one of the finest of the 13. In D flat with its veiled almost-said tonality, it’s pure Fauré. Sinclair makes light of the complex layering and breaking out of the main theme from the ruminant textures of the underlying sound work. Troubled development and an agitated sense of the quietly passionate language informs Sinclair’s more robust and explicit reading. It’s hugely welcome. He handled other textures especially from higher registers in the central section as if from another world. Returning to the main theme it’s as if some inner journey has reached the surface in an exhilarating reading.
Rachmaninov’s 1917 Etudes Tableaux (literally Study-pictures) Op 39 – coming after the first set of Op 33 from 1911 – are harder to absorb and less popular than the Preludes; their nearest equivalent both musically and date are Debussy’s Etudes from 1915. Which also come after two sets of Preludes and are equally more stringent, less popular.
There’s exceptions: like the D minor Op 39/8. This rollercoaster of D minor is caught as it were in mid-flight, with terrific mobility and headlong intensity. Sinclair is entirely at home here: Rachmaninov suits him. Indeed both composers with their refractive then explosive declamations do. His control of rubato ripples through his fingers, and the sheer ruck, thew and leap of Rachmaninov’s dark-hue melodies pass through his fingers. Sinclair lends to his Rachmaninov a fearless drive to the abyss. Thrilling.
Chapel Royal SMC Ensemble Brighton Photo Simon Jenner
Finally as we were told, a product of publisher Chappell’s initiative of encouraging popular songs. It last quite a few years.
Elgar having finished his 1908 First Symphony was at a loose end. His Op 48 ‘Pleading’ (published earlier than the symphony though) shows his gifts, not particularly of a song composer, chiselled to art song. Arthur Salmon’s poem desires his beloved to ‘come home from the hills of dreamland’. Sentimental stuff, but with a bedrock of a slumbering giant beneath.
Lilian Ray (the dates 1913-49 aren’t quite right, it was 1876-1949) was apparently a man. John Neat also writing as Ray Lilian, wrote 53 songs as Ray – seen as more fitting sentiment for a woman! – and many more as Neat in a more serious vein. He published a lot with Francis, dAy and Hunter, from 1972 a subsidiary of EMI, themselves absorbed. Dating from 1913 ‘The Sunshine of Your Smile’s recorded by Count John McCormack and Jussi Bjorling is probably better known than those serious songs. It’s an attractive lilting piece in the tradition of Lisa Lehmann and Ivor Novello. It was mind-boggling to think this composer was born in the year if Lutoslawski and Britten, but the song was. It’s naggingly memorable.
Chapel Royal Photo Simon Jenner
Wilfred Sanderson (1878-1935) was once hugely popular and sang at Edward VII’s coronation. His ballads are typically sentimental. This one ‘As I Sit Here’s with words by Dena Tempest is attractive and redolent of, as Geoffrey Hill once put it of the Edwardians before World War One: “the lost delicate suitors who could sing.” There’s a fine peroration to close.
Eric Coates (1886-1958) at least needs little introduction. Like Rebecca Clarke born on the same day (27th August) he was a sovereign viola player whose compositions unlike Clarke’s mainly focused on orchestral light music and arrangements.
Frederick Weatherly was a barrister who wrote the lyrics of over 300 songs including ‘Danny Boy’. ‘The Green Hills O’ Somerset’s rather refers to those lost delicate suitors. Coates isn’t known for songs at all; so it’s refreshing to hear how good he could be in the lighter vein and lower foothills of Schubert’s Parnassus. It’s the kind of thing Schubert occasionally set too. Consolatory rather than than lamenting the dead, it is though a curious schmaltzy way to remember the dead. Except that this is how they would have sung themselves. Fine singing and Zhanna Kemp as ever consummate as an accompanist.
A remarkable treasure trove of an evening.
