Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert
26 March 2023
Saturday's Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert was the first in the 130 year history of the orchestra to consist entirely of works by female composers. The 'Women of Note' concert at Christchurch in Northampton was an exciting evening: it has been a really enjoyable process for the orchestra getting to know unfamiliar repertoire and exploring the stories behind the pieces and their composers. All the works we played deserve to be better known so I have included links here to recordings by other orchestras.
We started the concert with the suite 'Penillion' by the Welsh mid-twentieth century composer Grace Williams - a lovely piece that draws on the eisteddfod tradition of improvised penillion singing, usually accompanied by harp. This four movement work for full orchestra features a prominent role for the harp, but the faster second and fourth movements also feature Eastern European and Spanish influences. Listen to 'Penillion' by Grace Williams, played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIU2vT0tJ5Y
Errolyn Wallen's 'Triple Concerto', for a trio of violin, viola and accordion, accompanied by string orchestra, is an entertaining, genre-defying piece written in 2018 for the Kosmos Ensemble. It was exciting to see Kosmos perform it with the NSO - featuring Harriet Mackenzie on violin, Meg-Rosaleen Hamilton on viola and Miloš Milivojević on accordion. And Kosmos brought the house down with their encore of Astor Piazzolla's 'Libertango'. You can watch Kosmos playing Errolyn Wallen's 'Triple Concerto' with Worthing Symphony Orchestra in 2018 at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdR7oM2BYPw
The second half of the concert opened with 'Turbulent Landscapes' by Thea Musgrave - a suite in which, like Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition', each movement is inspired by an artwork, in this case paintings by JMW Turner. Each movement also features one member of the orchestra as a soloist. I wrote here previously (in February 2023) about the significant challenge of playing the solo horn part in the third movement, ‘Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps’. It was a nerve-wracking experience, particularly having to stand up to play it, but I think it went pretty well. The other soloists within the orchestra sounded fantastic: Nick Tollervey on tuba, Sarah Mourant on oboe, Terry Mayo on trumpet, Robert Reid on bass clarinet, Paige Johnson on piccolo, and Naomi Muller on clarinet. These solos were not like the short solo passages we often have to play within a symphony: here each movement is almost a mini concerto, and I know from my own experience how much time each of my fellow soloists must have spent preparing for the concert. 'Turbulent Landscapes' was a really challenging work to play but I think our performance was very impressive and I've really grown to like this unusual, programmatic work. You can listen to Thea Musgrave's 'Turbulent Landscapes' performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, while looking at the relevant Turner paintings at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnokpA37ieY
At last year's Edinburgh International Festival I saw the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, performing Florence Price’s ‘Symphony No 1’ (reviewed here in September 2022). This symphony, premiered in 1932, was the first work by a Black woman composer to be performed by a major US orchestra. We finished our NSO concert with Florence Price's Concert Overture No. 2 - one of several of her works that might have been lost had it not been discovered among Price’s affects in an abandoned Chicago residence where she lived toward the end of her life. You can listen to Florence Price's Concert Overture No. 2 played by the BBC Concert Orchestra at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk4ST2sGDvI It's an enjoyable weaving together of several well known spirituals and was a lovely way to end what felt like a very special concert. As one audience member said on Facebook: “If you missed this, you missed a fantastic evening. I knew none of the pieces and only one of the composers (Florence Price) and yet I'd rank that as one of my best orchestral evenings ever. Wonderful.”
posted by Robin Simpson @ 3:07 pm
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