REVIEW: "A wonderful start to the Davan Wetton reign"

Monday 05 August 2019

Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s summer concert was triumphant for more reasons than one.

Not only did the ‘Best of British’ event mark Fort Regent’s first major performance since the venue was unexpectedly forced to close to large events over fire safety fears, it also provided a preview of the musical zest set to be delivered by Hilary Davan Wetton, the Artistic Director of the City of London Choir and Associate Conductor of the London Mozart Players, in his role as JSO’s new musical director.

Express got a sense of what’s to come from the man who has vowed to break down musical barriers…

To judge by Saturday’s Jersey Symphony Orchestra concert ‘Best of British’, the four-year tenure of Hilary Davan Wetton as Principal Conductor is going to be an exciting one for the orchestra as well as audiences.

Although he doesn’t start officially until next year, he directed a performance in the guise of Guest Conductor, which will already have many badgering the orchestra for next year’s dates to put in their diaries.

What was so encouraging was that there was nothing remotely 'workaday' about any aspect of this concert, whether in relatively unfamiliar music like Holst’s Marching Song, or the Last Night of the Prom-inspired conclusion with its Elgar and Parry which everyone knows so well - you sensed attention to every detail throughout.

From the outset, Walton’s Crown Imperial was characterised by rhythmic precision, an ideal balance of orchestral textures – allowing room for some exuberant brass when the moment required – and a swagger in the final statement of the march, subtly created by gently pushing the tempo on.

Meanwhile Butterworth’s Shropshire Lad Rhapsody - a piece of haunting beauty even if you divorce it from the tragic circumstances of the composer’s death on the Somme aged only 31 - displayed an equally fastidious approach in a different way. It was a rare treat to hear the JSO play so quietly - a skill greatly undervalued - or find such subtly and suppleness of phrasing.

The emergence of the four-note motif with its two falling intervals, which dominates the piece, was simply magical. It’s true that, at the conclusion, the orchestra’s pianissimo made you aware that Fort Regent’s air conditioning operates at a slightly louder dynamic level but to be required to listen so actively created an extraordinary intensity within the Gloucester Hall.

Pictured: The concert was the Fort's first major concert since closing to large-scale events over fire safety fears.

Centrepiece of the programme was Elgar’s Sea Pictures, a cycle of five settings of poems inspired by the sea or at least by the emotions it generates. Mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons was the ideal soloist, not simply for the quality of her voice but the clarity of her articulation and her attention to the meaning of the text. That might seem an obvious requirement but her self-effacing, yet authoritative, performance was the antidote to the generalised washes of sound you sometimes get – here, by contrast, was something urgent and compelling.

Take the third song, ‘Sabbath, Morning at Sea’, for example. It contains some of the most ‘Elgarian’ writing with grand orchestral climaxes but it also displays moments of great intimacy like the wonderful interplay between soloist and the orchestra’s excellent leader Martin Smith. Here again, you felt the hand of the conductor in rehearsal to ensure that the balances between instruments and voice were perfect.

If Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was the least successful item in the programme, it was largely because narrator Tim Pollard’s microphone was set at too low a level, so that his vocal ‘guide’ was much less of a partner that he might have been to the individual sections as they let their hair down in turn.

So enjoyable was this evening as a whole, it hardly makes sense to talk of highlights. Yet there should be a mention of the woodwind solo contributions in Delius’ Walk to the Paradise Gardens and the gusto displayed by Marta Fontanals-Simmons in the concluding Proms-style renditions of Jerusalem, and Land of Hope and Glory where the carefully accented brass parts made a real impact.

Pictured: A previous JSO concert at Fort Regent.

This was a terrific concert and a wonderful start to the Davan Wetton reign at the JSO which, at four years, already seems far too short.

Someone in the orchestra should remind him of the story of the French conductor Pierre Monteux who, aged 86 at the time, would only agree to sign his recording contract if it ran for 25 years!