REVIEW BY Richard Amey. ‘Brahms Requiem’, Saturday 21 March 2026 at Worthing Assembly Hall (7.30). Worthing Choral Society, The Boundstone Chorus, Sinfonia of Arun, soprano Cheryl Enever, bass-baritone Richard Bannan: Beethoven, Coriolan Overture; Vaughan Williams, Toward The Unknown Region (text Whitman) conductor Sam Barton; Brahms, A German Requiem (sung in English) conductor Mattea Leow.
‘Into The Blue’, Sunday 22 March 2026 at Worthing Assembly Hall (3.00). Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Dominic Grier, guitar Paul Gregory. Debussy, La Mer; Chaz Hart, Blue Wave Guitar Concerto (World Premiere); Sibelius, Symphony No 5.
Worthing’s classical music scene blossoms forth this Spring in quantity and quality provision the town may never have known before. At the end of this report, the list of orchestral, choral and chamber concerts through April and May includes two additions, in which Worthing-based international conductor Dominic Grier’s work in performing with his orchestra and singers oozes beyond the town into Arundel and Steyning.
See especially both weekend days just gone. A newly-sprung conductor makes her home-town Assembly Hall debut – two of Worthing’s three foremost choirs pair up to sing with the Sinfonia of Arun (containing a number of long-serving Worthing musicians) – on the following day Grier and Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra give a concerto world premiere – performing it is a world-class soloist. Are you in amazement-debt already?
This certain new young Worthing conductor has been fledged by Worthing’s three senior conductors – the mentorship of Royal Academy-centred Grier, of Worthing Symphony Orchestra’s musical director and conductor John Gibbons BEM, and of the man who gave this 20-something person their first conducting chance in this town, Aedan Kerney MBE, founder of The Boundstone Chorus and artistic director of they and Worthing Choral Society – the two choirs who paired up on Saturday evening.
This person is Mattea Leow. Chinese-British, a Worthing orchestral violinist, former associate conductor at her alma mater Royal Holloway University of London (Music with Philosophy), now associate music director of The Boundstone Chorus and head of music at Worthing’s St Andrew’s High School. In black sleeveless top and wide trousers, she took on conducting Brahms’ A German Requiem, unflamboyantly harnessing both choirs, orchestra and two soloists, in a performance that duly caught fire at the right points, and crowningly in the penultimate of its seven sections, “For we have here no abiding city”.
If you wonder whether this stirring performance succeeded, this was my first listening in maybe 20 years to this great opus and these pages had me beside myself with excitement. If I was fist-pumping then, Mattea Leow later did a double one of her own, on the rostrum, to the audience, during the audience applause, having first brought the various sections of the vocal and instrumental forces to their feet. It was a releasing of her own relief as well as triumph at her own achievement. But it also signified to performers and audience a shared victory in the performance and the Requiem’s task in overcoming the adversity of personal bereavement within a conventional framework of religious piety, which was Brahms purpose.
Both choirs’ women generally maintained their top-end intonation even into the final laps despite inevitable fatigue. Although Brahms himself will have witnessed how the power of his music to move its performers spurred on his amateur singers. The two soloists in their only three appearances between them elevated the collective commitment and the Sinfonia had their own stamina fluctuations to conquer. They and the soprano and baritone all working under a new young conductor on her own Brahms Requiem debut.
What had Sunday’s experience of its English translation to commend it? Apart from more reliable pronunciation and immediate intelligibility than had it been in German, its big bonus was our being able following it in the WSC’s free programme brochure and appreciating the sensitivities and strengths of Brahms’ effective and popular setting of the text with his own music. Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra will give us the sung work in German with a swelled Brighton 16 choir, plus Mozart’s Haffner Symphony, in the same building on 28 June. Any people who saw Sunday’s performance will have their receptivity deepened for that one.
Somewhat strangely, Sinfonia of Arun elected to add to this concert the same overture as WPO: Beethoven’s Coriolan, and there was some temerity at the artistic expense of various parties, including the embarrassment of Sunday’s other conductor, the Brighton & Hove-based Sam Barton.
In 1807, Beethoven completed his Fifth Symphony and Coriolan, both in the C minor key. The Symphony’s finale contains the European orchestral debut of trombones, reinforcing the horns, trumpets and drums in its big fanfaring theme prevailing over deafness and political oppression. Coriolan has no equivalent celebration or triumph because it’s a psychological drama inside the mind of would-be Rome conqueror, Coriolan, under the peacemaking pressure of his own mother. Its tension and vacillating struggle is internal. Beethoven, as publication shows, wanted trombones neither included, nor added as second thought.
Sinfonia of Arun evidently travel cheekily to their Coriolan performances armed with manufactured trombone parts to stop their three players idling around backstage. I suspect Beethoven, had he been there, would have had a meltdown at The Assembly Hall. The extra trombone weight Sinfonia of Arun offered is what he’d decided was inappropriate and unwarranted, even crass. And I expect that, had these trombonists and their orchestra management offered Beethoven supplicatory drinks afterwards in the interval, they’d have ended up on the carpet – the drinks, not the offending personnel – and the audience would have got a new Beethoven legend included in their ticket.
Sam Barton took command of Vaughan William’s existential setting of Walt Whitman’s afterlife speculation, Toward The Unknown Region. Here through the song’s five verses was the steady upward-reaching curve towards the kind of musical climax trombonists climb out of bed and dress up for. Vaughan Williams has actually invited them, and they’re straight in at Bar 4. Barton let the music’s vocal and orchestral forces strive en masse in the sonic density and textural intensity of Vaughan Williams’ pre-Ravel tuition period, on a scale proportionate to his enormous A Sea Symphony of this same compositional phase.
Whitman asks us this: Do you dare walk with me to where there is no ground nor path? With Barton steadily measuring the pace, the choral fervour mounted from the second verse onwards (my Whitman paraphrasing): “no map/guide/human voice/touch/hand/face/blooming flesh, lips, eyes” . . .. “all is a blank before us, all waits undreamed of in that region” . . . “we are bound by nothing, we burst forth, to float in time and space”. Fascinating to speculate how differently VW would have treated and sounded in this, had he first approached it after his Ravellian lessons. Take his Tallis Fantasia as your imagining starting point.
Barton began conducting in Canada and guested with choral organisations in London and the South, but the Brighton & Hove-based composer, double bassist and choral, operatic and solo tenor has since also studied with Dominic Grier and one of Grier’s own teachers Denise Ham. Barton has sung Wagner’s Mime, who crops up in Siegfried from the Royal Opera House at The Connaught on 31 March. Barton is associate musical director under Aedan Kerney at Worthing Choral Society, which in 1997 emerged from the ending of Adrian Hawke’s Worthing Sixth Form Festival Choir. Saturday’s voice numbers were, WCS (75): 31 sopranos, 22 altos, 9 tenors, 13 basses. TBCh (55): 18, 19 7, 11. Only 16 tenors among 130: what is it in men’s modern food, drink and activities?
Now for Sunday – like Saturday, a concert where nothing was said or announced. The £3 programme brochure sold out, the musicians simply played . . .
A guitarist of 1960s formative years, playing in London on name solo-singer recording sessions alongside famous Big Jim Sullivan, and at age 26 he is on Spanish Sierra Nevada holiday. Suddenly, his hike happens upon what he describes as “A Garden of Eden”. A moist, green oasis in the dry and rugged mountains. His imagination reacts. He hears it conveyed musically on his chosen instrument.
Later, he teaches guitar at Trinity College. He studies orchestration there under Eric Gilder, who also gives singing lessons to Diana Ross and The Supremes. “Want to write a guitar concerto?” asks Gilder. “Start your own and see what happens.” The man becomes a composer for guitar teaching courses – “I try to write a new piece about each special scene I see on family holidays.” He writes books teaching electric guitar.
This person is Chaz Hart. Pandemic lockdown keeps him at home in Bexhill with 2 x PRS electric guitars, 7 x nylon-strung classical guitars and 2 x steel-strung acoustic ones. In sea travel he revels in the sight and sound of the ship’s wake. Visiting Florida, he saunters down Key West Main Street, soaking up each different musical genre sound spilling out through the doors and windows. He thinks of that Spanish ‘Garden of Eden’. He visits the awesome Grand Canyon. His mind is expanded by a high-circling condor and he later pictures a wagon train winding maybe homeward across the open plain.
Thus, his first Guitar Concerto, called Blue Wave, is hatched in 2020. Main Street is the first movement, Sierra Nevada the middle one and the Canyon-condor-wagons its homecoming. Postwar guitar concertos soon failed to identify with the instrument in its post-60s, multiple-identity and style diversification in what Chaz Hart recognises as the 50 Years of Guitar Growth and Bloom (my title). Springing out of Rock ‘n’ Roll and R&B, its versatility and ubiquity unseated the orchestra as the base of so much popular music. Hart and I were both participants and products of this.
“I hope my Blue Wave Concerto has a flavour of this era. It started with Bert Weedon (the first pop guitar tutor book), then The Shadows (frontline melodies), Carlos Santana introduced the latin, there was blues, with then Jeff Beck showing so many new ways of playing the guitar, and Gary Moore’s Still Got The Blues being a lasting big statement.”
The main schools of modern guitar? There’s also lyrical blues-rock with Brian May and Andrew Latimer; hard rock through Tony Iommi and plenty others; country spearheaded by Albert Lee; folk acoustic by Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, expanded by Gordon Giltrap; then jazz fusion virtuosity fronted by such as Allan Holdsworth.
We’re talking about guitar pioneers already since dead. What does this mean a Guitar Concerto should sound like now? The door is open and among those first through it, Hart is probably the among the least pretentious, complex, over-clever, high falutin or oriented towards guitar-composition immortality. “If it’s longer than the Rodrigo Concerto [1939; just under 30mins] people will get bored,” warns Hart. “And listeners need tunes to latch onto.”
His Blue Wave Concerto lasts 23min. He’s identified melody and/or a distinctive repeated rhythm as the key Ingredients. Up there with the Rodrigo in total guitar record sales must be Jerry Lordan’s Wonderful Land (The Shadows, on Fender electrics, with orchestra horns and strings) which topped the charts for months on the back of a hummable main tune and a novelly memorable second one. Add in the other Shadows biggest hits and we spot the essentials of an instrumental music hit. Later, Peter Green’s Albatross matched the template.
Rodrigo’s Guitar Concerto de Aranjuez model, of music capturing outdoor scenery, sounds and scents, has its parallel in Hart’s Concerto genesis – the sights and feel of what he saw and experienced on his travels. And, in keeping with the classical guitars outnumbering his others at home, he sets it for this instrument. So it has that voice but its vocabulary also embraces styles from those 50 years, in a set of musical picture postcards or snapshots.
Hart’s Guitar Concerto is a welcome surprise – it’s easy to listen to and absorb. Light, warm, happy, relaxing and entertaining. It combines gentleness and simplicity with vigour, melodic character with traditional and modern rhythmic agility as its invigorators, and a wistful turn when its composer recalls those outdoor compositional stimuli that stopped his walking boots in their tracks. Any blues in it is cheerful blues. Woodwind and trumpet, as in the Rodrigo, are the guitar’s songful companions, the strings its staunch ally.
It’s got definite tunes in its lively outer movements and cloudy atmosphere in the middle one with its shiftings of impetus, and one melody touch-glinted by a glockenspiel. The finale’s distinctive energising theme is a jaunty street tune that might be whistled by a character in a Rogers & Hammerstein musical. And why not? Hart’s viewing the bits of America we’re still content to contemplate.
This performance brought in evergreen Brighton-based guitar maestro and Chapel Royal Lunchtimes concert curator, Paul Gregory – who’d played the Aranjuez Concerto in his previous Assembly Hall appearance, with WSO. He’s mastery personified, and prevailed over various technical obstacles This performance could only be dedicated to Hart’s lost daughter Zoe, whom cancer claimed after she’d finally persuaded someone willing to perform the Concerto. Enter Grier, who invited Gregory.
The WPO’s 81 players exceeds the weight scales this delicate music requires, but they’ve now told the UK that the Blue Wave Concerto is now afloat in an age that welcomes it and, therapeutically, may need it – sitting, in this example, as a surprise and colourful contrast between two concentrated highpoints of classical music that deal in vaster vista but have no interesting soloist. Gregory is doing it again on June 13 at All Saints Church, Lindfield, East Sussex (7.30) with the smaller Mid Sussex Sinfonia, sitting between Bizet’s first Carmen Suite and more show-closing Sibelius – his Symphony No 2.
WPO threw open Debussy’s visionary windows “to the open sky” and the English Channel in his La Mer – his three sketches in which the performing debut was this time the WPO’s own. Music to enjoy playing, which is a main WPO aim, and they became Debussy’s orchestral exhibition. With Grier they evolved the initial half-lit early-morning mystery, then flowed free into the rest of From Dawn To Noon On The Sea. I’d intended to see what Erik Satie meant about the bit around 11:45, but clean forgot to set my watch.
Bubbling and foaming horns, spraying strings, glinting woodwind then trumpet swooping seagulls seeking Debussy’s bag of chips on Eastbourne seafront, all had WPO flicking their pencils and paint brushes everywhere during Play Of The Waves. And in the Dialogue Of The Wind And The Sea their palettes were dipped into by various other tools as the conversation really heated up with playful basslines and riffs and watery sliding solo lines.
The Fifth has come second on Grier/WPO’s Sibelius Symphonies agenda, following their No 3 last season. Sibelius is always good to watch as it’s being played, in revealing how he gets his sound. It seemed the two flutes and four horns were characters who spent the longest onstage, apart from the stalwart strings, who again touched some of the sonic heights its players have set themselves in this orchestra. The first movement had a desolate bassoon solo from Neil Allen and, of course, in the finale the horn quartet’s lungs were extended by the big, swaying sight and sound of the 16 winged swans Sibelius had witnessed in his nature wilderness, and which he now made just as unforgettable for us.
Finally, how would the timpani execute in the final two chords of this performance? How separated would their flam be? Its two notes tight together, or wider and even more dramatic? How ruthless, or how emphatic? Alonzo Mendoza took the foolproof route one: both his beaters united in two unison downward blows of a double-bladed butcher’s cleaver.
Richard Amey
UPCOMING CONCERTS
Easter Saturday 4 April – Worthing Assembly Hall (2.45), Worthing Symphony Orchestra, leader Julian Leaper, conductor John Gibbons: Handel, oratorio Messiah, on period instruments at baroque pitch, with voices and soloists from Genesis Sixteen, who are alumni from the young artists’ development programme of the famous British choir, The Sixteen. Messiah, the choral extravaganza for all seasons.
Saturday 11 April – St Nicholas’ Church, Arundel (7.30). The Angmering Chorale with Sussex Chamber Orchestra, conductor Dominic Grier. Handel, oratorio Exodus: Israel in Egypt.
Sunday 19 April – Worthing Assembly Hall (2.45), Worthing Symphony Orchestra, conductor John Gibbons, saxophone Rob Burton: Haydn, Symphony No 63 ‘La Roxelane’; Paul Carr, Saxophone Concerto; Ennio Morricone, Gabriel’s Oboe from The Mission; Shostakovich, Waltz from Jazz Suite; Mozart, Symphony No 40 in G minor.
Tuesday 21 April – Christ Church Lunchtime (12.30) – Sylvia & Golden, flute: guitar and voice
Tuesday 12 May – Christ Church Lunchtime (12.30) – Brighton Guitar Quartet
Sunday 17 May – Worthing Assembly Hall (2.45), Worthing Symphony Orchestra, leader Julian Leaper, conductor John Gibbons, piano Julian Chan. Mendelssohn, The Fair Melusine Overture; Bizet, Symphony in C; Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No 2.
Sunday 24 May (2.45) – ‘Visions Virtuosic’. St Symphorian’s Durrington Hill – International Interview Concert: Julian Chan (solo piano), a week after the Malaysian will have performed Tchaikovsky’s big Piano Concerto No 2 with Worthing Symphony Orchestra (on 17 May), having already done Rachmaninov No 3 and Tchaikovsky No 1 with Worthing Philharmonic in November 2023 and June 2025.
Programme (not in order) including Schubert, Sonata in C minor D958; Godowsky, Java Suite selection; Alkan, Aesop’s Feast; Beethoven Sonata in F# For Therese; Chopin, Ballade No 2 in F major; plus features ‘Mystery Music’ and ‘What’s The Story?’. With Guest Interviewer.
Saturday 30 May – Steyning Festival at Steyning Parish Church of St Andrew & St Cuthman (6.30) Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra, leader June Lee, conductor Dominic Grier, violin Yinong Xiai: Beethoven, Egmont Overture; Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto; Schumann, Symphony No 3 ‘Rhenish’. Tickets from worthingphil.org.uk or steyningfestival.co.uk
OTHER 2026 CONCERT SEASON DATES
WPO: 7 June, 28 June
Worthing Choral Society: 13 June
The Boundstone Chorus: 20 June
Christ Church Lunchtimes: 2 June
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