Brighton Year-Round 2024

Sussex Musicians Club Chapel Royal

Sussex Musicians Club

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: Chapel Royal, North Road Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Things got off to a bright, indeed really vivid start when Alex Pearson oboe, Lou Emmel bassoon, and Steve Engelhard piano played Norman Weiss: Bagatelle No 6 (con brio). I’ve never heard it: neo-classicism personified, flavoured with a touch of Les Six, it comes as a discovery. In fact Weiss is a contemporary U.S. composer, working as keyboardist for Broadway’s The Phantom of the Opera!

After this indeed Poulenc arrived, first his: Andante from Poulenc’s Trio for piano, oboe and bassoon. This suggests depths Poulenc reached later, an again one was struck in these performances by the absolute security and pitch, as well as blend of the three players. Clearly at home anywhere professional music, they’re an adornment to music-making in Brighton, and have a busy itinerary.

Next Engelhard played the beguiling Poulenc Improvisation No 13 in A minor for piano. Again the expressive minor, as a counterpart to Weiss’s harking to a earlier iteration of the 1920s. This is exquisite music-making.Finally, another duo: Les Chemins de L’Amour, arranged for bassoon and piano by Martin Gatt swung by Emmel and Engelhard. It owns a plangent insouciance, the bassoon sounding like a weary chansonnier. Quite bewitching and beautifully turned at the end.

The trio finally played a Swiss composer I’ve never heard of Carl Friedemann (1862-1952) a prolific composer in most genres, best remembered for his 140 marches: his Ehestandsgeplauder, Op.54 for oboe, bassoon and piano. Though born in the year of Delius and Debussy, he harks back to a lighter, slightly earlier tradition. It’s a lendler-swung, gently-inflected dance.

Things upped several notches of seriousness next, with the big work of the evening: Beethoven’s Sonata No. 7 in C minor for Violin and Piano Op. 30, No 2, played by Beatrice Sales (violin) and Andrew Biggs (piano). Biggs enters confident and powerfully-projected. But then you realise he’s best known as a violinist, indeed was leader of a symphony orchestra. It’s the fit time he’s been heard to my knowledge as a pianist. The acoustics didn’t favour Sales’ violin quite so much, but here’s another transformation. Sales  when not playing the flute is known as a violist.. Sales plays the violin with a viola’s sense of tonal dark and soul in fact.

This is late early Beethoven, and when you think that nearly all his violin sonatas fall between Op 12 and 47, with only the much later Op 96 to follow (and that from 1812, hardly very late) it’s striking to see some mid-period elements emerging here, in a work dating from around 1801.

Sales and Biggs negotiate the dramatic Allegro con brio in c minor which is often much slower than that implies: almost like a processional with moments of intensity. Relief comes in the Adagio in A flat major, a gentle set of variations; and the ferociously preppy Scherzo in C major, full of pianistic interjections and jokey fermatas, but the finale Allegro Presto back to C minor finds the dark relentless. Again the piano’s almost dominant, with its emphatic chords breaking the obvious violin line. It does however finally move into a more flowing dialogue. The Tempest Piano Sonata Op 31/2 in D minor wasn’t far off. A thoughtful, powerful performance.

Finally Hugh O’Neal (piano) played Bach’s E major Prelude and Fugue (Book 2, of the ’48’) in a luminous performance. The Yamaha responds well to bright tones, and the ‘innocence’ of E major in traditional ascription works well here: O’Neal’s playing radiated outwards in a clear-headed, crystalline prelude, gathering force, then unwinding in the slow-moving fugue; which like many fugues ravels up again.  A rapt conclusion.

Published December 14, 2024January 8, 2025 by Simon Jenner