Brighton Year-Round 2025

Sussex Musicians SMC Chapel Royal

Sussex Musicians Club

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: Chapel Royal

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

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 20^th 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.

Published June 16, 2025 by Simon Jenner