Delta Saxophone Quartet: Martland, Soft Machine and new works on Saturday
WHO better than the Delta Saxophone Quartet to give York Late Music’s 2023-2024 concert season early momentum on Saturday?
A double celebration this weekend will mark not only 40 years of Late Music, but also the ruby anniversary of the Delta musicians, regular participants in the York series.
Saturday’s 7.30pm programme at the Unitarian Chapel, St Saviourgate, York, will be “typically Delta-eclectic”, featuring the music of Steve Martland, The Soft Machine and some new works.
Stuart O’Hara: Season-opening concert of English songs
The new series will begin on Friday at 1.30pm when bass singer Stuart O’Hara and pianist Marianna Cortesi take a tour through some of the finest English songs from the past decade: works by La Monte Young, Richard Rodney Bennett and Jonathan Harvey, complemented by world premieres of York composers’ settings of words by local poets.
On Friday evening, Late Music will pose the intriguing question: would you attend a concert where all the music was played twice? Would it help you appreciate the music more? Late Music wants to discover the answers in Ruth Lee’s innovative concert of music for harp and electronics. This one is a free/pay-what-you-like event. You could even choose to pay twice!
If your knowledge of accordion is limited to scene-setting via Hollywood movie conceptions of Paris – as sent up by American filmmaker Woody Allen in Everyone Says I Love You – Saturday’s lunchtime concert will put you right.
Franko Bozac: Never underestimate the accordion
Virtuoso Franko Bozac will showcase the reasons why this instrument should not be underestimated in his 1pm programme, featuring a collaboration between composer James Williamson and visual artist Romey T Brough, presented in tandem with Blossom Street Gallery, York.
November 4’s lunchtime concert will be a tribute to Dylan Thomas to mark the 70th anniversary of his death. Tenor Christopher Gorman and pianist David Pipe will present new settings of the Welshman’s poetry by composers Philip Grange, Sadie Harrison, Hayley Jenkins, David Lancaster and Rhian Samuel at 1pm.
In the evening, Beethoven will feature via Franz Liszt piano transcriptions, played by another Late Music favourite, Ian Pace. His 7.30pm programme will include Michael Finnissy’s Gershwin song transcriptions and Late Music concert administrator Steve Crowther’s Piano Sonata No. 4. Box office: latemusic.org.
Ruth Lee: Innovative concert of music for harp and electronics
The wedding: Emily Belcher’s Emily Webb marries Frankie Bounds’s George Gibbs in a ceremony conducted by Rory Mulvihill’s Congregational Church minister, right, in Amerrycan Theatre’s Our Town. Looking on, left, are Damian M O’Connor’s Constable Bill Warren and Charlotte Hewitson’s Rebecca Gibbs
RORY Mulvihill’s avuncular Stage Manager – a narrator, ringmaster, master of ceremonies and Cassandra rolled into one – talks of the stars “doing their old, old crisscross journeys” since four billion years ago.
You could call Thornton Wilder’s Our Town a time play, not in the manner of Bradford playwright J B Priestley’s Time Plays of the 1930s and 1940s, but because of the importance of time and using it well.
As director Bryan Bounds said afterwards: “The third act is the glass of water in the face to say, ‘Wake up, this is all going to be gone before you realise it’.”
Ironically, neither Mulvihill’s measured, mellifluous Stage Manager nor Wilder’s play, with its two intervals rather than the customary one, is in a particular hurry. The watch is ticking well past 10pm as we leave, more than two and a half hours after our arrival, but rest assured, time spent in the company of Wilder and “Yorkshire’s American theatre company” is time spent well indeed, particularly after that remarkable, rug-pulling third act.
Our Town has been called “America’s greatest play”, and while your reviewer does not have the time to debate that contention here, the likes of David Mamet and Edward Albee, no less, speak of this 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner that highly.
Advance publicity had suggested Amerrycan Theatre’s modern-dressed production was a very belated York premiere for Our Town, but it has since come to light that Rowntree Players presented it in the late 1950s, the actor who played young lead George Gibbs now in his 80s.
Nevertheless, that remains a long, long hiatus since its only York production, an act of neglect frankly. Not that you would feel that way after the gentle loosener of the first act, where Mulvihill leads a guided tour of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, population, 2,642.
Everyone knows everyone and their business in this little American town with its quietly competitive churches, railway, blanket factory and all-in-one town hall, post office and jail .
Wilder is presenting a microcosm of American life, much like Dylan Thomas’s portrait of the mythical Welsh seaside village of LLareggub in his 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, but Thomas’s play spanned only 24 hours, whereas Wilder’s three acts span 12 years from 1906 to 1918, rather than the original 1901 to 1913, in Bounds’s account with intervals of three years from Daily Life (May 7 1906) to Act Two’s Love and Marriage (July 7 1909) and nine more to Act Three’s Death and Eternity (Autumn 1918, originally Summer 1913).
A cast of 14 populates Our Town, some from York, others from Leeds and Harrogate, one born in Tasmania, Bounds originally from Temple, Texas, and his computer engineer friend, Thomas Miller, from southern Illinois, in his first foray into acting since university days. Just as we grow to know Wilder’s characters, an interval read of the programme profiles reveals plenty too, each accompanied by a black-and-white photograph from childhood days.
Our Town is deemed a radical play, not only in breaking down theatre’s fourth wall for Mulvihill to ask various (primed) audience members questions about Grover’s Corners, and in its lack of props and rudimentary scenery, but also in its bravura use of dead people – yes, you can see dead people a la The Sixth Sense – who rise from their graves to take seats to conduct Act Three from beyond.
Here, these dead souls of the cemetery discuss life’s transience, as Craig Kirby’s suicidal drunkard, the now late choirmaster Simon Stimson, scalds the living for their ignorance and bliss in Wilder’s bleaker, blacker version of Jaques’ monologue in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Bleaker still, they castigate the grieving George (spoiler alert) for wasting his time in visiting the graveyard.
Everything is milk and roses on the surface in Act One, even in the Sentinel newspaper run by the upright Mr Charles Webb (Andrew Isherwood), but gradually more than small-town gossip prevails. The women are not happy to be subservient; young Wally Webb (Harrison Turner-Hazel, a name for an actor if ever there were one!) must go off to war; symbolically, Kirby’s erratic Stimson tells the ladies of the Congregational Church choir (Jess Murray’s outstanding Mrs Myrtle Webb among them) that they sing too loudly.
At the play’s core is a love story, one of young lovers, neighbours George Gibbs (Frankie Bounds), the sports jock, and Emily Webb (Emily Belcher), the brightest pupil at school. The Romeo and Juliet of Wilder’s world, their courtship scenes are a delight, but the marriage ceremony shocks: a forewarning of Act Three’s darkness to come. Bounds junior and Belcher are terrific in those scenes, and Belcher is better still in the play’s stark climax.
America’s greatest play? You decide, but your first decision should be to visit Our Town and its story of everyday life and the extraordinary in the ordinary, but hurry, it will soon be leaving town.
Amerrycan Theatre in Our Town, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, 7.30pm tonight and tomorrow; 2.30pm and 7.30pm, Saturday. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Robert Hollingworth: Conductor of the University of York’s largest choir
University of York Choir & Baroque Ensemble, Central Hall, University of York, November 30
CHRISTMAS music of the Baroque and the 20th century were contrasted here in the five sections of Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit and four carol-anthems by Howells.
Interwoven with these were five extracts from A Child’s Christmas In Wales by Dylan Thomas. It was an ingenious idea, although none of these strands had much in common beyond the seasonal message.
Robert Hollingworth, who is now conductor of this choir, the university’s largest, read the passages from Thomas’s nostalgic view of a childhood Christmas, blanket-wrapped in an armchair and adopting an impressive Welsh lilt (that softened a bit towards the end). It was cosy, fireside stuff, with larger-than-life characters springing from the pages.
Charpentier’s late-17th century mass is almost balletic in its attempt to appeal to popular taste. The Baroque Ensemble, with guests leading three of its string sections, responded stylishly, with keen rhythm and taut ensemble.
The choir did not catch quite the same sense of urgency, perhaps feeling that Hollingworth’s baton was directed more at the players. That said, the tempo changes in the middle of the Credo were well managed. Alexander Kyle took over conducting for the final two sections, including a surprisingly jaunty Agnus Dei.
Variety came with several passages from a semi-chorus that additionally supplied soloists, who were at their most appealing when sopranos intertwined with recorders. A choir this size ranged on three flanks is always going to have difficulties with blend, especially in the very dry acoustic of Central Hall.
So, it was a pity that the least-known – and most recent – of the Howells pieces, Long, Long Ago, came first, before the choir had found its feet.
Here Is The Little Door, conducted by Kyle, was the best-shaped of the Howells. In contrast, A Spotless Rose was a little too fast for there to be no feel of the bar-line and the crunchy harmonies at the end, symptomatic of icy winter, were fudged. Bo Holten’s First Snow made an effective finisher.
Hollingworth is deservedly recognised as a first-class choir trainer. He will need just a little longer to stamp his mark on this choir. Watch this space.
