Symphony No. 7
A year or so ago my wife Rachel was asked to take over as leader of the Horsham Symphony Orchestra. This was set up in 1971 by the then director of music at the nearby Christ’s Hospital (a Bluecoats school )with a couple of local residents. Since then the HSO has contributed richly to the musical life of this West Sussex market town giving three major concert a year at the Capitol Theatre. The fifty or so members of the orchestra are largely amateur but are conducted and strengthened by a handful of excellent local professionals. They also invite well established soloists to perform major works with them as often as possible and are currently conducted by the prolific Steve Dummer. They describe themselves as a “friendly orchestra” who welcome new members of all ages and indeed there are a handful of very fresh faced lads and lasses in the string and brass sections in particular. They rehearse for their termly concert on a Wednesday evening and on the day of the performance they spend several hours aiming for the polish and control live performances invariably demand.
On Saturday evening I took the girls (both aspiring string players) to see their mum lead the orchestra in Dvorak’s seventh symphony as well as accompanying the pianist Benjamin Pope performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 K467.
The seventh symphony was written with the grand intention of “moving the world,” and it is certainly full of high drama right from the start with its brooding string sequence establishing the tempestuous tone of the score. The symphony came in the second half of the programme and I had the impression that the orchestra was by now fully warmed-up and open to the spirit of Dvorak’s soaring music bringing it wonderfully alive some century and a quarter on from its original performance. The marvellous thing about experiencing live, as opposed to recorded music, is that you can sense so much more the mood of the musicians as the piece unfolds. You can perceive the gradual awakening to the transcendent power of the music drawing them into that almost mystical plane of inspiration required to really connect with the really great classical compositions. It is perhaps especially intriguing to observe mainly amateur performers, whose weekdays are taken up with various civic and municipal roles or looking after their young children, finding an outlet for their artistic nature under the dramatic glare of stage lanterns. Moreover there is something almost trance-like about the way a fifty-piece orchestra grouped around their conductor find the extraordinary collective energy and acute sensitivity demanded by a composer such as Dvorak. Seeing the string section sawing and swaying as one to the mysterious patterns majestically traced in the air by the conductor’s baton is highly dramatic in itself. Moreover the HSO make a deeply resonant sound and even as a classical layman I could sense that they had been brilliantly guided and prepared by their conductor and leader to respond to the complex moods and musical ideas within the piece as well as its overall emotional arc. I was particularly struck by the programme notes about the symphony which I hurriedly read in the interval to prepare myself for the composition. I learnt that Dvorak had shortly turned down a commission for a major opera in Vienna, because the producers insisted the libretto be written in Austrian rather than his native language. At the time there was a wave of resentment in Bohemia towards Austrian imperialism, and Dvorak felt it would be a form of betrayal to comply with the producer’s demands and so he turned down this opportunity in spite of his ambition to be an internationally known opera composer. The programme implied that this, together with his mother’s death, gave the seventh symphony its distinct air of conflict. As I watched the orchestra become increasingly transported by this turbulent mood, I reflected on how this spirit of defiance in the music might resonate with the individual members of the orchestra. We live in an economic system that leaves us precious little time to express our artistic talents. Most of these musicians would struggle to find the time to make their weekly rehearsals let alone the hours needed to really master the score. They must instead follow the tempo and rhythm of market capitalism with its dreary cycles of buying and selling, and profit and loss, in order to keep afloat in the flood-tides of the credit crunch. Such mechanical, repetitive cycles lack the heroic drama of Dvorak’s grand symphony with its surging passionate intensity. They too often reduce our lives to a grim and colourless struggle to hold onto our job so we can simply keep our money lenders at bay. This is a tragically reductive picture of who we are truly called to be, as people made in the image of the divine creator. We are infact all artists called to respond to the music of the rolling spheres, and the melody in our souls in many varied creative ways. However, like Dvorak we too have to take a stand against those forces which would rob of us of our true identity and turn us into a mere function of the state. Here at the civic theatre of Horsham in West Sussex, fifty or so ordinary citizens dressed in black were giving up their souls to the transcendent power of a grand symphony and reminding the several hundred members of the audience of the magnificent drama of being alive.
A year or so ago my wife Rachel was asked to take over as leader of the Horsham Symphony Orchestra. This was set up in 1971 by the then director of music at the nearby Christ’s Hospital (a Bluecoats school )with a couple of local residents. Since then the HSO has contributed richly to the musical life of this West Sussex market town giving three major concert a year at the Capitol Theatre. The fifty or so members of the orchestra are largely amateur but are conducted and strengthened by a handful of excellent local professionals. They also invite well established soloists to perform major works with them as often as possible and are currently conducted by the prolific Steve Dummer. They describe themselves as a “friendly orchestra” who welcome new members of all ages and indeed there are a handful of very fresh faced lads and lasses in the string and brass sections in particular. They rehearse for their termly concert on a Wednesday evening and on the day of the performance they spend several hours aiming for the polish and control live performances invariably demand.
On Saturday evening I took the girls (both aspiring string players) to see their mum lead the orchestra in Dvorak’s seventh symphony as well as accompanying the pianist Benjamin Pope performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 K467.
The seventh symphony was written with the grand intention of “moving the world,” and it is certainly full of high drama right from the start with its brooding string sequence establishing the tempestuous tone of the score. The symphony came in the second half of the programme and I had the impression that the orchestra was by now fully warmed-up and open to the spirit of Dvorak’s soaring music bringing it wonderfully alive some century and a quarter on from its original performance. The marvellous thing about experiencing live, as opposed to recorded music, is that you can sense so much more the mood of the musicians as the piece unfolds. You can perceive the gradual awakening to the transcendent power of the music drawing them into that almost mystical plane of inspiration required to really connect with the really great classical compositions. It is perhaps especially intriguing to observe mainly amateur performers, whose weekdays are taken up with various civic and municipal roles or looking after their young children, finding an outlet for their artistic nature under the dramatic glare of stage lanterns. Moreover there is something almost trance-like about the way a fifty-piece orchestra grouped around their conductor find the extraordinary collective energy and acute sensitivity demanded by a composer such as Dvorak. Seeing the string section sawing and swaying as one to the mysterious patterns majestically traced in the air by the conductor’s baton is highly dramatic in itself. Moreover the HSO make a deeply resonant sound and even as a classical layman I could sense that they had been brilliantly guided and prepared by their conductor and leader to respond to the complex moods and musical ideas within the piece as well as its overall emotional arc. I was particularly struck by the programme notes about the symphony which I hurriedly read in the interval to prepare myself for the composition. I learnt that Dvorak had shortly turned down a commission for a major opera in Vienna, because the producers insisted the libretto be written in Austrian rather than his native language. At the time there was a wave of resentment in Bohemia towards Austrian imperialism, and Dvorak felt it would be a form of betrayal to comply with the producer’s demands and so he turned down this opportunity in spite of his ambition to be an internationally known opera composer. The programme implied that this, together with his mother’s death, gave the seventh symphony its distinct air of conflict. As I watched the orchestra become increasingly transported by this turbulent mood, I reflected on how this spirit of defiance in the music might resonate with the individual members of the orchestra. We live in an economic system that leaves us precious little time to express our artistic talents. Most of these musicians would struggle to find the time to make their weekly rehearsals let alone the hours needed to really master the score. They must instead follow the tempo and rhythm of market capitalism with its dreary cycles of buying and selling, and profit and loss, in order to keep afloat in the flood-tides of the credit crunch. Such mechanical, repetitive cycles lack the heroic drama of Dvorak’s grand symphony with its surging passionate intensity. They too often reduce our lives to a grim and colourless struggle to hold onto our job so we can simply keep our money lenders at bay. This is a tragically reductive picture of who we are truly called to be, as people made in the image of the divine creator. We are infact all artists called to respond to the music of the rolling spheres, and the melody in our souls in many varied creative ways. However, like Dvorak we too have to take a stand against those forces which would rob of us of our true identity and turn us into a mere function of the state. Here at the civic theatre of Horsham in West Sussex, fifty or so ordinary citizens dressed in black were giving up their souls to the transcendent power of a grand symphony and reminding the several hundred members of the audience of the magnificent drama of being alive.
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