Jess Gillam brings the house down at Worthing Symphony Orchestra concert

Worthing Symphony Orchestra, ‘Jess Gillam – Stars in her Eyes’ concert at The Assembly Hall, Sunday 29 October 2023 (2.45pm), leader Paul Willey, conductor John Gibbons, multi-saxophone soloist Jess Gillam (Cumbria).

John Williams, Star Wars Suite (Main Title, Princess Leia’s Theme, The Little People, The Battle, The Throne Room and End Title); Barbara Thompson, Concerto for 3 Saxophones (soloist Jess Gillam; alto sax in fast 1st movement, tenor in slow 2nd, soprano in quick 3rd); Malcolm Arnold, Symphony No 6 (three movements – energetic, very slow, fiery); John Williams, Adventures on Earth (ET).

Adolph Sax would have felt further personal vindication and deliverance. Having invented one of the most sensually alluring musical instruments, ahead of its time in the formal musical world and destined later to define post-war jazz, his baby only tiptoed around the sceptical classical concert hall. That is until five years ago when a bouncy, bespectacled, redhead girl started de-stiffening the doors.

On Sunday, in Jess Gillam’s hands, mouth, lungs, skill and personality, the soprano breed of saxophone screamed, squealed, seared, soared, serenaded and sang above a full symphony orchestra in the busy finale of a three-pronged Concerto written by the late Barbara Thompson – a classically-trained sax player at the Royal College of Music, who fronted British jazz performance, then composed when beset for her last 25 years by Parkinson’s Disease.

The WSO brooded, burgeoned then gleamed in Thompson’s wide colour palette of orchestral effects. And Gillam added the composer’s portraiture of power, soul and dexterity in the alto sax, soulful demeanour in the tenor with its supernatural low and high ends, and the strength, grace and delicacy of the beautiful soprano. Each movement’s conclusion called on Gillam’s control and resilience in each instrument’s highest register.

Thompson’s expertise schemed and calculated it all without free improvisation – nor even explicit hybrid jazz feel. Anything of that we sensed only through the saxophone’s habitual association with it. So this was purely the mechanism and mettle of Adolph’s creation, perhaps writ larger than anywhere else yet in the classical canon.

Gillam’s soprano sax then silenced and transfixed an audience of 490 in an encore clamoured-for by an audience as much enchanted as thrilled to be welcoming her back for this second-hearing Concerto performance following its April 2018 Worthing premiere. Thompson, memorably present that year, lost her noted drummer husband Jon Hiseman two months later. She passed away in July last year, at 77, while Gillam, now 24, lights the international classical and jazz stage, and for already three years has presented her own award-winning BBC Radio 3 Saturday lunchtime conversation-and-recommended-musical-samples show, This Classical Life.

Her bonus solo encore was performed also in front of a Worthing Symphony Orchestra numbering 52 equally enthralled fellow musicians, and adding a third triumph to her popular pair of 2016 and 2018 Worthing appearances. The encore began in pin-drop pianissimo as 80-year-old American composer Meredith Monk’s Early Morning Melody began to evoke birdsong. Then Gillam moved into a rapidly virtuosic take on a folk dance, Shine You No More, as realised by the engaging Danish String Quartet.

In a trouser suit of plain blue, a bun of red hair, Gillam stomped her sparkly black creeper shoes in time and brought the house down – then during the ensuing interval she chatted to friendly audience members from the front of the stage.

Why did WSO call up this Concerto again? “We wanted to revisit it” – John Gibbons, their artistic director now 25th seasons in situ; “You always find more in the music each time you play it” – Gillam, the piece’s champion. I found the Concerto took surer shape. Its adventurously-conceived instrumental colours and textures grew stronger, and even more striking and rewarding. Its numerous moments of mystery or outburst were more gripping. Its musical conversation came in clearer logic. Its soloist’s voicings took on greater sense.

After this 1988 work, Thompson wrote her Saxophone Symphony for choir and orchestra (1992), her Saxophones Quintet for Brighton Festival (2001), then her Mirages Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and String Ensemble and Apollo Concerto for Sax and String Ensemble (2004). There’s also a Tuba Concerto with Big Band – although there’s no emergent new star player to popularise that.

But Jess Gillam looks like taking care of this triple Concerto, with her trio of Japanese unlaquered bronze Yanagisawa saxophones – the bell of her alto engraved with her name and her mother’s floral design. We’ll await Decca Classics’ recording intentions about this. Meanwhile, The Jess Gillam Ensemble of she, string quartet, bass, percussion and piano have a third album in the pipeline, as confided to me by her partner and bassist Sam Becker.

This concert was another WSO showcase stacked with keen interest and, this time, cinematic feel with two composers synonymous with the screen. Gillam had her fan legion in the South, ready-drawn to this event alongside the WSO regulars now well-versed in their offering unusual concertos. Add in the surefire attraction of household-name music from two monster hit film scores by John Williams.

There were plenty of fervent shouts and cheers of appreciation and the audience’s readiness for the extraordinary brought another vocal reception to something few of them will have heard before – John Gibbons’ latest-scheduled Malcolm Arnold Symphony, No 6. In January, WSO performed No 4, with a positive Worthing audience reaction now exceeded by No 6. This work made its historical 1969 London debut in the Royal Albert Hall alongside organist Jon Lord’s Concerto for Band and Orchestra, featuring Deep Purple with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and Arnold coaching and conducting.

Gibbons has recorded No 9 with his Latvian orchestra, and has chalked up years of WSO appearances at the annual festival of Arnold’s music in the composer’s home town of Northampton. Gibbons understands and celebrates trumpeter Arnold’s musical personality, which ignored convention, freely bled in a jazz or pop influence, and perched him top of the post-war British film composers’ wanted list.

Seemingly in this No 6, although riven with personal symphonic ideas and sometimes dark statements by a mind that had been constantly dented by its demons, there flow different sections, sometimes in a progression, sometimes juxtaposed, to which a listener can easily apply their own continuous imagined changing scenery and dramatic tensions – just as happily as reading the musical commentary in the £3 concert programme brochure. Arnold’s declared inspirational references to Coltrane jazz and 1967 pop in the first two movements were hard to detect. They may have been, for example, in passing saxophone phrases or figures more easily detectable by reading the score, or possibly Arnold’s own advance billing of the music could have been red herrings to interest and tease – maybe fox – his detractors.

To a modern concert audience like this one, WSO were presenting a real breadth of entertainment in new discovery (Thompson, Arnold) as well as illustrative re-visits to the well-known (Williams). The WSO’s musical ranks also earn their weekly crust in recording studios. Film scores are bread-and- butter home territory. Such familiar John Williams, heard live, immediate, in the raw, instead of glossily at home or in the cinema, arrest the unsuspecting new concert-goer as an experience to remember.

This ongoing public awakening of awareness about a live orchestra’s vibrant visceral, cerebral and emotional power is the business Gibbons and the WSO are in. The same for Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s classical music’s constant message to the town. And during what he sees currently as a phase of economic despair and restricted spending, Gibbons, from his rostrum, urged all those knowing this message to work together in spreading it.

Richard Amey

Next orchestral concerts

Worthing Symphony Orchestra on Sunday 12 November (2.45), ‘Liberation’ concert at Assembly Hall, Conductor, John Gibbons: Jean Sibelius, Finlandia and Symphony No 2; Antonin Dvorak, Violin Concerto (soloist Simon Zhu), Bernard Stevens, Symphony of Liberation. More music about freedom, for a Remembrance Day (Sibelius large, Stevens concise), spotlighting another young violinist of the future playing more dancing Dvorak – which will be this Concerto’s first time in Worthing under the Gibbons tenure.

Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra on Sunday 26th November (3) at Assembly Hall, conductor Dominic Grier: Anatoly Lyadov, Polonaise Op55; Sergei Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No 3 (soloist Julian Chan), Edward Elgar, Symphony No 2.

Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra on Sunday 17 December (3), ‘Christmas on Broadway’ concert at Assembly Hall, conductor Dominic Grier; with Sompting Village Primary School Choir and Worthing Choral Society, conductors Aedan Kerney and Sam Barton. Selections from Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady and Rogers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music; Leroy Anderson, A Christmas Festival; Hely Hutchinson: A Christmas Carol Symphony; and seasonal favourites and carols for all.

Tickets for these concerts from WTM (01903 206206)