Leeds’ vibrant amateur orchestral scene starts its Autumn Season each year at the beginning of September, at the end of the long school holiday. Weekly rehearsals normally result in a Christmastide concert, so it’s particularly enterprising of Leeds Haydn Players to bring off a concert by the second week in October.
As the ensemble’s name implies, it is the works of one particular composer that tend to get promoted in the orchestra’s programmes, but, here, it was not one of Haydn’s 104 symphonies to be included, but his most famous concerto, the one for trumpet from 1796. By then in his mid-60s, Haydn had written all his symphonies and had celebrity fame enough to dictate for himself which commissions, if any, he accepted. The valveless trumpet of the day could play pitifully few notes, so when Haydn’s friend Anton Weidinger produced an instrument with flute-like keys that could play every note of the scale, the composer was keen to write something which exploited such new possibilities. His well-known sense of fun extended as far as making the trumpet’s very first entry use only notes possible on the old instrument, before launching into newly-created melodic territory.
The modern trumpet remains an orchestra’s loudest instrument, but, from the start, soloist Sebastian Williman, of Grimethorpe Colliery Band and the Royal Northern College of Music, found subtleties for us to reassess its brash reputation, particularly in the work’s central slow movement. There, in the recapitulation, Sebastian fashioned a truly-beautiful, long-breathed singing line, which was a joy to savour. He rattled off the famous finale – familiar to some via the notorious Netflix TV series The Squid Game – with the utmost aplomb.
Earlier, conductor Melvin Tay made his own mark with some nuanced detailing in Rossini’s Overture to The Barber of Seville. Never a programme’s main event, such an opener can sometimes be a routine, perfunctory affair, but here he had the orchestra poised and active from its arresting, dramatic start, registering an engaging echo effect in the first phrase of the violin’s main melody and inviting some delightful soloistic work from the wind department principals, time enough allowed to each to give proper expression.
Melvin opened Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the sole work of the concert’s second half, at a rate somewhat faster than its customary leisurely pacing. Though the strings struggled to keep every last detail under the fingers in places, we were treated to the generous offering of the first movement opening repeat. Admirable too was their disciplined pausing in the slow movement’s riverside scene. Perhaps here, an intentional prominence given to the winds tipped the overall sound balance against them. No reservations could be held about the shattering effect of the “storm”, with the heavy brass and timpani, underused by Beethoven until then, fully justifying their inclusion. Beecham once remarked that the British may not like music, but they surely love the noise it makes. This was splendid stuff indeed.
In the finale, a noble, uplifting celebration of nature, this wonderful work was brought to an aptly majestic close.
And they can still fit in possibly eight rehearsals before December!
