Gloriously upbeat start to 2024 from Worthing Symphony Orchestra

Conductor John Gibbons and leader Julian Leaper combine for the orchestra’s annual celebration of Viennese waltzes, polkas and marches. As John says, it’s a concert to banish the gloom of winter in a feast of uplifting tunes – a joyous, celebratory event featuring the music of the Strauss family and their contemporaries.

“We have been doing the Viennese concert for decades and it's one of the most popular concerts. People just love the experience and I think it's because what the concert gives you is that uplift at the beginning of January. It is post-Christmas and it's just got a bright feel to everything. I think a lot of people assume that January is the most depressing month but actually I think November and December are with the days getting shorter but once you get to January the days are starting to get longer and you get the bulbs starting to come up and you get the feeling that spring is on its way. And the Viennese concert is all about that sense of bubbliness and that sense of optimism and about the hope that maybe 2024 is going to be better than 2023! Hopefully the day is going to be crisp with a bit of sunshine and with that sense of things breaking through.

“There are certain things that absolutely have to be on the programme like Blue Danube and The Radetzky March and The Thunder and Lightning Polka. Those are classics that have to be there but we've got some new ones this year that we've never done before. I've got a pile of music sitting on a table downstairs that I just have to put into the right order. 80 per cent of the concert is in my head in advance so it's just a question of putting in the little polkas and the little exciting interesting new things that might surprise and maybe one or two things that might reflect the year and what is happening. And the great thing is there's an absolutely phenomenal stock of music that we can draw on. When you consider Johann Strauss II, you have got opus numbers going well into the 400s and then there is his father and his brother and his cousins and all the other writers that are around writing at that same time. There is this incredibly vast array of music that you can choose from.

“I think it is all about the tunefulness of the music which is also just very, very uplifting. Sometimes music from the classical world can be very, very dark but this is something that's different and for a lot of our audience this is absolutely their concert of the year. It's foot-tapping and it's uplifting. And you can walk out with a real sense that spring is coming. And what I love is the absolute guarantee of the joyousness of the music.”

And it all comes at a good time for the orchestra: “We are in a very good place. We've managed to survive the pandemic and we are carrying on. And with everything that is going on in the arts, that's great to say. You see what is going on in the West End and there's a huge reduction of work for musicians in the West End shows. A lot of shows are looking to replace musicians in the pit with synthesisers and recordings. But with us you've got the ability to hear the live sound of an orchestra which is a real luxury to hear. However brilliant you think something is when you watch it on the TV screen, it's absolutely nothing like seeing it live. I often compare it to football. You think you're catching the atmosphere at the stadium when you are watching on your TV screen but really you're just getting nothing of that at all, of that really special feeling of actually being there.”