How do you officially open a new building, specifically one dedicated to the performing arts? Do you cut a ribbon? Far too boring. Smash a bottle of champagne on a gleaming new concert grand piano? A terrible abuse of both Bollinger and Steinway. Following his brief introductory speech, Professor Barry Ife, the Principal of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, opted for a musical gesture. Christopher Ying, one of Sevenoaks’ highly talented team of percussionists, stepped forward and obliged with a single stroke on the tam-tam, and with that always evocative, conjuror-of-mysteries kind of sound resonating through the hall, there began a truly wonderful evening of celebratory music-making.

The international dimension of the many generous donors to this magnificent building had already been alluded to by Katy Ricks in her own speech of welcome, and the programme that followed, if unable to embrace music from quite all five continents, certainly came close to giving us a something of a Cook’s musical tour of the nations.

Exoticism was especially to the fore in the first two items. In Constant Lambert’s The Rio Grande, given in the composer’s own version for two pianos, percussion, and chorus, we were treated to a display of dazzling keyboard virtuosity from Alex Ying, playing the role of concerto-like soloist, impressively aided by Jacob Rainbow supplying the scarcely less demanding transcription of the original orchestral part on a second piano. Razor-sharp rhythms and sensitive shadings of dynamic characterised the percussion playing. The text of Sacheverell Sitwell’s poem could have done with clearer enunciation by the chorus, but in this piece that has been described as possessing a ‘strangely attractive quality which must come from the surreal [today we might say “wacky”] blend of jazz and sultry Brazilian idioms with an oh-so-terribly English choral sound’, that latter essential quality was caught to perfection by The Sennocke Consort. The performance benefited hugely from Christopher Dyer’s by turns taut and expansive direction.

After sunning and exercising ourselves further, metaphorically speaking, through Daniela Kriegbaum’s vocally and visually colourful performance of the Aria and Danza from Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No.5 we were off to Europe.

Here we were treated to the magic that a worldwide fan club has come to associate with the clarinet playing of Sevenoaks alumnus Emma Johnson. With her renowned technical mastery totally at the service of the expressive needs of the music, we were treated to a spell-binding performance of two movements of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. What remains above all in the memory of this listener was the exquisite pianissimo dynamic at certain moments in the Adagio movement. The hall’s acoustics certainly passed this test with flying colours, as they did at the opposite end of the range when faced with the big guns of Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slave. This received a spine-tingling and exhilarating performance which represented the Symphony Orchestra at its thrilling best.

Never was a new home more richly deserved by this ensemble, nor by the school’s Big Band which relished being able to play at a decibel level that in the Aisher Hall would have been life-threatening, but which the Pamoja Hall took in its stride.

To conclude the evening the Choral Society, under Sam Gladstone’s dynamic and expert conducting, gave us excerpts from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Old chestnut this work may be, but on such an occasion the vitality of this performance made one listener at least mindful that tall oaks can still spring from little acorns.

Peter Young

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