SUBTLE it wasn’t. But there again, who in their right minds would have expected subtlety when the Philharmonic was reinforced by a double choir, enough explosives and weaponry to start a terror alert in the wrong hands and a laser show straight out of Star Wars?
No, the Classical Spectacular at the Echo Arena on Saturday night was one of those occasions when the only thing to do was let your hair down and have a stomping good time.
And although the more fragrant of classical music lovers may well wake up screaming in the night at the prospect of an evening like Saturday’s, they were far outweighed by the thousands who entered into the spirit of the evening with joyful abandon.
It’s a formula that has worked for 20 years now for promoter Raymond Gubbay. Take one orchestra, a conductor and soloists with an assured popular touch, the best light show that money can buy, an appropriate quantity of gunpowder, light the blue touchpaper, sit back and enjoy.
Saturday’s master of ceremonies was John Rigby, born in St Helens and therefore pretty well on his home patch.
As a conductor, all he really had to do was make sure everyone started and finished together, and it was really as a presenter, turning round and addressing the audience, that he came into his own. He had the measure of what the audience wanted, and supplied it in full, smoothing the path when needed but often letting the music speak for itself, albeit with the volume level on maximum.
A programme for an Arena concert has got to be chosen pretty carefully, of course. A whole night of robust and bomb-proof pieces can end up sounding like more and more of the same, and it was to everyone’s credit that there was as much contrast between the items on the programme as was humanly possible.
Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man was a suitable starting point for the festivities, with the combined forces of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and Welsh Choral brought straight into play with the opening of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana and the Hallelujah Chorus.
Somewhere in there was Sousa’s Liberty Bell, inextricably linked with Monty Python, of course, Lee Bisset and Wynne Evans having fun in bits of La Traviata, and Jonathan Scott playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue – as a performance probably the highlight of the night.
Wynne Evans is now known as the over-the-top tenor Gio Compario in the TV adverts, and he went into full Gio Compario mode in the second half, hamming it up splendidly in O Sole Mio and Nessun Dorma.
The official finale was supposed to be Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture complete with cannon and musketry, but John Rigby knew his Liverpool audience better than to stop there, sending at least the Red half home happy with a final rip-roaring version of You’ll Never Walk Alone.
