United Kingdom Williams, Rodrigo, Holst: Sean Shibe (guitar), Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra / Marin Alsop (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London, 8.2.2026. (AV-E)
Williams – Star Wars Suite
Rodrigo – Guitar Concerto, ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’
Holst – The Planets
As an introduction to a packed out Royal Festival Hall audience, Robert Looman, principal piccolo of the Philharmonia, gave us an informatively humorous introduction to the concert, and stated for the record: ‘With thanks to the Philharmonia archivist Mike Hurwitz, I can tell you this is our 56th performance of the full Planets suite since our inception 80 years ago. The music from Star Wars has featured in at least 45 of our performances, and this is only our 8th performance of the Rodrigo.’
Marin Alsop has John Williams’s Star Wars Suite in her blood and bones and conducted it with great gusto, panache and aplomb securing passionate playing from the Philharmonia. In particular, the brazen blazing brass played with a virtuosic and vivacious white-hot intensity. The orchestra exuded such love through their playing and clearly liked playing the score for Alsop. You will never hear the Star Wars Suite conducted and played better than this!
After each movement there erupted a spontaneous applause from an ecstatically enthusiastic audience who were really relishing in this magnetic music making.
Just an aside: whilst I have never seen Star Wars, I did bear witness to the making of it at Elstree Studios in that extremely hot summer of 1976 when my father was directing Valentino in the next studio. I was working in the art department which was bang next to the Star Wars art department where they were manufacturing the Stormtroopers helmets and suits and which were cast in thin plastic and mass-produced by the dozen! If only I had swiped one! What they’d be worth now!
Rodrigo’s ‘earthbound’ Guitar Concerto, ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ seemed out of sync being flanked by two scores which were ‘out of this world’. Penderecki’s Kosmogonia (1970) would have been much more apt.
Globally celebrated for its saccharine second movement, ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ was given a ‘newly minted’ interpretation by Sean Shibe that felt like one was hearing the work for the very first time; for it is a very difficult thing to do with such an ‘old warhorse’ like this.
In the Allegro con spirito, Shibe’s rustic ‘flamenco strumming’ recalled that ‘duelling banjos’ scene in John Boorman’s Deliverence (1972); such was Shibe’s vaudevillian versatility: transforming a guitar into a banjo.
Thankfully, the Adagio was schmaltz-free, with Shibe eschewing (and skewering) ‘the more than usually revolting sentimentality’, as Lady Bracknell would say. For here there was a subdued and serene sensation of a melting melancholia, and a distilled demeanour of a dissolving distancing, a vacant vanishing, so nuanced, so subtle, was the fingerwork here: indeed, I have never heard it played with such a sublime simplicity totally devoid of cloying ‘chocolate-box’ mawkishness.
The concluding Allegro gentile had an elevated evaporating evanescence sending us all sky-high; for this was not ‘earthbound’ after all, but heaven-bound; and throughout, Alsop gave Shibe sensitive support from her world-class players.
Shibe scribed: ‘Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjueza is the kind of apotheosis of all guitar concerti.’
Alsop has rightly become a world-renowned conductor of English music and her perceptional performance of The Planets proved this. Mars was appropriately menacing, Venus was appropriately vapourish, Mercury was appropriately meteorological, Jupiter was appropriately jubilant, Saturn was appropriately saturated, Uranus was appropriately urchin, Neptune was appropriately nebulising.
In Uranus, a special high-praise must go to the timpanists Laura Bradford and Elliott Gaston-Ross for their incisive and vigorous playing. Not surprisingly, the afternoon ‘family’ audience applauded after each planet, which was to the slight dismay of Alsop, who wanted to keep all those planets on the move! This was by far the best Planets that I have ever heard in concert – by a long shot!
Alexander Verney-Elliott
Featured Image: Marin Alsop conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra