Review: cellist Philip Higham at Brighton's Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts

Turning out to see a musician play five solo cello works all by himself is a bit like going to hear a solitary actor deliver five different soliloquys of five different lead characters from five different Shakespeare plays in the actor’s own chosen order.

Both will be concerned with mood, meaning, expression, eloquence, projection, nuance, tone and attack. The cellist will have been forward-thinking – as both director and actor – about preparation, articulation, interpretation, dynamics and execution, perhaps even physical gesture. Because actor or cellist will be out there alone once the curtain lifts. No one else speaking lines sharing the scene, no interactive dialogue or repartee to spark inspiration and energy. Just the solitary musician’s brain and heart going to work in tandem.

Increasing is the availability of this singular concert experience, with its need for pro-active listening concentration and love of the instrument. The man on the street today will have heard, the opening of Bach’s G major Suite. But the instantly popular young Sheku Kanneh-Mason in this role on worldwide TV has tilted the interest and potential audience towards solo cello.

After five years’ hesitation by the Coffee Concerts to risk a solo instrument concert since presenting Baroque violinist Rachel Podger in the Corn Exchange, Higham in early December 2018 performed to 200, of whom 40 decided on the day that this was for them. On Sunday, post-pandemic, but illness still about, Higham played to 198 and again 40 paid on the door.

In 2018, he played Bach’s Suites 1 3 and 5, and Gabrielli’s Ricercare Nos 7 and 5. This time he brought Bach’s No 2 and Gabrielli’s earlier 1 3 and 2 of his seven. After his helpfully substantial spoken introduction to the first half of his programme, Higham prefaced these with two short, simpler-textured Caprices composed 50 years since Bach, by the Brussels-born reformed character dall’Abaco. Higham said he had discovered the composer by chance, and his music warmed Higham for his Bach and Gabrielli task, the first Caprice walking outwards, the second hurrying home.

In Bach’s Suite of dances Higham had the Courante furiously busy, his following Sarabande graceful. To the second of the two consecutive Menuets he brought agility which heightened to make fleeter the closing Gigue. After the unstinting rigorour of the German Bach voice, instant contrast and refreshment came in the Italian Gabrielli’s three ‘quests’ – which Higham gave freer in temperament and feel, less insistently self-absorbed than the Bach, more outgoing and transparently expressive.

Higham sequenced Gabrielli’s three Rocecari in falling fifths tonality. But instead of the listeners’ pulse rate easing down each time, each one raised it. His No 3 increased further No 1’s sense of freshness, his No 2 accelerating through its rapid virtuosic cadenza to a second bright climax in a jig of gathering pace and intensity. Higham had announced Gabrielli as a star of the solo cello, but also as a poet, preacher and theorist. Higham’s performance duly intimated how much a star.

Higham performed his first half programme, of 18th century music, with the Baroque bow – shorter and more curved – on his on his gut-strung 17th century cello, which sat balanced like a viola da gamba between his spread knees, resting on his calves, above matching light tan shoes. For second half, of 19th and 20th Century, he switched to a modern bow and out came the cello’s downward pin for the standard modern playing position.

Time vaulted 300 years beyond Gabrielli to a Berio homage to Swiss conductor Paul Sacher using musical notes Eb A C B E D as code spelling of Sacher’s surname to springboard a semi-meditational exploitation of bow-and-string effects. Berio’s native Italian instructs his cellist to play as an intimate monologue this multi-voiced and cross-shaded music. Higham unravelled vast skill in conveying it as a vivid, though contained, arguably dignified, four-minute character study.

In many Coffee Concerts, a work of rugged or dissonantly coloured 20th Century work captures and heightens attention and walks away with the honour of ‘concert high-spot’. Berio would have done had Higham not introduced most of this audience for the first time to Brahms disciple, Max Reger. I can’t remember Reger getting a hearing here, if at all, but he was the revelation of the day – and just what the doctor ordered, as a winter bottom and hand warmer.

It was another showpiece. The Suite’s Prelude found Higham plaintive, almost melancholy. In the triple-time Scherzo he danced, quipped and lithely attracted. In the trio he sang, and in the closing Variations, Higham and Reger showed us, in both mercurial bravura and delicate cantabile modes, that a cello in top hands can do just the thing we anticipate seeing a solo violin doing.

Higham maintained his consistent quality of rapid a high-fingerboard intonation through the challenges, yet without flamboyance or showmanship. Taking the stage in grey suit waistcoat and trousers, white shirt and pale yellow tie, and in unmannered and businesslike performing style, it was as though a youngish executive, with wife and small children at home, had escaped from his office for lunch, skipped his food, found a spare room and was doing a practice run-through for a concert that evening. The Higham image and musical offering were pleasingly distinctive.

Quite probably, that non-showmanship derives from being primarily a team player as principle cello of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as well as a chamber musician. He fits in roughly a dozen solo engagements a year but soon he also gives the Brahms Double Concerto twice in Urecht. His use of a music stand on Sunday, having played from memory here in 2018 suggests he is busier now. And if that increasing audience interest in solo cello continues apace, we can only guess the shape of Higham’s career another 10 years from now.

This concert was provided in memory of her late husband by Margaret Polmear, commemorating Andrew Polmear – not only the enjoyably insightful writer of Coffee Concert programme notes and Strings Attached in-house concert reviews and newsletter, but a GP distinguished for his publications on the management of general practices. He was strongly interested in music education and cello tuition and the Polmears, often anonymously, have been generous supporters of classical music offering by Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival and also modern dance and theatre.

Andrew’s music writing sprang from authentic foundation. Fellow programme notes author Chris Darwin told me, “Andrew was a very good amateur cellist, a very good chamber musician. We’d been in the same quartet for 25 years, although performing concerts simply for friends. He was an excellent Baroque continuo player and had a superb sense of rhythm.”

Coffee Concerts-goer David Harrison knew Andrew inside the arts-donation scene: “He’d tell you after a performance if he didn’t like something, and he was very inquisitive in the best sense of the word.” [“Exacting”, was the word Dome and Festival chief executive Andrew Comben used in his own tribute before Philip Higham took the stage on Sunday] “But he was very much up for exploring new artistic territory.”

“He was a very intuitively caring person with a very dry, wry sense of humour, aside from the arts, he wrote a regular column about wine in The Whistler, the print and online community magazine of his local West Hill and Seven Dials area.”

He and I both writing about the Coffee Concerts, I shall fondly miss the invigorating incentive of Andrew’s and my agreement not to discuss any performance afterwards until we’d gone away and written up. Nor to read the work of the other until one’s own was published.

Richard Amey

Next Coffee Concert, (same venue, time): Heath Quartet on Sunday 19 February. String Quartets by Haydn Op 20 No 5 in Fm, Fanny Mendelssohn in Eb, Schubert No 14 in Dm D810 ‘Death and The Maiden’.

Quickly stood among the star foursomes of the 2010s Coffee Concerts while establishing themselves nationally, including landing the 2013 Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artistes Award as its first winning ensemble for 15 years, and later an award-winning Tippett album.

Last here in January 2020 with Beethoven and Brahms. Founding first fiddle Oliver Heath, after 20 years, has since departed (summer 2021: “I have made the decision to see where different paths might lead me,”). His replacement is Marije Johnston.