CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ Take the following ingredients: CBSO orchestra, CBSO chorus, conductor Kazuki Yamada and a hugely demanding, super-scale, richly emotional score. What is the result? A triumph. Symphony Hall was packed right to the upper circle and when the final notes of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony died away the standing ovation and fifteen minutes of applause put the seal on a magnificent start to the new CBSO season. This wasn’t a fluke, the same recipe has worked in recent seasons in equally impressive performances of Berlioz’s ‘Faust’, Haydn’s ‘Creation’, Verdi’s Requiem and Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ – they have brought out the best in the CBSO’s music director with his flair for musical drama and passion pushed to the limits. Yamada, a dapper musical general, command ed his huge forces – 120 players and a 100-strong chorus – t o dazzle the audience in a bravura displa y o f Mahler’s intoxicating musical brew, by turns sentimental and transcendental with a light sea...
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A SOLD-OUT CONCERT AT ST ANDREW’S, WILMCOTE If Elf and Safetee had allowed, it would have been standing-room only in Wilmcote’s St Andrew’s Church on Sunday evening for the latest in the popular series of Gwyn Williams Bursary concerts. This jewel of a building was packed to capacity with an audience of 80+ to enjoy a mixed programme of vocal and instrumental items delivered by a team of highly -talented international professionals all giving their services free of charge in aid of this charity, founded to aid young string players, in memory of Gwyn, a long-term Wilmcote resident, and Sir Simon Rattle’s principal viola in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Much-loved local archdeacon, the Ven. Dr Brian Russell, gave informative and perceptive introductions to performances by Chinese violist Jinhe Chang, first prizewinner of the Gwyn Williams Viola Prize at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire ,accompanied by Jiayi Chen (Vaughan Williams and Elgar), American cellist Ni...
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ENTER A LIVING LEGEND Munich Philharmonic at Symphony Hall ★★★★ We live in the age of celebrity when the runner-up in a television reality show is hailed as a star and 1970s singers performing their two hit singles on the revival circuit are labelled legendary. In the midst of this devalued currency the audience for this concert had the privilege of seeing an authentic living legend perform. Martha Argerich first appeared on the concert platform, aged eight, 77 years ago, triumphed in every competition she entered becoming a star when winning the International Chopin Piano Competition in 1965. Look at the cover photograph of her first recording made that year for EMI and you'll see a pouting beauty with a mane of black hair for whom the word "sultry" could have been coined. She made Bardot loom prim. But tempus fugit; the Martha Argerich who was greeted with cheers and applause from an enthusiastic Symphony Hall audience is 85-years-old, the mane is grey, in black and ...
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Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Buckfast Abbey in Devonshire dates back more than a thousand years and has a chequered history, being demolished during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and its present site was reinstated as an abbey in 1902. It has a thriving musical life with the present Abbey Choir founded in 2009 and an organ by the Italian organ builder Fratelli Ruffati, their first to be constructed in Britain, which was installed in 2017 and given its inaugural recital in 2018. Both are featured in two new discs released on the Ad Fontes label handsomely housed in handsome CD-sized hardback books lavishly illustrated in colour, with beautiful views of the Abbey and its surroundings, and with informative notes. 'Cinquième Symphonie' ★★★★ shows off the Ruffati organ's splendid sound in a 76 minute programme performed by the Abbey's own organist Charles Maxtone-Smith. The album's title is of the disc's opening wor...
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Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Ondřej Kukal & Jiří Teml: Jan Fišer (violin), Czech Philharmonic / Jakob Hrůša, Tomáš Netopil (Animal Music CD) ★★★★★ Here's a fascinating find: two contemporary orchestral works, challenging, interesting, having direct emotional appeal and by composers who are, at least in Britain, virtually unknown. Kulak's Symphony No. 1 “With Glockenspiel”(Op. 15) (1999) has a tremendous opening full of foreboding and menace which reminded me of Nielsen at his most pugnacious. There are some amazingly deep, cavernous subterranean sounds as if Moby Dick were on the prowl in a murky ocean, accompanied by blisteringly fast timpani. Is this Captain Ahab and his ship in pursuit of the great white whale? I offer this description just to give you an idea of how dramatic, and potentially cinematic, the opening Andante Spiritoso movement is. The tinkling glockenspiel makes a consolatory, calm-after-the-storm entrance right at the end....
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ELGAR, POULENC AND JANACEK Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral **** On Monday evening Adrian Partington, Director of this year’s Gloucester Festival on the Three Choirs circuit, managed something a one-time Prime Minister ducked out of attempting. He held the pause on the first beat of the second bar of Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture perfectly, before releasing the Philharmonia Orchestra strings into a scurry of detail. This proved a reading both bustling and tender, revealing all the pageantry and poignancy the composer so loved in London Town. Of course allowances had to be made for the sounds of the various sec...
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SIMON RATTLE AND THE CBSO PLAY WALTON I returned this evening to my long-neglected CD of Simon Rattle conducting Walton with the CBSO, recorded nearly 30 years ago. This performance of the First Symphony, in my not so humble opinion the greatest British symphony (pistols at dawn, anyone?) is so powerful, so intense, that one cannot listen to it too often. No wonder that for once Radio 3's "Building a Library" got things right, when the person comparing all available recordings chose this one, saying the players performed as though their lives depended upon it. At the time of this recording Rattle was approaching the end of his tenure as the CBSO's Principal Conductor, a post he had held since 1980, and during much of which ...
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Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Walton: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Yamada (Deutsche Grammophon CD 83 minutes) ★★ The first recording by the CBSO and its new music director is a huge disappointment. Their combination has produced some wonderful music-making at Symphony Hall and unforgettable concert evenings. The two captured here in live recordings were not amongst them. Unlike the London critic who gave this disc a rave review I actually attended the concert at which Walton's second symphony was performed, along with his 'Orb and Sceptre' march, composed for the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. While he hailed them, as heard on disc, as an "unbridled success" I failed to discern in them any great insights or indeed any affinity with Walton's music from Yamada. Unless one values the motto "slow is best", for here and in the accompanying performance of Walton's First Symphony, Yamada's tempi are...
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TRULY TERRIFIC TOSCA CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ Dramatic would be an understatement. Black drapes hung from ceiling to platform transforming Symphony Hall into a gigantic catafalque, over which loomed a gigantic cross formed from myriad lights. The CBSO players occupied every inch of space, they too in black, illuminated only by music stand lamps. Kazuki Yamada's baton stabs down incisively, the CBSO roars into life with menacing doom-laden chords saturated in percussion and brass. Seconds later the political fugitive Angelotti (Ashley Riches) is racing down the left stalls aisle and onto the platform desperately seeking refuge in the Church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle. Just under three hours later Tosca (Anna Patalong) takes her fatal plunge as the cross dazzles us with a blaze of pure white light. A capacity audience from stalls to the precipitous seats in the grand tier roar their approval of a superb performance that has gripped us throughout. In the 1950s professor of music...
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BIRMINGHAM PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Birmingham Town Hall ***** In Birmingham, Mahler’s Second Symphony, the “Resurrection” has become something of a “Farewell” Symphony. Sir Simon Rattle signed off his 18-year principal conductorship of the CBSO with it in 1998, and now the much-loved Michael Lloyd has bowed out with the work after 32 years as principal conductor of the city’s world-c...