Midlands Classical Music Making

  CHRISTMAS AT LONGBOROUGH Nestling high in a fold of a Cotswolds hillside, Longborough’s ancient St James’ Church was the perfect venue for a Christmas concert last Sunday celebrating the music-making prowess of young people. “Christmas at Longborough” effectively showcased the Longborough Youth Chorus, an all-year-round offshoot of the internationally renowned Longborough Festival Opera, and these 33 youngsters covered themselves and their team of mentors (Emma Campbell, David Eaton, Maria Jagusz) with masses of credit. Everyone knew exactly what they had to do when and where during these 45-minutes proceedings, presented twice, with movement in and out of the choir stalls and onto the front of the chancel beautifully synchronised. This was an impressive display of stage-discipline and memory. Among the offerings were a range of carols from all over the world, solos both English and international from Longborough Young Artists Jasmine Flicker, Myrna Tennent and Patrick Do...

  AURORA LIGHTS UP THE CBSO FESTIVE CONCERT CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★ There's a film and television genre the makers call "feelgood". The works may not be of the highest artistic merit or stay long in the memory but at the end everyone is smiling, uplifted and cheered. This concert was a feelgood occasion bursting with festive spirit with many family groups in the audience, proud parents waving at their children who were members of the choir. The concert included three world premieres, two of which confirming that world premiere does not necessarily mean world class. The concert was the pinnacle of the "Bringing the Light" project, a community-based event which began a year ago with the CBSO's Community Board working with the Canal & River Trust to light up the nearby canal with a Lantern Walk. The emphasis has been on shining a light, literally and metaphorically, on the CBSO's connection with Birmingham and its multifarious, multifaith community. T...

                                             THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (Naxos 8.660572-73) The legend of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to roam the world until redeemed by love, is universal. With the roles reversed, it gives us Siegfried and Odette/Odile in Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, but it offers no salvation to Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew who mocked Jesus dragging his cross on the way to his crucifixion. We even think of Janacek’s Makropolous Case, where the 337-year-old Emilia Marty longs to be allowed to die. Abandoning the staples of comic opera and Meyerbeerian stifling spectacle, in Der Fliegende Hollander, the first work to hold its place in his operatic canon, Wagner set to exploring the intimacy of human longing and expectation, making the orchestra both a confidi...

                                             EDUARDO VASSALLO RETIRES FROM THE CBSO                                                           By Christopher Morley   The end of an era comes on Wednesday evening December 10, when Eduardo Vassallo plays his final concert with the CBSO after 36 years as principal cellist. When I asked him to reflect upon his career, his reminiscences virtually wrote themselves, as he begins. “My journey with music started early because my father was a d...

  SHOSTAKOVICH'S ENIGMATIC FAREWELL SYMPHONY CBSO at Symphony Hall  ★★★★★ Winston Churchill famously said that, "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Add the adjectives 'comic', 'wistful' and 'sly' to that quotation and you would have a pretty good description of Shostakovich's Symphony No.15. Shostakovich spent most of his career in a cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet government's cultural commissars: feted and awarded medals for symphonies seen as suitably patriotic at other times publicly vilified for "formalism" the catch-all term for anything - complexity, ambiguity, dissonance, pessimism - they found suspect. Little wonder that his music exploited, "a teasing and often powerfully affective emotional ambivalence", as the music critic Bernard Jacobson termed it. So much so, I suspect, that even Shostakovich wasn't always sure when it applied. Take the musical quotation of Rossini's ...

  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CDs  Schoenberg: Soloists, Berliner  Philharmoniker  / Kirill  Petrenko  (Berlin  Philharmoniker  Recordings 3 CDs & Blu Ray)  ★★★★★ The first thing that sets this set apart is its appearance, more  objet   d'art  than CD box set. On the shelf it will eclipse everything else. Designed by American artist Peter Halley in multi-coloured panels it opens out to reveal a hardback book, complete with notes and in-depth essays, and the four discs in individually colour-themed holders. The set retails at around £60 but quality isn't cheap and beyond its handsome appearance this set has genuine musical quality too with one of the world's great orchestras under their chief conductor Kirill  Petrenko  who gets right to the heart of each of works performed, which were captured in concert between 2019-2024. Schoenberg's best known orchestral works are here starting with the late...

                BAVARIAN RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA                                            Symphony Hall (11.11.25) ***** Just under 35 years ago I was here in this auditorium to review Simon Rattle conducting the CBSO playing their very first work in the opening concert of the hall he had inspired and which had been built thanks to the EEC, the vision of Birmingham City Council, and a few astute manoeuvrings by some influential local figures. We were all immediately bowled over by the clarity of the acoustic (indeed, the Gemini cartoon on the front page of next morning’s Birmingham Post showed a woman berating her husband for the hourly bleeping of his digital watch), and the opportunities offered by mani...

                                             I POMERIGGI MUSICALI                                                           Teatro dal Verme, Milan                                                           (Octob...

  Jörg’s Mendelssohn Miscellany CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Jack of all trades master of none, so the proverb tells us. Jörg Widmann proves that’s not always the case: clarinet virtuoso, versatile (if quirky) composer and a conductor whose combination of probing musical intelligence and infectious enthusiasm endears him to both orchestra and audience. He’s also a shrewd concert programmer. In 2023 he conducted a sizzling Beethoven Symphony No.7 together with works, including his own ‘Con Brio’, which explored aspects of the symphony together with an orchestral arrangement of a chamber work for clarinet. He used the same template here but with Mendelssohn as the focus, beginning with his arrangement of the Andante from the composer’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. It’s a work dear to Widmann, who learned to play it as a ten-year-old, and his arrangement with a small group of strings, is tasteful and charming. As well as Widmann’s own mellifluous playing there’s a magical part for cel...

  A SOARING SEAGULL AND NIELSEN’S TERRIFYING TIMPANI CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Never judge a musical work by its literary inspiration. Nearly fifty operas are based on Shakespeare plays and nearly all are duds while Puccini’s tuneful triumphs derive from penny dreadful potboilers. This maxim meant that I ignored a pang of doubt when discovering that the British composer Adrian Sutton’s violin concerto, premiered in 2023, was inspired by Richard Bach’s 1972 fable ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. Gulls enjoy noisily circling rubbish dumps and stealing chips from holidaymakers at the seaside. Bach’s anthropomorphic gull is on a transcendental quest of self-realization. Millions of Americans bought it – the definition of gullible. It was just the image of the soaring bird that really mattered to Sutton and was the starting point for the work commissioned by violinist Fenella Humphreys. The three sections of its twenty-five minute span flow seamlessly into each other, surging, soaring an...