Midlands Classical Music Making

                                             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...