Midlands Classical Music Making

  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...