Midlands Classical Music Making

                                             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...