Midlands Classical Music Making

  BACK ROW BOYS STEAL THE LIMELIGHT IN GLASS CONCERTO CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ In rock music drummers are the butt of endless jokes, with internet sites listing hundreds of them. Not so in classical music where viola players are the designated target for banter. In orchestras timpani players suffer the lesser indignity of being tucked away in the back ranks and often taken for granted. What a delightful change to see Matthew Hardy and Toby Kearney, usually providing the orchestra's bedrock beat, as soloists in Philip Glass's Double Timpani Concerto. "The front of the stage is a very unfamiliar place for timpanists; indeed, timpani are probably the last instrument you’d expect to hear in a concerto," said Hardy. But courtesy of the master of minimalism's 2000 work - originally titled 'Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra' - they demonstrated versatility, vigour and imagination. In  the three-movement work Glass reinforces the standard orchest...

  ENGLISH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA                                                           Malvern Priory **** In only a few years the Worcester-based Elgar Festival has grown into one of the major events on the concert calendar. attracting visitors from both home and abroad, hearing the music in the composer’s own surroundings. So the beautiful Priory in Malvern, to all intents and purposes the capital of Elgarshire, was the perfect setting for a programme of string music by Elgar and his contemporaries (one of them only 6 when Elgar passed away). Artistic director Kenneth Woods conducted a compact English Symphony Orchestra on willing top form in a gorgeous sequence of works with moonlight as the...

                                                            FLORILEGIUM                              St James’ Church, Chipping Campden *****   Playing all six concertos in Bach’s Brandenburg set but not necessarily in the right order was an intriguing idea, but one which raised a couple of issues. Visiting this year’s excitingly-programmed Chipping Campden Festival, the expert, thoughtfully-prepared authentic performance group Florilegium brought a fascinating panoply of period instruments for this wonderful showcase of Bach at his orchestrally most c...

  SLIMMED-DOWN STRAVINSKY STILL DAZZLES CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ You wait for ages for a bus and then two come along or, in this case, works by Hindemith. Having been delighted last month with the CBSO's masterly 'Symphonic Metamorphosis of the Themes by Carl Maria von Weber' - performances of the German master's music being in the blue moon region of frequency - here was an exquisitely crafted powerhouse performance of the 'Concert Music for Strings and Brass'. Hindemith ought to have inserted the words "Lots of" in the title for this was no modest chamber piece. A huge array of brass, including a horn section, was perched impressively all along the rear of the platform, looking down on a massive string section, with first and second fiddles six desks deep. The opening direction is "mit Kraft" (with power) and the CBSO obliged in what sounded like the opening skirmish of a battle. You want loud? We'll give you loud... as the brass sect...

                                      JOE DAVIES CONDUCTS MAHLER’S SYMPHONY OF A THOUSAND                                                                         By Christopher Morley   Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the “Symphony of a Thousand”, does not quite live up to its name. For its world premiere in Munich, in 1910 there were only around 400 people on the platform, performing under the composer’s baton. This monumental work has as its first part a ...

                               NICKY SPENCE AND DYLAN PEREZ                                            Royal Pump Rooms, Leamington Spa *****   Jetlag? What jetlag? Such was the exhilaration and emotional energy communicated by this captivating recital in the Leamington Music Festival 2026 it was difficult to credit that the singer had flown in overnight after performing in Paris and that the pianist had landed from New York that very morning . This poignant, brilliantly-constructed programme devised by tenor Nicky Spence and accompanist Dylan Perez was all about the mystery of childhood and its relationship with the adult wo...

  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Bach 'Goldberg Variations': Radek Baborák  et.al . (Animal Music CD) ★★★★ Bach's aria and thirty variations were composed for a keyboard player called Goldberg to induce sleep for his insomniac aristocratic employer. "Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations," he would insist, so Bach's biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel tells us. A good tale but probably apocryphal; what's certain is that it's one of Bach's crowning achievements and was, as the 1741 published score puts it, "Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits." There are dozens of keyboard recordings to choose from, played on the two manual harpsichord, the instrument Bach composed it for, and the modern concert grand. Musicians cannot resist the Goldberg spell and there are also recordings of transcriptions for an immense variety of soloists and ensembles including: solo harp, solo accordion,...