Midlands Classical Music Making

  TRULY TERRIFIC TOSCA CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ Dramatic would be an understatement. Black drapes hung from ceiling to platform transforming Symphony Hall into a gigantic catafalque, over which loomed a gigantic cross formed from myriad lights. The CBSO players occupied every inch of space, they too in black, illuminated only by music stand lamps. Kazuki Yamada's baton stabs down incisively, the CBSO roars into life with menacing doom-laden chords saturated in percussion and brass. Seconds later the political fugitive Angelotti (Ashley Riches) is racing down the left stalls aisle and onto the platform desperately seeking refuge in the Church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle. Just under three hours later Tosca (Anna Patalong) takes her fatal plunge as the cross dazzles us with a blaze of pure white light. A capacity audience from stalls to the precipitous seats in the grand tier roar their approval of a superb performance that has gripped us throughout. In the 1950s professor of music...

                                             BIRMINGHAM PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA                                                           Birmingham Town Hall *****   In Birmingham, Mahler’s Second Symphony, the “Resurrection” has become something of a “Farewell” Symphony. Sir Simon Rattle signed off his 18-year principal conductorship of the CBSO with it in 1998, and now the much-loved Michael Lloyd has bowed out with the work after 32 years as principal conductor of the city’s world-c...

                                                                           BOWS AND ARROWS                                                                         By Julian Lloyd Webber                     ...

  STUPENDOUS STOKOWSKI AND STRAVINSKY FROM VOLKOV AND THE CBSO CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ The conductor Leopold Stokowski has always divided critical opinion. He transformed a provincial orchestra into the finest in the world, the "Fabulous Philadelphians" and promoted the performance of new music, giving American premieres to works by composers including Copland, Ives, Schoenberg, Varese and in 1922, Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'. Yet to a cadre of critics and musical puritans he was loathed as a showman and charlatan. He became a household name when in Walt Disney's 1940 'Fantasia' he shook hands with Mickey Mouse: for his denigrators he might as well have shaken hands with the devil. His orchestration of music from other genres and eras, particularly Bach, met with opprobrium. Such vulgarity, and to play them at popular concerts for the hoi polloi! Then there was his appearance, the mane of flowing hair and conducting without a baton preferring flo...

                                             ELGAR VIOLIN CONCERTO               Frank Peter Zimmerman, London Philharmonic Orchestra/ Edward Gardner (BIS) Elgar’s Violin Concerto has been recorded over 40 times (I have more versions than I can remember), and I can’t recall a duff offering. In just the past two years we have had fine accounts from Vilde Frang, drawing us inward, and Christian Tetzlaff, more extrovert, and both examples of how this wonderful work can inspire international soloists, not just British ones. Now we have a new release from Frank Peter Zimmerman, like Tetzlaff a German violinist, and one who has this concerto under his fingers after many performances worldwide. In an interview pu...