Midlands Classical Music Making

                               ELGAR, POULENC AND JANACEK                              Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral ****   On Monday evening Adrian Partington, Director of this year’s Gloucester Festival on the Three Choirs circuit, managed something   a one-time Prime Minister ducked out of attempting. He held the pause on the first beat of the second bar of Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture perfectly, before releasing the Philharmonia Orchestra strings into a scurry of detail. This proved a reading both bustling and tender, revealing all the pageantry and poignancy the composer so loved in London Town.   Of course allowances had to be made for the sounds of the various sec...

                                                             SIMON RATTLE AND THE CBSO PLAY WALTON        I returned this evening to my long-neglected CD of Simon Rattle conducting Walton with the CBSO, recorded nearly 30 years ago. This performance of the First Symphony, in my not so humble opinion the greatest British symphony (pistols at dawn, anyone?) is so powerful, so intense, that one cannot listen to it too often. No wonder that for once Radio 3's "Building a Library" got things right, when the person comparing all available recordings chose this one, saying the players performed as though their lives depended upon it. At the time of this recording Rattle was approaching the end of his tenure as the CBSO's Principal Conductor, a post he had held since 1980, and during much of which ...

                                                                                                     MAHLER SYMPHONY no. 6                                                                                BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall ***** Last night's BBC Prom performance of the world's second greatest symphony was a brilliant broadcast, even over my tiny desktop smartspeaker. Sakari Oramo paced proceedings perfectly, finding moments of tenderne...

  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Walton: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Yamada (Deutsche Grammophon CD 83 minutes) ★★ The first recording by the CBSO and its new music director is a huge disappointment. Their combination has produced some wonderful music-making at Symphony Hall and unforgettable concert evenings. The two captured here in live recordings were not amongst them. Unlike the London critic who gave this disc a rave review I actually attended the concert at which Walton's second symphony was performed, along with his 'Orb and Sceptre' march, composed for the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. While he hailed them, as heard on disc, as an "unbridled success" I failed to discern in them any great insights or indeed any affinity with Walton's music from Yamada. Unless one values the motto "slow is best", for here and in the accompanying performance of Walton's First Symphony, Yamada's tempi are...