CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★
Take the following ingredients: CBSO orchestra, CBSO chorus, conductor Kazuki Yamada and a hugely demanding, super-scale, richly emotional score. What is the result? A triumph. Symphony Hall was packed right to the upper circle and when the final notes of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony died away the standing ovation and fifteen minutes of applause put the seal on a magnificent start to the new CBSO season. This wasn’t a fluke, the same recipe has worked in recent seasons in equally impressive performances of Berlioz’s ‘Faust’, Haydn’s ‘Creation’, Verdi’s Requiem and Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ – they have brought out the best in the CBSO’s music director with his flair for musical drama and passion pushed to the limits.
Yamada, a dapper musical general, commanded his huge forces – 120 players and a 100-strong chorus – to dazzle the audience in a bravura display of Mahler’s intoxicating musical brew, by turns sentimental and transcendental with a light seasoning of kitsch. Out attention was immediately riveted from the opening bars, as the reinforced bass and cello sections tore into the ferocious doom-laden exposition. There were bursts of sunlight and sweetness, as in the second movement’s gossamer pizzicato from violins and violas, Mahler’s, “sad recollections of...youth and lost innocence.” Musical frissons were everywhere: the unearthly proclamations of offstage brass; the thunderous antiphonal duel of timpani and snare drums; Marie-Christine Zupancic’s desolate voice-in-the-wilderness flute; and the CBSO Chorus’s first hushed entry. This was their 1,000th performance and under Chorus Master Julian Wilkins they are flourishing.
The soloists, soprano Eleanor Lyons and Jess Dandy, were excellent and vocally complementary. Dandy was a wonderful Angel in last season’s ‘Gerontius’, another choral performance of the highest quality, and she is marked out by being a modern rarity, a true contralto. Her “O Röschen rot” with its combination of power and poignancy was perfect. Yamada chose a very broad tempo for the final ascent to the empyrean and the entry to eternal life. It could have sagged but it worked, the slight holding back earlier made the climax’s arrival, the soloists' voices soaring over the CBSO Chorus’s solid bedrock of sound, the clangour of bells and brass, a musical apotheosis worthy of the wait.
This was a special night for the CBSO’s Principal Trumpet Jonathan Quirk who retired after 40 years with the orchestra during which he met his wife Wendy who played in the violin section.
- Norman Stinchcombe