Midlands Classical Music Making

                                             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...

                                             I POMERIGGI MUSICALI                                                           Teatro dal Verme, Milan                                                           (Octob...

  Jörg’s Mendelssohn Miscellany CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Jack of all trades master of none, so the proverb tells us. Jörg Widmann proves that’s not always the case: clarinet virtuoso, versatile (if quirky) composer and a conductor whose combination of probing musical intelligence and infectious enthusiasm endears him to both orchestra and audience. He’s also a shrewd concert programmer. In 2023 he conducted a sizzling Beethoven Symphony No.7 together with works, including his own ‘Con Brio’, which explored aspects of the symphony together with an orchestral arrangement of a chamber work for clarinet. He used the same template here but with Mendelssohn as the focus, beginning with his arrangement of the Andante from the composer’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. It’s a work dear to Widmann, who learned to play it as a ten-year-old, and his arrangement with a small group of strings, is tasteful and charming. As well as Widmann’s own mellifluous playing there’s a magical part for cel...

  A SOARING SEAGULL AND NIELSEN’S TERRIFYING TIMPANI CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Never judge a musical work by its literary inspiration. Nearly fifty operas are based on Shakespeare plays and nearly all are duds while Puccini’s tuneful triumphs derive from penny dreadful potboilers. This maxim meant that I ignored a pang of doubt when discovering that the British composer Adrian Sutton’s violin concerto, premiered in 2023, was inspired by Richard Bach’s 1972 fable ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. Gulls enjoy noisily circling rubbish dumps and stealing chips from holidaymakers at the seaside. Bach’s anthropomorphic gull is on a transcendental quest of self-realization. Millions of Americans bought it – the definition of gullible. It was just the image of the soaring bird that really mattered to Sutton and was the starting point for the work commissioned by violinist Fenella Humphreys. The three sections of its twenty-five minute span flow seamlessly into each other, surging, soaring an...

  C BSO DELIVERS ANOTHER ELGAR TRIUMPH CBSO at Symphony Hall  ★★★★★ Great times for Elgarians. Last week we had his choral masterpiece ‘Gerontius’ .This week we were treated to a tremendously dramatic and virile performance of his greatest orchestral work the  Symphony No. 1.  While life has sped up considerably since its premiere in 1908 performances of the symphony have become considerably slower. It’s a fate also inflicted on ‘Nimrod’ from the ‘Enigma Variations’ which conductors Bernstein and Levine transformed from noble paean into a lugubrious dirge. Elgar’s 1931 recording of the  s ymphony is a vigorously bracing 46-and-a-half minutes. By the 21 st  century  Sir Colin Davis’ s, just under 55 minutes, render ing  the dynamic work torpid and flabby. Having seen  Nicholas Collon  conduct before I expected an Elgar with passion and drive – he did not disappoint. The symphony’s opening, basses and cellos, intoning the motto theme was l...