RICHARD PHILLIPS OBITUARY Richard Phillips passed away in his sleep at the age of 85 on the night of January 30/31, and the world of music has lost one of its great promoters, champions and entrepreneurs. He has left a huge legacy in the West Midlands, as Helen Beecroft, who succeeded him as director of Warwick Arts Society and Leamington Music, says: “Richard was such a wonderful man - a true inspiration and an immense force for good in his unceasing championship of music. His incredible career in the arts has brought music to the ears and hearts of so many; from his first job at Sadler's Wells Opera, via the Yorkshire Arts Association, Warwick Arts Society, and Leamington Music, Richard created or directed 109 festivals including founding the York Early Music Festival and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and his amazing work earned him many much-deserved awards - not least the MBE for services to music and the arts in 2016. ” He built an impressive network o...
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Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Shostakovich Complete Symphonies: Soloists, London Philharmonic Choir, London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus / Noseda (LSO Live 10 CDs & SACDs) ★★★★★ This must be the classical music bargain of the year. Ten discs, in both standard and high resolution formats, nearly twelve hours of music in a handsome box which includes a 190-page booklet with notes on all fifteen symphonies plus full texts and translations of those which include songs and choruses. It's currently retailing on Amazon at £35.60 which is less than the cost of three single discs. None of this would matter one iota if the performances were not first class – they are. This set is a nine year collaboration between Gianandrea Noseda, the LSO's Principal Guest Conductor, but the live recordings show great consistency over that time span. The Italian conductor's deep knowledge of Shostakovich's music began when he was appointed Principal Guest ...
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STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER WITH THE CBSO CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Forget about Paris as portrayed by France’s great artists; the impressionist masterpieces of Monet and Pissarro, Renoir's bustling Montmartre and Seurat's painstaking pointillist Eiffel Tower. In 'An American in Paris' George Gershwin paints the city in bold, garish primary colours, the musical equivalent of Pop Art thirty years before the movement was invented. It's a crackling, zinging piece, the city seen from the viewpoint of a wide-eye naïf seduced and entranced by its romance and bustle, so busy soaking in the sights that he's almost knocked down by the traffic - listen out for the four parping taxi horns blasting out their warning. It demands a huge orchestra with the CBSO spread to the ends of the platform to accommodate its massively reinforced percussion and wind sections, the latter including three saxophones to add to the jazz-tinged flavour. All that power requires deft handling an...
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MIGHTY MAHLER TRIUMPHS (EVENTUALLY) CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ "Déjà vu (noun): the feeling or illusion that one has experienced something before although one is actually experiencing it for the first time." That's the dictionary definition and it was, uncannily, exactly what I felt at my first CBSO concert of 2026. A concert starting with Mahler's 'Blumine', the movement the composer cut from the final version of his first symphony, and ending with a performance of the revised Symphony No.1. In between there was the UK premiere of a challenging work by a living composer. Yet I remembered another cold winter night a couple of weeks into January when I attended just such a concert sitting in the same stalls seat. No illusion though. It happened on January 12, 2023. Then the conductor was Gergely Madaras and the new work was Austrian composer Thomas Larcher's Symphony no.3 ‘A Line above the Sky’. Now it was Kazuki Yamada and the new work was Japanese born...
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MY 2025 HIGHLIGHTS Two outstanding events at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall, right at the end of the year, crowned my highlights, one a welcome back reunion, the other a fond farewell. In November Sir Simon Rattle returned to the concert-hall he had fought for for years, bringing the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to such a standard that it was crying out for a performing space of world-class excellence, and in Hall 2 of the International Convention Centre they certainly got it. Having achieved so much for the orchestra, Rattle left in 1998, since then holding principal conductorships with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the London S...
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DAVID QUIGLEY AND THE CECILIA ENSEMBLE (for 15.1.26) There are tales of musicians finding inspiration as the result of a dream: the violinist-composer Tartini and his “Devil’s Trill” Sonata, Schumann dreaming that the angels had sent him his Violin Concerto, Wagner’s Walther dreaming of the Prize Song that was to make him a Mastersinger. And now we have pianist David Quigley, inspired by St Cecilia, patron saint of music, in the naming of his fledgling chamber ensemble, as he tells me, returning from a Christmas break in his native Ireland. “The name has a special significance for me. There is, of course, the connection with St Cecilia, the patron saint of music and musicians, but the decision became clear in a much more personal way. My maternal ...
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CBSO VIOLAS CENTRE STAGE CBSO Centre ***** Tucked away somewhere between the soaraway brilliance of the violins and the august nobility of the cellos and basses, orchestral violas might be thought of as leading a retiring life, modestly content with their discreet status. Nothing could be further from the truth, as this delightful matinee concert revealed. The CBSO viola section has a huge fan club, as a packed, whooping CBSO Centre demonstrated, responding to this wonderful display of viola capabilities we enjoyed. Liberated from the confines of orchestral textures, the players brought us ruminations deep and soulful on the C string, tingling harmonics in the ethereal upper reaches, shimmering tremolandi and deft pizzicato, all delivered with wonderful empathy between the players in this enthralling exploration of works by York Bowen, Dale and Richter. ...
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CBSO Symphony Hall ***** The roar which greeted the entry of the CBSO onto the Symphony Hall stage last Wednesday hailed the arrival for the last time as principal cellist of the orchestra Eduardo Vassallo, retiring after 36 years, the first couple of those even before this magnificent hall was opened. Vassallo formed a close relationship with Sir Simon Rattle, who engaged him, and has sin...
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CHRISTMAS AT LONGBOROUGH Nestling high in a fold of a Cotswolds hillside, Longborough’s ancient St James’ Church was the perfect venue for a Christmas concert last Sunday celebrating the music-making prowess of young people. “Christmas at Longborough” effectively showcased the Longborough Youth Chorus, an all-year-round offshoot of the internationally renowned Longborough Festival Opera, and these 33 youngsters covered themselves and their team of mentors (Emma Campbell, David Eaton, Maria Jagusz) with masses of credit. Everyone knew exactly what they had to do when and where during these 45-minutes proceedings, presented twice, with movement in and out of the choir stalls and onto the front of the chancel beautifully synchronised. This was an impressive display of stage-discipline and memory. Among the offerings were a range of carols from all over the world, solos both English and international from Longborough Young Artists Jasmine Flicker, Myrna Tennent and Patrick Do...
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AURORA LIGHTS UP THE CBSO FESTIVE CONCERT CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★ There's a film and television genre the makers call "feelgood". The works may not be of the highest artistic merit or stay long in the memory but at the end everyone is smiling, uplifted and cheered. This concert was a feelgood occasion bursting with festive spirit with many family groups in the audience, proud parents waving at their children who were members of the choir. The concert included three world premieres, two of which confirming that world premiere does not necessarily mean world class. The concert was the pinnacle of the "Bringing the Light" project, a community-based event which began a year ago with the CBSO's Community Board working with the Canal & River Trust to light up the nearby canal with a Lantern Walk. The emphasis has been on shining a light, literally and metaphorically, on the CBSO's connection with Birmingham and its multifarious, multifaith community. T...
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THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (Naxos 8.660572-73) The legend of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to roam the world until redeemed by love, is universal. With the roles reversed, it gives us Siegfried and Odette/Odile in Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, but it offers no salvation to Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew who mocked Jesus dragging his cross on the way to his crucifixion. We even think of Janacek’s Makropolous Case, where the 337-year-old Emilia Marty longs to be allowed to die. Abandoning the staples of comic opera and Meyerbeerian stifling spectacle, in Der Fliegende Hollander, the first work to hold its place in his operatic canon, Wagner set to exploring the intimacy of human longing and expectation, making the orchestra both a confidi...
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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...
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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 ...