Midlands Classical Music Making

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY LOOKS FORWARD TO TWO YEARS OF THE CBSO CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS CBSO CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS by Christopher Morley It began its existence rehearsing in the band room at Steelhouse Lane police station and giving concerts in the Theatre Royal in New Street and the Futurist cinema in John Bright Street, both a dolly stone's throw from Birmingham's New Street railway station. Today its home is in one of the world's finest concert-halls, Symphony Hall in Birmingham city centre, a venue which was built expressly to accommodate the great world-renowned ensemble the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has become. And this autumn the CBSO begins two years of concerts celebrating the centenary of its founding, originally as the City of Birmingham Orchestra (it added the "Symphony", at principal conductor George Weldon's behest, in February 1948) , with funding from the City Council which continues to this day, a wise munificence which ...

NORMAN STINCHCOMBE REVIEWS CDS OF MENDELSSOHN AND HERBERT HOWELLS MENDELSSOHN IN BIRMINGHAM Vol.5: CBSO / Gardner (Chandos SACD/CD CHSA 5325) ★★★ Anyone who has collected the first four volumes of this series will rightly feel short-changed if they buy this one. Half of the eight overtures on this disc – A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Hebrides, Ruy Blas and Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage – have already appeared on the first four volumes. The four new ones – Paulus, The Fair Melusina, Trumpet Overture and Athalie – last for a combined 29 minutes. How about first time buyers? They'll get engagingly played, energetic and very brisk performances under Edward Gardener, all well recorded. Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage unfolds the pictorial elements beautifully with characterful wind playing and ringing brass, as there is in Ruy Blas. In Hebrides inner detail isn't always clear – compare with |Norrington (EMI). In Shakespeare's enchanted forest conductors like Previn ...

DAVID HART RELISHES PRESTEIGNE'S CONTEMPORARY OFFERING PRESTEIGNE FESTIVAL St Andrew's Church, Presteigne **** After twenty-seven years as artistic director of the Presteigne Festival George Vass continues to find new composers whose music is more likely to intrigue, rather than alienate, audiences. Two typical examples were on Sunday evening, when composers-in-residence Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Hannah Lash both hit the marks of challenge and accessibility. Frances-Hoad's 'Katharsis' made a huge impact. This quasi cello concerto, inspired by the suites of Bach and Britten with six movements instead of the usual three, contains several virtuosic moments for the soloist (here, the splendid Alice Neary in command of every challenge) but is also an engagingly lyrical piece. Vass's Presteigne Festival Orchestra savoured every nuance of Frances-Hoad's imaginative score - nonchalant cello pizzicatos in the Minuet against whistling violin harmoni...

CBSO COMES HOME IN STYLE CBSO Symphony Hall ***** Fresh from conquering the BBC Proms, and simultaneous with BBC4's relay of that triumph, the CBSO came home to Symphony Hall and a packed auditorium, bringing a delicious programme of works composed within less than 20 years of each other. Fairy-tale and childhood was the underlying theme, beginning with Ravel's enchanting Mother Goose Suite. Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla opened the Pavane languorously, putting a strain on woodwind intonation which would have defeated many a lesser orchestra. They got their revenge with cheeky chirrups in Tom Thumb, and the contrabassoon made an enormously dignified contribution to the Satie-styled Conversations of Beauty and the Beast. Finally Mirga brought a well-built conclusion to the Enchanted Garden. As she did to Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, long a CBSO showpiece, but here fresh and crystalline, pointillistic in detail and incident, both deft and loving and with an Infernal D...

THE MUSIC OF RICHARD RODGERS LAUNCHES THE PRESTEIGNE FESTIVAL IN STYLE THE SOUND OF HIS MUSIC St Andrew's Church, Presteigne **** Thankfully the days are long gone when ill-informed snobbery prevented the performance of music from shows and films in the "serious" concert-room. Excuse me, but what made anything by Gilbert and Sullivan kosher, but not, for example, Oklahoma!, the latter spectacularly masterminded by the great John Wilson at the Proms a couple of years ago? For the opening concert of this year's Presteigne Festival, George Vass, the festival's artistic director, presented "The Sound of his Music", a celebration of the music of Richard Rodgers, the genius who collaborated with librettist Oscar Hammerstein II in, indeed Oklahoma! and so many other well-loved musicals. Rodgers` previous collaborator had been Lorenz Hart, a tormented soul whose lyrics are so much darker than Hammerstein's generally life-enhancing creations, a...

CBSO AND A HANDSWORTH-BORN COMPOSER CBSO Symphony Hall **** It was the young star cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason who attracted the near-capacity audience – but it was a similarly precocious Birmingham woman who stole the show. Handsworth-born Dorothy Howell was just twenty-one when her symphonic poem Lamia was performed at the 1919 Promenade Concerts. It is amazing to think that this was her first orchestral work – there is such assured handling of large forces in a piece inspired by Keats' romantic poem. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla brought out all its shimmering beauty; the sighing woodwind-led opening, central dance episode and final melancholy love-lorn theme for solo violin. How heartening that the CBSO will take Lamia to this year's Proms, a century after its debut. Smart programming to complement it with Oliver Knussen's The Way to Castle Yonder which similarly evokes mystery and magic albeit in a different musical idiom. The public relations puffery on the internet sa...

A MOUTHWATERING SELECTION OF CHAMBER MUSIC IN STRATFORD THIS SEPTEMBER STRATFORD MUSIC FESTIVAL by Christopher Morley ( After nearly a quarter of a century of its existence, the Stratford on Avon Music Festival this year takes a fresh look at itself as it launches a packed week of events in the middle of September. A community weekend of activities, many of them geared towards the family, ushers in a week of chamber music, but before all that begins, this year's Festival opens with one of the country's favourite baritones, Roderick Williams, singing Jeremy Sams' new English translation of Schubert's great song-cycle Winter Journey ("Winterreise"). Christopher Glynn is the pianist for this performance given in the round at the Stratford Playhouse, venue for all but one of the Festival events (September 13, 7.30pm). David Mills, the Festival's artistic director, hopes this year's offerings will attract new concertgoers of the futu...

NORMAN STINCHCOMBE REVIEWS TWO MOZART PIANO CD RELEASES MOZART PIANO SONATAS VOL.2: Peter Donohoe (Somm Recordings SOMMCD 0198) ★★★★★ The Rondo in A Minor, K. 511 is added as a bonus item but succinctly captures Peter Donohoe's approach to Mozart. This rarely-recorded work provides a fascinating contrast with Mitsuko Uchida's performance on her 1980s traversal of the complete sonatas, my benchmark set. Donohoe's style is trenchant and powerful, the clarity of his Bechstein's bass reinforcing the effect, and swift too – 8.50 to Uchida's spacious 10.58. Uchida, with a velvety-sounding Steinway, explores the piece's shadows, revealing its proto-Romantic qualities. Those different approaches (equally valid) are evident in the performances of sonatas No. 7 in C Major, K. 309 and No. 8 in A Minor, K. 310. In the bleakly tragic K.310 it's Donohoe who registers the maestoso marking more clearly, while Uchida, more expansive, plunges even deeper into the anda...

FASCINATING EVENTS AT AUTUMN IN MALVERN AUTUMN IN MALVERN by Christopher Morley This year marks the 30th anniversary of Autumn in Malvern, a festival which celebrates not only the arts in themselves but also the culture which springs so bountifully, like the famous water, from these beautiful hills. Peter Smith has masterminded this heroic enterprise from its inception, quietly calling upon his many contacts to enhance the offering, and the forthcoming programme is a typical mix of the international, the national, and the local. Various exhibitions offer a permanent backdrop as a Festival Art Trail, beginning with two in Malvern Library Gallery. One is locally inspired, "Colour in Landscape: those Blue Remembered Hills", curated by Carly Tinkler and Jem Waygood, and tying in with their talk on the subject in Colwall Village Hall on September 20 (3pm). The other exhibition in this venue is based further afield, with Kevin Austin's "Liverpool Post-W...

ZOE BEYERS GIVES CHURCH STRETTON A FIVE-STAR RECITAL ZOE BEYERS St Laurence's Church, Church Stretton ***** Janáček is a composer best heard with unsullied ears, especially if you're not familiar with his edgy individuality. Church Stretton Arts Festival audiences, though, are friendly, welcoming souls so paid rapt attention to the bristling energy and folk-song asides of his Violin Sonata, which Zoë Beyers chose to open her recital with pianist Philip Moore. And when the work's hard-won romanticism emerged fully in Beyers' impeccably bowed second movement and, to an even greater extent in the heart-rending sadness of the final Adagio, with its abrupt ending (so typical of Janáček when he has no more to say), even the most dubious listener couldn't fail to be won over. Moore's robust pianism, which from my second-row seat had occasionally sounded a little overcooked, was a perfectly judged match for Beyers in Debussy's Sonata in G m...

CAPTIVATING REALISATION OF A BAROQUE OPERA LA CALISTO Longborough Festival Opera ***** Longborough is a chocolate-box Cotswold village: about the last place that you'd expect to find yourself mired in the sleazy aftermath of a Friday night on Broad Street. But then, a lot of things about Cavalli's 1651 opera La Calisto are not as you might expect. Girls become bears, gods become goddesses and at least one character contemplates intimacy with a goat. Cavalli's music turns on a ha'penny, and in Mathilde Lopez's production, conducted and (brilliantly) arranged by Lesley Anne Sammons, high-baroque elegance can metamorphose at any moment into cocktail jazz, urban funk or the raunchiest of tangos. So while the action took place in what looked like a grubbier corner of the old Paradise Circus (but with more cartoon animal heads), the action glittered with lurid, eye-popping colour. Baroque purists would have squealed the house down: the clarinet, accordion, re...

RODERICK WILLIAMS BRINGS THREE CHOIRS LISTENERS A NEGLECTED ENGLISH MASTERPIECE RODERICK WILLIAMS Three Choirs Festival at Cheltenham College ***** His phenomenal talent aside, Roderick Williams is loved by audiences for his engagement with them. The baritone's eyes cover every one of us present (and here in the splendid College Theatre there was not even hasty extra seating to be had), his responsive body-language draws us in, he is totally generous of himself -- and he talks to us as if to old friends. His nattering began by paying tribute to the Three Choirs Festival (this year in Gloucester) and its courageous foresight in allowing him to present an English song recital which was not of the usual run-of-the mill "safe" variety. Instead of the usual Shropshire Lads and Songs of Travel we were given Volume 7 of local-boy Parry's English Lyrics and, in a performance which convinced us how shameful is its neglect, the first real English song-cycle, Some...

NORMAN STINCHCOMBE REVIEWS 5-STAR SCHUBERT AND BERLIOZ CDS SCHUBERT DIE SCHÖNE MÜLLERIN: Williams / Burnside (Chandos CHAN 20113) ★★★★ The finest lieder singers have, of course, always characterized the individual songs which make up Schubert's two great cycles, Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. Nowadays the fashion is for singers to adopt a dramatic persona when performing but Roderick Williams' approach as the love-lorn Miller's apprentice is part of that earlier tradition – intense projection of the text but with no imported method acting. As a baritone he takes the lower-key options but lightens his voice very effectively. His combination of vocal depth but wide-eyed naivete in Am Feierabend (After Work) and Des Müllers Blumen (The Miller's Flowers), for example, recalls the muscular but emotionally vulnerable heroes of Thomas Hardy's rural novels. Iain Burnside's playing is immensely characterful – just listen to the ...

RICHARD BRATBY HEARS A 21ST-CENTURY MASTERPIECE AN ENGLISH REQUIEM Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral **** "We brought nothing into this world, and we take nothing out". A bell tolls through the opening bars of John Joubert's An English Requiem and muted strings sigh like autumn rain. As a meditation on last things from such a life-affirming composer, it seems at first almost too bleak. But the horn that calls hauntingly in the middle-distance of those first phrases recurs in later movements; there's a journey under way here. Shadows lengthen across every movement of this intensely beautiful work, but Joubert's message, expressed through the tension between his richly poetic music and the penny-plain English of the New Revised Standard Version, is nonetheless one of comfort. Joubert died in January this year, and this performance was always likely to be a poignant occasion. Adrian Partington (who conducted the premiere here in Gloucest...

EDWARD GARDNER PRESIDES OVER A DRAMATIC VERDI REQUIEM VERDI REQUIEM Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral ***** Edward Gardner has known Gloucester Cathedral intimately since he was admitted into the choir there as a seven-year-old chorister. Over the years this increasingly world-renowned conductor has returned to his musical birthplace to direct memorable performances at the Three Choirs Festival. Three years ago it was the Berlioz Requiem, and three years on it was another Requiem, that by Verdi, which left us stunned this time. So much at home with the acoustic here, Gardner can judge its reverberations to the micro-second, and accordingly he was able in this reading to give all the composer's many pauses their true dramatic emphasis. And, as one of this country's great operatic conductors, he found all the Requiem's stylistic links with the near-contemporaneous Aida. And how he persuaded the Philharmonia to playing of supple flexibility and wa...

NORMAN STINCHCOMBE IS KNOCKED OUT BY THE PROWESS OF THE CBSO YOUTH ORCHESTRA ACADEMY UNDER MICHAEL SEAL CBSO YOUTH ORCHESTRA ACADEMY Birmingham Town Hall ★★★★★ A great start to the concert with a devilishly fine performance of the overture to Weber's opera Der Freischutz. The thumbnail pictures of the opera's characters, from satanic Samiel to winsome heroine Agathe, are skilfully woven into the musical fabric making for an exciting ten minutes. The players captured the rapid changes of mood really well – the horn section as the embodiment of rustic values, the piping vernal woodwind and unnerving shivering strings. There are also plenty of those slippery diminished seventh chords in Dvořák's Symphony No.7 where a composer loved for his sunny and ingratiating Bohemian melodies shows a darker side. Under the CBSO's associate conductor Michael Seal this was a performance which scrupulously maintained the tension between the symphony's brooding crepus...

HOW DO WE GET INTO THE CULTURAL HEART OF BIRMINGHAM? THE COLLAPSE OF BIRMINGHAM Birmingham is working very hard in succeeding to make its cultural centre a no-go area. For many months the access to Symphony Hall, the Central Library, the Repertory Theatre and the Town Hall has been forbidding. How to locate the bus stops and the taxi ranks has been off-putting enough. Now we are chirpily advised of a diversion to pedestrian access to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which will only take a few extra minutes. I'm sure the elderly and infirm (among which I include myself), and those dependent upon wheelchairs will take comfort from that advice. Heaven knows what all this is for. Victoria Square was beautifully clear for a life-enhancing Indian festival last Sunday. Centenary Square is now open, with a rubbish design and layout which cannot attempt even to touch the sandal-latchets of the original paving-tiles and the amazing Forward sculpture; what happened to all th...

GERMAN ROMANTIC LIEDER AT THEIR BEST MARK PADMORE AND PAUL LEWIS Birmingham Town Hall **** So many insights were revealed in this enthralling recital performed by two of the most popular British artists on the concert-platform, not least in Mahler's five Ruckert-Lieder given in their original voice and piano scoring. As Mark Padmore pointed out, in their orchestral version we normally hear them sung by mezzo or baritone, but here was an opportunity to hear them with the nuances of a tenor voice. Everything came across as far more intimate and spontaneous than it possibly could with a large symphony orchestra and conductor, with Paul Lewis' piano contributions now delicate, now busy, and coping with all the often unidiomatic aspects of Mahler's idiosyncratic keyboard-writing as he matched Padmore's visionary growth in intensity towards the end of Um Mitternacht. After this "Ich bin der Welt abhanden Gekommen" came as resigned solace, Padmore's...

NORMAN STINCHCOMBE REVELS IN NEW BRITTEN AND DAVID MATTHEWS RECORDINGS BRITTEN / PURCELL: Doric Quartet (Chandos 2CDs CHAN 20124-2) ★★★★★ Britten's three string quartets are just too long to squeeze onto a single CD so here a second disc accommodates the composer's youthful Three Divertimenti. It can only have been musical snobbery that produced the scathing response at their premiere in 1936; the Dorics bring out their charm and insouciance quite engagingly. They also include three Fantasias in Four Parts by Purcell whose music influenced Britten. His Second Quartet marked the 250th anniversary of Purcell's birth, while the Third Quartet's finale used the passacaglia form integral to the 17th century composer's music. The Doric Quartet's playing is superb throughout whether conveying the tender melancholy of the First Quartet's Andante calmo, with expressive playing from first violin Alex Redington, to the often acerbic and thorny Third Quartet. The...

DON GIOVANNI Longborough Festival Opera **** Alongside its painstakingly-built proud Wagner tradition, Longborough Festival Opera has also created itself a name for inventive Mozart production, and Martin Constantine's new staging of Don Giovanni provides an interesting, if not always totally successful addition to the tally. We are in a gentlemen's health club, where the members sport various bats (instruments of violence when necessary) and treat the female staff as commodities of every nature. Will Holt's design is basically the back wall of a locker-room, complete with urinal (the comic value of that is minimal), the cupboard doors providing resourceful windows, exits and entrances, and the gentlemen sport white towelling robes over white singlets and boxer-shorts, varied only by gold lame briefs for formal wear. The visual impact is dull. Constantine brings some arresting insights into this scenario, including Don Giovanni's lavish ball portrayed as an orgy...

RICHARD BRATBY HEARS THEATRICALITY AND FLAIR FROM THE MOZARTISTS IN LICHFIELD THE MOZARTISTS Lichfield Cathedral ***** Lichfield Festival has not always been lucky in its choice of visiting ensembles, but The Mozartists always looked like a good bet, and so they proved. Right now, this London-based period instrument orchestra is pretty much exactly where the action's at: a full, red-blooded ensemble sound, characterful, virtuosic wind and brass playing, and – under the direction of their founder Ian Page - performances that simply brim over with theatricality and flair. But then, with programmes as appealing as this, why wouldn't they? Inspired by Mozart's youthful travels, the concert was bookended in typical eighteenth century style by a pair of early Mozart symphonies. In between came a triple helping of solo deliciousness. Oliver Wass played the harp and Katy Bircher the flute in Mozart's Concerto K.299, conducting a conversation of exquisite brightne...

THEA MUSGRAVE'S NEW TRUMPET CONCERTO IS A VALUABLE ADDITION TO THE REPERTOIRE CBSO Cheltenham Town Hall ***** The five fingers of one hand are probably more than enough to number the truly great trumpet concertos in the repertoire, but after Saturday's premiere of the new Trumpet Concerto by Thea Musgrave we certainly need another digit. Commissioned jointly by the CBSO (who gave this first performance) and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and dedicated to Alison Balsom, Artistic Director of the Cheltenham Music Festival of which this concert was a vibrant highlight, the only factor that might preclude frequent hearings of the piece is its scoring for a large percussion section, three players needed to deploy a cornucopia of instruments. Combined with an otherwise modest orchestra they provide a kaleidoscope of colours with which the music responds to a series of tree- paintings by Victoria Crowe, burgeoning with vitality even at moments of stasis. Balsom...