Midlands Classical Music Making

SORENSEN'S HARPSICHORD CONCERTO DISAPPOINTS CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ The Danish composer Bent Sørensen's Bach-inspired harpsichord concerto in six movements 'Sei anime' ('Six Souls') received its UK premiere. Sørensen told us that the title would more be accurately construed as 'Six Lonely Souls'. The soloist Mahan Esfahani and the Bergen Philharmonic gave the world premiere last month but, having listened to it three times, repeated hearings have failed to reveal any depths under its rebarbative, busily unigratiating surface. Esfahani wasn't always audible, despite having a microphone thrust under the lid and five speakers strung across the platform. He was, though, in its final seconds as he leant inside and plucked the strings by hand. Sometimes the instrument tinkled like a music box with a stuck mechanism accompanied by wind glissandi and belching brass, the latter sounding very like Sørensen's 1990 trombone work 'T...

BARBER OPERA HITS THE GROUND RAISING ICARUS Barber Opera at Birmingham Repertory Theatre *** Founded in the late 1950s by the great Anthony Lewis, the Barber Operas rapidly became touchstones of quality performances of baroque opera (Scarlatti, Rameau, and above all, Handel) featuring singers clearly rising to the top of the tree, Janet Baker just one example. As an undergraduate at Birmingham University in the late 1960s it was my privilege to be involved in these productions in the Barber Institute's jewel of a theatre, whether as chorister, stage-hand, or indeed orchestral player. Wonderful indelible memories were made. Time and financial constraints have moved things on. After several fallow years (not just because of Covid), the Barber Opera has resurrected, but now in the functional Studio at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and with the premiere of a chamber opera by one of the University's own composers, Michael Zev Gordon. "Raising Icarus" i...

WONDERFUL MUSIC-MAKING IN CHIPPING CAMPDEN CHIPPING CAMPDEN MUSIC FESTIVAL By Christopher Morley Two of the greatest joys in life are wine and song (you can guess the missing third joy), and Charlie Bennett embodies them both. Charlie, a retired wine merchant of exceptional renown, has established an amazing festival in Chipping Campden, attracting the world's greatest international musicians to this impossibly charming Cotswolds town. Over the years it has been my privilege to review several of his presentations, including last year an amazing Schubert recital from probably the world's greatest pianist still performing, Elisabeth Leonskaja. Settle back as Charlie tells me how it all came about. "I was born in Chipping Campden and was a pupil at Chipping School from 1962-69. My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all bakers and until 2016 we still lived in the house I was born in. After school I studied piano with Professor Angus Morris...

FIVE STAR MOZART AND MAHLER CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ From the opening impressive ringing call-to-arms of Matthew Williams' trumpet to the closing notes of untrammelled joy in the rondo finale there was much to savour in this performance of Mahler's fifth symphony. Under Christoph König's crisp and incisive direction – his podium restraint reminiscent of his countryman Christoph von Dohnányi – there was energy and drive with the minimum of fuss. Occasionally the result sounded a mite too civilized and reined in but restraint and discipline brought compensations too, most notably in the Adagietto. Mahler's tempo indication is "Sehr langsam (Very slow)". I doubt if it would have been if he could have foreseen the late twentieth century trend for gross tempo inflation. The was a musical love letter to Mahler's wife Alma: a mere eight minutes when conducted by Mahler's close friends and confidants Mengelberg and Walter, more recently a slow dirge used...

FROM DARKNESS TO JOYOUS LIGHT DON GIOVANNI Welsh National Opera at Birmingham Hippodrome ***** So often in opera performances, one or more of the many ingredients – singing, playing, acting, staging, lighting, costumes, directing, to name but some – don't quite hit the mark, even if others prove to be outstanding; this was not the case with WNO's revival of their 2011 production of Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' where every element delivered, resulting in a hugely satisfying evening's entertainment. Mozart's moralistic tale – at times comedic, at times sinister, but always ambiguous in how it plays with our empathy for Giovanni – is sympathetically told through the vision of director John Caird. The striking set design by John Napier – monolithic walls that move in sections to focus the drama – prove surprisingly versatile at assisting with the storytelling, including the use of multiple doors which are ideal for this opera where Giovanni, and his unfor...

NORMAN STINCHOMBE REVIEWS WNO'S JENUFA Jenůfa: Welsh National Opera at Birmingham Hippodrome ★★★★ Like all great dramatic works Janacek's Jenůfa rests on a few simple but universal truths: we hurt those we love; murder will out; to err is human, to forgive, divine. It pivots on the jealousy of disinherited Laca Klemeň who has loved his cousin Jenůfa since childhood but she, while Laca served in the army, fell for his handsome mill-owning half-brother Števa, a shallow seducer. She is now pregnant by him, a fact she is keeping secret, naively hoping that he will marry her. In this Moravian village – dark and forbidding in Katie Mitchell's austere production – this will lead to infanticide, despair and finally redemption. Janacek's wonderful score makes the moral transformation believable in a taut, sharply etched performance by the WNO orchestra under Wyn Davies, although he let the orchestra sometimes overpower the singers in Act 1. Every key transformative mom...

LATEST JOHN WILSON AND VAUGHAN WILLIAMS REVIEWS FROM NORMAN STINCHCOMBE 'Metamorphosen': Sinfonia London / Wilson ★★★★ John Wilson and his players give a sensitively articulated broadly-paced performance of Richard Strauss's 1945 threnody 'Metamorphosen'. His 'Study for 23 solo strings' laments what he called the Nazis' "12 year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture" but also the Allies' retributive justice as bombing flattened the cultural centres of Weimar, Dresden and Munich. The Chandos recording's wonderful transparency allows us to hear the subtle interplay of parts and Strauss's quotation from Beethoven's 'Eroica'. The central section is increasingly agitated as Strauss directs but never attains the intensity and anguish of the Staatskapelle Dresden's '70's recording under supreme Straussian Rudolf Kempe who truly, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." In total contrast ...

ESO BACK IN THE CONCERT-HALL KENNETH WOODS AND THE ENGLISH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA By Christopher Morley The Worcester-based English Symphony Orchestra has achieved wonderful things during the two years of lockdown and pandemic, zooming concerts and maintaining team spirit, but conductor Kenneth Woods is over the moon about returning to performing in front of a live audience. "There is just nothing like the feeling of a live concert," he enthuses. "he excitement of performing great music without a safety net generates the most incredible collaborative energy in an orchestra, and the presence of an audience, their attention, their involvement further heightens the intensity. It's been doubly nice for ESO because I think our regimen of very challenging recording work during covid has made us an even better orchestra. "The flip side of all of this is that this remains a moment of great peril. Ticket sales for all orchestras are fluctuating wild...

JEFFREY SKIDMORE REFRESHES BACH'S ST MATTHEW PASSION ST MATTHEW PASSION Ex Cathedra at Symphony Hall ***** I have attended performances of Bach's St Matthew Passion since the time it was almost contemporary music, and have endured so many heavy, portentous renditions, mainly emanating from self-regarding metropolitan societies, going through the sacrosanct motions year after year. Jeffrey Skidmore and Ex Cathedra will have none of that. Such an enthusiast, who brings detailed scholarship and documentary revelations into his vivid accounts of everything he touches, Skidmore is always looking for ways to breathe life into the music in question, recreating the circumstances of its origins – though I doubt even he could have imagined the big band playing ABBA selections as we entered the foyer. Once we got over that culture shock, one certainly unlooked-for on a Good Friday, there was much to admire in the freshness of Skidmore's approach, opening with Alec Rot...

ANGEL BLUE TRIUMPHS IN LA TRAVIATA LA TRAVIATA Royal Opera House, Covent Garden Heartfelt thanks to the ROH for another straight, no-frippery production of one of the repertoire greats, this time Verdi's La Traviata in director Richard Eyre's meticulously detailed, loving staging. Bob Crowley's sets evoke Parisian opulence (Violetta's party-room actually reminding me of Birmingham Art Gallery's great round foyer!) and the heroine's eventual penury, though we must have missed the luxury referred to by Giorgio Germont when he gatecrashes the love-nest shared by his son and Violetta. Vocal values are very high, and so is the acting. led, above all, by Angel Blue as a most moving Violetta. We first see her during the Prelude (an opening so hushed as to be a miscalculation by Verdi, but here the audience was impeccably silent – though breaking into applause at the end of arias, and even in the middle of them, and crashing into the finale's closi...

ONE-MAN SHAKESPEARE SHOW ON THE BARD'S ANNIVERSARY MICHAEL PENNINGTON PLAYS THEATREBARN By Christopher Morley Theatrebarn is exactly what it says on the tin; it is a comfortably raked auditorium looking down onto a compact stage in a converted barn, part of Bretforton Grange in the Vale of Evesham. The enterprise began over forty years ago when James Wellman, an actor at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and his chef partner, David Swift, decided that they wanted to run their own theatre and fine-dining restaurant. Bretforton Grange seemed to fit the bill, with its medieval long gallery and vaulted stone undercroft, and after two years of planning and work, the opening performance was given by Dame Peggy Ashcroft and pianist James Walker in October 1979. Performances took place in the long gallery, rechristened as the Theatre Room, with stylish dinners served to patrons afterwards in the undercroft, but demand outgrew the surroundings, so in the early 1990s J...

NORMAN STINCHCOMBE REVIEWS TWO MAJOR NEW BEETHOVEN RELEASES BEETHOVEN Symphonies 6-9: Le Concert des Nations, La Capella Nacional de Catalunya / Savall (3 CD / SACD) ★★★★ Original instrument surveys of Beethoven's complete symphonies have always stumbled at the ninth – Jordi Savall's is no exception. Partly it's a question of tempi: the set claims this performance takes just under 64 minutes but the CD player reveals it's barely 60, which I found untenable. The slow movement is deprived of sublimity, the scherzo of wit, the finale of grandeur, despite some good choral and solo singing. It's a pity because there's a lot to enjoy in this set. The 'Pastoral' is a joy with its rambunctious peasants' dance, thrilling storm – hard-stick timpani rattling impressively – and a beautifully played beneficent prayer. Savall and his players revel in the eight's pawky humour and the seventh has tremendous drive and energy, the 'Allegretto' take...

A WONDERFUL RETURN TO LIVE MUSIC FROM THE BIRMINGHAM BACH CHOIR We also celebrated the return of the Birmingham Bach Choir to live performance after so many months of lockdown, and also celebrated the heroism of Ukraine, the choristers sporting that besieged country's national colours, and singing A Prayer for Ukraine to open the concert. A more personal celebration came with the world premiere of conductor Paul Spicer's Sound the Invisible Trumps (beginning in the organ depths like Honegger's Christmas Cantata), dedicated to the memory of Pauline Round, a valued and much-loved past-President of the Choir, and which indeed sets two little gems of her poems amidst medieval poetry and Walter de la Mare. There was an inner dedication, too, the second setting "Brief is our Life" remembering Mike Lloyd, a valued long-term supporter of the choir, succumbing to Covid at the very onset of the pandemic, the actual subtext of Spicer's well-structured piece. Emily ...

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY ENJOYED THREE ENCHANTED EVENINGS AT EASTBOURNE'S GRAND HOTEL SOME ENCHANTED EVENINGS Appassionata at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne ***** Eastbourne's breathtakingly magnificent Grand Hotel, so imposing yet also so welcoming, has an impressive roster of visiting musicians since its opening in 1875. Among the many luminaries who have crossed its portals are Debussy (who completed La Mer here), Kreisler, Caruso, Nellie Melba, Ysaye, Paul Robeson, Myra Hess… the list goes on. Latest to join them is the young vocal quartet Appassionata, who, together with pianist Will Sharma, presented a three-night entertainment "Some Enchanted Evenings" at the end of March. It began with baritone Matthew Siveter, already a much-loved veteran of Gilbert and Sullivan productions, presenting his one-man show "A Source of Innocent Merriment", drawing material from the likes of G&S themselves, Noel Coward, Flanders and Swann, Tom Lehrer, as well as d...

NORMAN STINCHCOMBE RAVES OVER TWO CDS FROM SYMPHONY HALL FAVOURITES RAVEL: Sinfonia of London / Wilson ★★★★★ Chandos continues its winning formula of conductor John Wilson, his revivified hand-picked orchestra and the wonderful warm acoustic of St Augustine's Church, Kilburn. As in Wilson's Korngold and Respighi recordings, the production team present a sound picture startlingly clear and lifelike, especially in SACD. In the opening bars of 'La Valse' the strands of music whisperingly coalesce into the main theme from utter silence while the climax, as the Hapsburg Empire waltzes itself into oblivion, is cataclysmic. Ravel's five other ballet scores are equally vivid with Wilson's elan, and the Sinfonia's characterful playing. 'Ma Mere L'Oye' is alive with telling detail; Beauty's sinuous clarinet, the Beast's gauchely pleading contrabassoon and the Princess of the Pagoda's tinkling chinoiserie. I never thought Dutoit's 19...

NORMAN STINCHCOMBE REVIEWS MAJOR NEW VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND STRAVINSKY RELEASES Albion Records is the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society's own recording label and since its formation in 2007 has issued 172 first recordings of little-known works and arrangements. Three newly-released discs continue this tradition with some intriguing rarities. In 'Transcriptions from Truro' ★★★★★ David Briggs, on the 'Father Willis' organ of Truro Cathedral, performs his own transcriptions of 'Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus', Symphony No.5 and 'The Lark Ascending'. In the last of these he is joined by violinist Rupert Marshall-Luck, with Briggs laying down a cushion of sound (one hardly misses the orchestra) while the violin soars and carols above, with Marshall-Luck's rapturous and finely-honed playing enhanced by the warm and expansive cathedral acoustics. The 'Variants' rhapsodic nature is captured convincingly by Briggs, sounding as if originally co...

MIRGA;S STAND-IN MAKES HER CBSO DEBUT CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★ Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla tested positive for Covid on the morning of this concert forcing her to cancel – three days before the CBSO is due to play in Germany at the start of a European tour. CBSO chief executive Stephen Maddock vowed, "The show will go on." The search is one for a replacement conductor for the early concerts. For this one CBSO assistant conductor Charlotte Politi stepped in, making her debut. Mieczysław Weinberg's fourth symphony was axed, replaced by three minutes of Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake'. Ramrod-straight, sharp-suited and refreshingly unhistrionic, Politi looked very assured all evening. Weinberg's Symphony No.3 in B minor is familiar to regular concertgoers from performances here in 2019 and 2021. Weinberg, along with Shostakovich and others, was subject to the 1948 crackdown by Stalin's cultural henchman Zhdanov. Only the approachable and uplifting was now p...

DISAPPOINTING GRIEG, FABULOUS SIBELIUS CBSO Symphony Hall **** Around 50 years ago I heard Nielsen's Helios overture for the first time, and didn't take to it. I've decided it must have been the conductor's fault, for a couple of times closer to the present day I have heard it conducted by Michael Seal and have really warmed to the piece. Seal's most recent delivery of it was with the CBSO for Wednesday's very well-attended matinee, and he built a strong image of Nielsen's sun's progress across the sky during the course of one day (let's not get bogged down in astronomical accuracy). Progress was confidently textured, with chattering woodwind and a sturdy fugue, Seal turning what had seemed a static work to me half a century ago into a living organism. Horns were at their noble best. This all-Nordic programme continued with a disappointing account of the well-loved Grieg Piano Concerto. Clare Hammond was the cool, detached soloist, ne...

EMOTIONALLY POWERFUL JENUFA FROM WELSH NATIONAL OPERA JENUFA Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff For all its near quarter-century of existence, Katie Mitchell's production for Welsh National Opera of Janacek's Jenufa continues to pack a powerful punch. Perhaps illegitimate birth is no scandal in the western world today, but many of us will remember the stigma that was until recently attached to it, and the impact of the sweet Jenufa's shame upon her immediate family and ultimately her Moravian village is shattering. Mitchell's production is ruthless in its clarity, aided by Nigel J Edwards' stark lighting design and the stark simplicity of Vicki Mortimer's sets. Add to this the vigour and movement of the remarkable WNO Chorus whenever the villagers assemble, and then the solitariness of the principals, locked in their own troubles; the result is emotionally overpowering. Elizabeth Llewellyn, the Jenufa pregnant by her cousin...

CBSO FOR UKRAINE CBSO at Symphony Hall, live on BBC Radio3 ★★★★★ The war in Ukraine casts its shadow everywhere. In the morning President Zeklensky said that if his country fell then Putin's forces would target more countries including Lithuania and Moldova. Hours later here was a concert with conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and violin soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who were born in those two countries. The CBSO chief executive Stephen Maddock dedicated the concert to the people of Ukraine and a giant screen carried a picture of their country's flag. The concert ended with a special encore, the poignant and tender 'Melody in A Minor' by Ukrainian composer Myrolslav Skoryk which has a special status there akin to Elgar's 'Nimrod' here. Perhaps the solemnity of the occasion accounted for a subdued account of Tchaikovsky's 'Romeo and Juliet' with its vivid, vibrant emotional colours diluted and the magical modulation into the love music mu...

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY GIVES THE KORNGOLD A TITLE AFTER FORGETTING SO TO DO YESTERDAY! CBSO YOUTH ORCHESTRA Symphony Hall **** The CBSO Youth Orchestra is an elite assembly of young musicians, expertly coached through half-term by players in the parent CBSO, and rehearsed selflessly by Associate Conductor Michael Seal before being handed over to the visiting guest conductor. Programming stretches and inspires these students, and the results have always been stunning. Up until now. I would be fascinated to learn how the fist half of Sunday afternoon's programme came to be selected. We began with 14-year-old Erich Korngold's lushly orchestrated Overture to a Drama, a nebulous structure sagging under too much material, and continued with only the third UK performance of the Piano Concerto by Florence Price, written in 1934. Circumstances surrounding this performance were unfortunate, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, the announced soloist (and also featured on the programme-book...

A MORE THAN 5-STAR WNO DON GIOVANNI DON GIOVANNI Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff ***** Welsh National Opera's current revival of its original 2011 production is quite simply the best Don Giovanni of the many I have seen in nearly 60 years. John Caird's direction unfolds the drama of this come-uppance parable with clarity and originality, whilst at the same time preserving precious values of not interfering with the composer's and librettist's intentions, and staff director Caroline Chaney has brought everything up shiny and new. Except all is not sparkling, with not much cliched Spanish sunshine. Lighting and set design are heavy and dark (a reviewer colleague has likened it to a Renasissance Caravaggio painting), with a nocturnal skyscape looking down on everything). This is a wonderful team performance from the WNO squad, lighting designer David Hersey complementing the original designs, both costume and set, of John Napier. Th...