A BAD NIGHT IN LOS ANGELES (SOMMCD 0662) **** The title draws you in immediately, but even before you get to the disc there is the fascinating insert-booklet, with notes by the composer of this kaleidoscope of piano music, Robert Matthew-Walker, himself. There are references to some of the friendships he has made during his long life (such illustrious names), and two photographs which cannot help but invite juxtaposition. The first is of a glittering gathering celebrating Leonard Bernstein’s 53 rd birthday party, with Pierre Boulez alongside Bernstein himself, a miserable-looking Daniel Barenboim and his then wife Jacqueline du Pre. Just behind her is a hirsute, moustachioed hippy – RMW! Turn a couple of pages and you see a very recent photograph of Simon Callow chatting to Matthew-Walker. How he could do with those locks of yesteryear! And so we move to the actual music on this well-fille...
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Emma Stenning appointed new Chief Executive of City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) has today announced Emma Stenning as its new Chief Executive, starting in her new role on Monday 3 April 2023. Taking the helm of one of the world’s most respected orchestras, Emma brings a wealth of experience in leading cultural organisations, many of which have had innovative live music programmes at their heart. She brings a track record in regional cultural impact, a reputation for delivering world class artistic quality, and a passion for developing new audiences. Emma joins the CBSO from her most recent role in the arts as Executive Director of Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto, the renowned Canadian company, much loved for its popular concert series. Her previous roles include Chief Executive of Bristol Old Vic, where she produced the Bristol Proms and Executive Director of Battersea Arts Cent...
New Chandos CDs reviewed by Norman Stinchcombe Chandos is the reigning ‘Classical Record Label of the Year’ – an accolade that is thoroughly deserved. The gigantic international entertainment companies swallow up and ditch famous labels of the past – farewell Philips and EMI Classics – endlessly repackage their back catalogue (how many remastered Karajan recordings do we need?) and concentrate on a few high-profile glossily packaged artists. Independent labels like Chandos do what the giants of the past once did; they allow conductors, orchestras and soloists to pursue their interests and give them room and resources to flourish. The huge success of conductor John Wilson and the revivified Sinfonia of London is a prime example. The partnership has given us award-winning discs of Korngold, Ravel, Respighi and English string music recorded in a location – St Augustine’s Church, Kilburn – whose acoustic splendour reminds one of the legendary venues of the past such as Kingsway Hall ...
Weinberg’s little gem steal the show CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ As Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s time with the CBSO draws to a close, she deserves our thanks for championing the music of Mieczysław Weinberg. I n 2018 M irga conducted the UK premiere of Weinberg’s powerful Symphony No.21, a threnody for victims of the Holocaust. It’s the pinnacle of her work with the CBSO and was followed by an equally impressive award-winning recording of the symphony. Weinberg, the Polish-born Jewish composer who fled the Nazis to Soviet Russia, was a prolific writer in many types and forms from the profound to the charmingly lightweight. The four-movement Sinfonietta No.1 Op.46 begins in the most undemanding way, The heavily-accented thumpingly rumbustious Allegro, reeking of circus sawdust and vaudeville greasepaint, sounds like its © Shostakovich (Keep the Commissars Happy Ltd.) Weinberg, like his musical mentor, knew how...
Elgar Concerto Weaves Its Magic CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ In his satirical comedy ‘Forty Years On’ Alan Bennett poked fun at England using the microcosm of a public school called Albion House. The jibes, japes and mockery are put on hold for one scene which is a paean to England before World War 1 – a world of lost content, of beauty and romance snuffed out in the trenches of Passchendaele. The narrator, Bennett himself, is accompanied by a musical soundtrack – the slow movement of Elgar’s violin concerto. The concerto was premiered in 1910 and in the andante Elgar distilled the quintessence of nostalgia for that lost time. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be – made grubby by the tainted fingers of cynical politicians and their spin-doctors. This wonderful performance by Vilde Frang, with the CBSO conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla showed that Elgar’s music cannot be traduced. Here it was in all its pristine glory, exuding the perfume of flowers long dead and summers long gone. F...
Superb Schubert from Paul Lewis Paul Lewis at Birmingham Town Hall ★★★★★ In an interview about his Birmingham series of Schubert’s complete piano sonatas Paul Lewis described him as, “the most human of all composers.” By which he meant that as opposed to Beethoven’s sonatas – musical journeys carefully mapped out, destinations reached, problems resolved – Schubert can leave us, “with more questions than you started with.” Rather like our own lives in fact. That questing, questioning aspect of Schubert was a thread running through this recital. He’s a musical traveller who can never stay on the straight and narrow but prefers the scenic route, the interesting by-way – mirrored in his side-slipping key changes – and sometimes ends in a cul-de-sac, which is why there are so many unfinished works, fragments that ran out of road. This is what happened in the Piano Sonata No 15 in C major, D840 with which Lewis opened the recital. Lewis played the first two movements which Schubert com...
CBSO & CBSO Chorus at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ was back home in Birmingham, the city where it premiered in 1900. After the oratorio’s disastrous first performance Elgar excoriated the poorly-rehearsed premiere choir for making the choruses, “no better than a drawing room ballad”. How different the resounding power, presence and discipline of the CBSO Choir under Julian Wilkins, its Associate Chorus Director. They were there in force, filling almost the entire choir area, and rose to every challenge with gusto, skill and clarity. They were a fiercely sardonic gathering of demons, sneering at the “psalm-droners and canting groaners”, the penitents on their knees in the hope of ingratiating the divine “despot’s will” – their interjected laughs really venomous. If oratorios are Victorian relics, like antimacassars and potted aspidistras, no one told the enthusiastic audience who packed Symphony Hall. Elgar rejected “Church tunes and rubbish”, wanting “...
Armenian State Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall ★★★★ In his own country the Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian is a musical and cultural icon in the way that Sibelius is in Finland and Verdi in Italy. It’s the 120 th anniversary of his birth this year and so, under the auspices of the Armenian Embassy in the United Kingdom, his homeland’s national orchestra was here to celebrate that landmark. Sergey Smbatyan founded the orchestra in 2005, when he was only eighteen, and here he was at the helm as artistic director and chief conductor. At the heart of the concert was Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto in D minor. It was premiered in 1940 by the great David Oistrakh, got the imprimatur of the Stalin Prize the next year and was the apogee of the composer’s success, drawing on Armenia’s folklore and indigenous music. It’s a hugely enjoyable, tuneful, bear-hug of a work that’s too-seldom heard in our concert halls. Jennifer Pike brought musical finesse, grace and well-focused at...
Exciting new CDs of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and English String Music reviewed by Norman Stinchcombe Delius, Elgar, Howells, Vaughan Williams: Sinfonia of London / Wilson (Chandos CD & SACD) ★★★★★ Following up his 2021 success with ‘English Music for Strings’ conductor John Wilson repeats the formula with equally impressive results. Once again two well-known works bookend two rarely-programmed pieces. This disc opens with Vaughan Williams’ ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’, for Double String Orchestra, and ends with Elgar’s ‘Introduction and Allegro’. In between is Delius’s ‘Late Swallows’, a slow movement from a string quartet orchestrated by the composer’s amanuensis Eric Fenby, and Herbert Howells’ ‘Concerto for String Orchestra’, a substantial work which at 28 minutes is easily the longest. Superlatives are now obligatory for Wilson and the Sinfonia’s recordings. The acoustic of St. Augustine’s Church, Kilburn, is ideal for ‘Tallis’ with the required separation of...
Impressive new CD releases from cycles of Mozart’s piano sonatas and concertos reviewed by Norman Stinchcombe Mozart Piano Sonatas Volume 6: Peter Donohoe (Somm Recordings) ★★★★★ This is the final instalment of Peter Donohoe’s survey of Mozart’s sonatas and I believe that Somm has saved the best for last. The series was recorded over two years but much of it, including this disc, was taped in sessions at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in the summer of 2018. That intense programming, and the concentration it required, matches Donohoe’s muscular keyboard style; the series often having the feel of live performances, with playing of the moment. This reaches its apogee in Donohoe’s readings of the Fantasia in C minor, K.475 and the Sonata No.14 in C minor, which follows it and ends the disc as a fitting climax. The Fantasia is one of Mozart’s darkest proto-Romantic works and one the young Beethoven must have pondered deeply. Donohoe shrouds the opening in mist and cloud before its...
Norman Stinchcombe reviews an Offenbach box-of-delights with operas and arias on CDs from Opera Rara Offenbach: ‘Robinson Crusoe’, ‘Vert-Vert’, ‘Entre Nous’ (7 CD box set Opera Rara) ★★★★★ Jacques Offenbach, who Rossini nicknamed ‘the Mozart of the Champs-Élysées’, wrote more than a hundred comic operas. Only two remain in the repertory; his early hit ‘Orphée aux enfers’ (‘Orpheus in the Underworld’) and his masterpiece ‘Les Contes d’Hoffmann’, unfinished at his death, while ‘La belle Hélène’ is occasionally revived if a star singer fancies the title role, as Jessye Norman once did. The Opera Rara label, whose mission is, “restoring, recording, performing and promoting the forgotten operatic heritage of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries”, show that there are gems to be mined in that mountain of neglected Offenbach scores. This bargain-price box restores three earlier Opera Rara sets back into the catalogue: ‘Robinson Crusoe’ a 1980 recording with the Ro...
SWAN LAKE Birmingham Royal Ballet at Birmingham Hippodrome ***** Birmingham Royal Ballet’s revival of Sir Peter Wright’s timeless production and choreography of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, together with the ballerina Galina Samsova, to whose recent memory this season is dedicated, comes up fresh and sparkling. Philip Prowse’s designs are breathtaking, not least the set for Act III’s ballroom (reminding me of nothing so much of the Hall of the Grail in Wagner’s Parsifal – more of that composer below), and the costumes are stunning, worn and danced in with style and aplomb. Heading the cast on this opening night were Miki ...
CBSO Symphony Hall **** Frankly speaking, the first half of Thursday’s CBSO matinee was something of a disappointment. Despite the expert playing of the musicians both collectively and individually, the opening account of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite was undercharacterised under the elegant conducting of Roderick Cox, and cellist Alban Gerhardt deserved something more musically rewarding than the third-rate Mendelssohn pastiche which is Saint-Saens’ Cello Concerto no.1 to display his awesome gifts. These include remarkable purity of tone, ...
A majestic ‘Alpine’ Symphony from the RLPO – shame about the slide-show Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Near the end of his epic musical traversal of a mountain peak Richard Strauss launches a storm. It’s the only genuinely pictorial effect in this huge tone poem which is, as Beethoven said about his ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, "more the expression of feeling than painting". There are none of Don Quixote’s bleating sheep, Beethoven’s cuckoos and quails or Mahler’s alpine cowbells. The storm is Strauss’s set piece and even the most innocent listener is left in no doubt about what’s happening; the plink-plonk string pizzicati of the first raindrops, ominous rumbles of approaching thunder from the basses and bass drum and then the apocalyptic eruption complete with wind-machine going full pelt. The RLPO under Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider did it complete justice; I’d have donned a souwester if there’d been one handy.This was exactly as it should ...
Norman Stinchcombe reviews CDs by the Takács Quartet and Mark Bebbington playing Vaughan Williams Dutilleux, Hough, Ravel: Takács Quartet (Hyperion) ★★★★★ Is there no end to Stephen Hough’s talents? Brilliant pianist, stylish essayist, novelist, exhibited abstract artist and composer. His String Quartet No.1 was premiered in 2021 and is a fine piece, integrated in a perfect programme with two masterpieces of French quartet writing; Ravel’s in F major and Dutilleux’s ‘Ainsi la Nuit’ (‘Thus the Night’). Hough’s quartet is titled ‘Les six recontres’ (‘The six encounters’) with a punning reference to the early twentieth century group of French composers ‘Les Six’. The spirit of the group’s humorous, ironic and occasionally madcap member Francis Poulenc haunts the quartet’s six movements. There’s a bustling, bristling walk down the boulevard, a dreamy melancholy stroll in the park, colourful excursions to the hotel and theatre, a serene meditation in church – Hough shares Poulenc’s qu...
The CBSO play two ‘Fifths’ – Prokofiev’s epic symphony and Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ concerto CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★ The premiere of Prokofiev’s fifth symphony in 1945 was the apogee of his career in Soviet Russia. The tide of what the Russians call ‘The Great Patriotic War’ had turned, with the Red Army starting the march that would end in Berlin with the Nazis routed. Prokofiev was conducting, waiting momentarily for a pause in the distant artillery fire before the downbeat came and one of the twentieth century’s greatest symphonies began. What an occasion, what a work. It’s not an easy one to conduct. Prokofiev called the first movement ‘Andante’ and the third ‘Adagio’, but gave them metronome marks specifying speeds respectively slower and faster than the designations would suggest. Eduardo Strausser, like many conductors, settled for a compromise, a trade-off. It saw the first movement’s grandeur and mystery, of the music gradually emerging like sunlight cutting through the m...