Midlands Classical Music Making

                                             RIGOLETTO                              Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff ** Verdi’s Rigoletto certainly has its faults (more of that later), but it certainly doesn’t deserve this shambolic new production from one of the world’s great opera companies. Director Adele Thomas seems to have conceived the tragedy as a vehicle for a surreal send-up of the genre itself. We begin with the nowadays obligatory pre-music curtain-raiser, an adolescent orgy featuring prizefighters knocking each other senseless, an amused crowd of nobles spectating from an upper gallery, and a flo...

  CBSO’s new season – fresh start CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Normal service has been resumed – after the most traumatic season for the CBSO since the orchestra almost went bankrupt just over twenty years ago. Birmingham City Council funding will be axed after a century of civic support. Then new CEO Emma Stenning’s infamous “Vision Statement” – a gospel for the trendy Holy Trinity of Accessibility, Relevance and Inclusiveness – urged audiences to get out the mobile phone, film the musicians, take selfies and bring in some drinks. In December Strauss and Beethoven were swamped by a vastly expensive, noisy, distracting and utterly irrelevant, light show. In April, tenor Ian Bostridge halted his performance of Britten’s ‘Les Illuminations’ until dimwits in the audience stopped distracting him with their mobile phones. My reviews of both concerts went viral and sparked many think pieces and diatribes in the national media. Perhaps in some small way they helped start the backtracking of...

  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD and DVD releases Mendelssohn ‘Elijah’: Soloists, London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus (LSO Live 2 CDs and SACDs)  ★★★★★ Mendelssohn’s oratorio was commissioned for Birmingham and was premiered in 1846 at the Town Hall conducted by the composer. It was a resounding success and cemented his position as Queen Victoria’s favourite composer whom she considered to be, “the greatest musical genius since Mozart”. The coupling of Mendelssohn’s music with Victorian values, and the increasing secularization of modern Britain, means the biblical work has been kept alive largely by amateur choirs and players. This exciting new recording, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano, shows what our concert halls have been missing. Forget the Victorian world of aspidistras and antimacassars – this superbly sung live recording blazes with passion, bringing the characters alive with operatic fervour. The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley is a mighty pre...

  ELAINE DELMAR                                            The Radlett Centre, Radlett *****   Doyenne of British jazz-singing   for well over half a century, Elaine Delmar continues to pack one hell of a punch. The voice is like a synthesizer of every musical sound imaginable, now piping like a piccolo, now swooping richly into cello tones. now barking out at us as though from the inside of a double-bass. And to this we add amazing clarity of diction and articulation, seductive phrasing born of immaculate breath-control, and a force of personality, bursting with adrenaline, which is irresistible. For this lovely event at the welcoming and charming Radlett Centre in such a delightful Hertfordshire village Delmar was joined by an expert quartet: Barry Green...

                                             PETER SMITH RETIRES FROM AUTUMN IN MALVERN                                                           By Christopher Morley   A footballer hangs up his boots when he comes to the end of his playing career. I’m not sure what a veteran festival-planner does when he retires, but whatever it is, Peter Smith will be doing it next month when he completes 35 years as founder and director of Autumn in Malvern. The festival does exactly what it says...

                                             TRIAL BY JURY/ HMS PINAFORE The National Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company                                            At Malvern Theatre *** The company’s title sounds grand and imposing, the reality is somewhat different, with so many variable standards in performance. What is undeniably laudable is the unashamedly traditional set-designs of these productions, a forbidding courtroom for Trial, a properly nautical foredeck for Pinafore. These cameos by Gilbert and Sullivan are firmly set both in the period of their creati...

  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases The great symphonies are amenable to different interpretations, surely one of the necessary conditions of being a great piece of music. Dvorak’s late symphonies are in that category and there are plentiful rewards to be had from recordings by conductors and orchestras with different approaches as two newly released sets show.  Dvorak: Czech Philharmonic /  Semyon Bychkov  (Pentatone 2CDs)  ★★★★ was taken from performances of the Symphonies 7-9 in the Dvorak Hall at the Rudolfinum in Prague last year. As the orchestra’s chief conductor and music director Bychkov has formed an acclaimed partnership with his Czech players at home and on tour. The LSO Live label is 25 years-old and is celebrating with a remastered set from of Dvorak’s Symphonies 6-9 conducted by Sir Colin Davis, D vorak, Janacek, Smetana: London Symphony Orchestra / Davis / Rattle (LSO Live 4 CDs & SACDs)  ★★★★  Both sets ar...

  HOW THINGS STAND WITH THE CBSO The plans of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra management to attract a diversity of new listeners off the city’s streets and into the concert-hall have caused consternation among regular audiences, subscribers, donors, and indeed legacy-givers. There has been much backtracking from the original proposals, issued in late November 2023, which included invitations to applaud whenever people felt like it, bring your drinks in, video the performance and your entourage enjoying it (and then send it in for publicity material), explanatory greetings from the platform at every concert, a more welcoming approach from front-of-house staff (a terrible affront to the expertise and experience of the stewards who have greeted us at Symphony Hall for a third of a century).   There was also an inference that the orchestra was racist, ageist and sexist (the expression “old white men” had been bandied around in some quarters). The filming raised a c...

                 ANDREW DOWNES PERFORMANCE PRIZE   A new international music competition launches at the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre, King Edward’s School, Edgbaston on September 22. The Andrew Downes Performance Prize, bringing £1000 to the winner, is designed to perpetuate the memory of this well-loved Midlands composer who died in January 2023. Downes’ music is performed worldwide, and this competition specifies that entrants, whether soloists or chamber ensembles, learn and play one of his compositions in the Final. Anna Downes, Andrew’s daughter, tells me how the competition was born.   “Originally, the prize was put in place when Dad won compensation for medical negligence which left him in a wheelchair. As Dad could no longer travel to promote his music, part of the compensation was so that he could find alternative means of ensuring his legacy.   “With the excellent suppo...

  CBSO’s Pre-Proms ‘Pictures’ a huge hit CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ There’s no getting around the fact that Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ is unbeatable. So powerful is its spell that on returning to the piano original it can seem pallid and details from Ravel – like the insistent whining trumpet to mimic the downtrodden Schmuÿle – become superimposed by our inner ear. Other arrangements by everyone from Ashkenazy, who conducted his own version at Symphony Hall in the 1990s, to Stokowski can seem drab, garish or bombastic. In May the CBSO under  Kazuki  Yamada performed Sir Henry Wood’s 1915 orchestration which preceded Ravel by seven years. I enjoyed it immensely and although it won’t supersede Ravel – when  Wood  heard that version he withdrew his own from performance – there’s surely room for an alternative version. It was  immensely popular  at Wood’s  own  Promenade Concerts and it’s fitting that the CB...

  Norman Stinchcombe  reviews the latest classical CD releases Meyerbeer ‘Le Prophète’: Soloists, Lyon Opera Chorus, Mediterranean Youth Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Mark Elder (LSO Live 3 CD & SACD)  ★★★★★ Premiered at the Paris Opera in 1849 Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera ‘ Le Prophète’   was huge in every way – length, ambition, scale and success. Its five acts lasted over six hours with elaborate staging and spectacular effects; the first use of electric arc light to represent the blazing sunrise, a full-size skating rink and an explosive ending when a German palace is blown up and everyone perishes in the flames. Wagner sneered about “effects without causes” but then nicked the ending for the climax of ‘G ötterdämmerung’. Times and tastes change and grand opera is hardly performed now. No performances of  ‘ Le Prophète’   exist on DVD and the only full scale recording on disc – the 1970s showcase for Marilyn Horne and conducted by he...