Midlands Classical Music Making

                BAVARIAN RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA                                            Symphony Hall (11.11.25) ***** Just under 35 years ago I was here in this auditorium to review Simon Rattle conducting the CBSO playing their very first work in the opening concert of the hall he had inspired and which had been built thanks to the EEC, the vision of Birmingham City Council, and a few astute manoeuvrings by some influential local figures. We were all immediately bowled over by the clarity of the acoustic (indeed, the Gemini cartoon on the front page of next morning’s Birmingham Post showed a woman berating her husband for the hourly bleeping of his digital watch), and the opportunities offered by mani...

                                             I POMERIGGI MUSICALI                                                           Teatro dal Verme, Milan                                                           (Octob...

  Jörg’s Mendelssohn Miscellany CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Jack of all trades master of none, so the proverb tells us. Jörg Widmann proves that’s not always the case: clarinet virtuoso, versatile (if quirky) composer and a conductor whose combination of probing musical intelligence and infectious enthusiasm endears him to both orchestra and audience. He’s also a shrewd concert programmer. In 2023 he conducted a sizzling Beethoven Symphony No.7 together with works, including his own ‘Con Brio’, which explored aspects of the symphony together with an orchestral arrangement of a chamber work for clarinet. He used the same template here but with Mendelssohn as the focus, beginning with his arrangement of the Andante from the composer’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. It’s a work dear to Widmann, who learned to play it as a ten-year-old, and his arrangement with a small group of strings, is tasteful and charming. As well as Widmann’s own mellifluous playing there’s a magical part for cel...

  A SOARING SEAGULL AND NIELSEN’S TERRIFYING TIMPANI CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Never judge a musical work by its literary inspiration. Nearly fifty operas are based on Shakespeare plays and nearly all are duds while Puccini’s tuneful triumphs derive from penny dreadful potboilers. This maxim meant that I ignored a pang of doubt when discovering that the British composer Adrian Sutton’s violin concerto, premiered in 2023, was inspired by Richard Bach’s 1972 fable ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. Gulls enjoy noisily circling rubbish dumps and stealing chips from holidaymakers at the seaside. Bach’s anthropomorphic gull is on a transcendental quest of self-realization. Millions of Americans bought it – the definition of gullible. It was just the image of the soaring bird that really mattered to Sutton and was the starting point for the work commissioned by violinist Fenella Humphreys. The three sections of its twenty-five minute span flow seamlessly into each other, surging, soaring an...

  C BSO DELIVERS ANOTHER ELGAR TRIUMPH CBSO at Symphony Hall  ★★★★★ Great times for Elgarians. Last week we had his choral masterpiece ‘Gerontius’ .This week we were treated to a tremendously dramatic and virile performance of his greatest orchestral work the  Symphony No. 1.  While life has sped up considerably since its premiere in 1908 performances of the symphony have become considerably slower. It’s a fate also inflicted on ‘Nimrod’ from the ‘Enigma Variations’ which conductors Bernstein and Levine transformed from noble paean into a lugubrious dirge. Elgar’s 1931 recording of the  s ymphony is a vigorously bracing 46-and-a-half minutes. By the 21 st  century  Sir Colin Davis’ s, just under 55 minutes, render ing  the dynamic work torpid and flabby. Having seen  Nicholas Collon  conduct before I expected an Elgar with passion and drive – he did not disappoint. The symphony’s opening, basses and cellos, intoning the motto theme was l...

  CANDIDE                              Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff ***** Spoiler alert for everything about this, the most joyous, exhilarating show I have ever seen in well over half a century of reviewing. Leonard Bernstein’s love-child struggles to find an identity: is it an opera, an operetta, a musical, and do any of the many revisions of the work help this categorisation? Who actually cares, when director James Bonas unveils a revelation bubbling with wit, giving space for wonderful vocal expression, and inspiring a set and lighting design by Thibault Vancraenenbroeck (in the good old days of overnight reviews that would have been a nightmare to dictate) and Rob Casey respectively. And alongside all this comes the amazing video and animation masterminded by Gregoire Pont. Into these fascinating visual ...

  HEAVENLY GERONTIUS LAUNCHES NEW CBSO SEASON CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ Whenever Elgar’s ‘ The Dream of Gerontius’  is performed in Birmingham it feels like it has come home. The city was home to its author Cardinal Newman, his burial place and where in 2010 he became a saint, beatified by  Pope Benedict XVI  at a ceremony in the city’s Cofton Park attended by 50,000 people. It always brings out the best in the performers: the orchestra, CBSO Choir, soloists and conductor cohere in triumphant unity. That happened here in 2023 when  Ryan Wigglesworth,  a late replacement for the mortally ill Elgar specialist Sir Andrew Davis, conducted like a man possessed. Here the CBSO’s music director  Kazuki Yamada  was equally as effective in an entirely different way. That most flamboyant of conductors became utterly self-effacing, subsumed entirely by and in the music. Most of the time I didn’t notice he was there. I’m not being facetious – that’s a compli...

  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CDs Heggie, ‘Intelligence’: Brugger, Barton, Bridges, Houston Grand Opera / Ryan (Houston Grand Opera 2 CDs) ★★★★ The American composer Jake Heggie relishes challenging subjects when he writes operas. His enormously successful ‘Dead Man Walking’ which has r eceived  more than  60 productions on five continents since its premiere in 2000,  was about the real-life relationship between a multiple murderer awaiting execution on death row and the nun who becomes his regular visitor. In ‘Intelligence’, premiered in 2023 by  Houston Grand Opera  in a production featured on this recording, Heggie goes back to the American Civil War and the action focuses on two women  Elizabeth Van Lew,  white and wealthy, a nd Mary Jane Bowser, a  b lack woman born  a slave. The connection is that both are believed to have become spies for  the Union  side planning to abolish slavery. The few facts kno...