Posts

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  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...
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  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...
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  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...
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  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 ...
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  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...
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  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...
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  PETROC TRELAWNY’S CLASSICAL MUSIC PUZZLE BOOK (Ivy Press) Following on from the well-deserved success of his lyrical “Trelawny’s Cornwall”, the popular BBC music broadcaster Petroc Trelawny has now set us all a challenge with his “Petroc Trelawny’s Classical Music Puzzle Book”. This is a beautiful publication from Ivy Press, the left -hand pages each devoted to composers ranging from Hildegard of Bingen coming through 900 years until the present day, and there are five sections: vocal, stage, orchestral, concertos, instrumental. Each tells of a particular work, accompanied by fascinating visuals which are certainly not the usual suspects. On each facing page is a puzzle connected with the composer in question. Truth to tell, some of the puzzles are less musical, more logical (the compilers are expert puzzle-setters Dr Gareth Moore and Laura Jayne Ayres), but they certainly offer plenty of rewarding absorption. I have enjoyed reviewing this lovely book, which has the bonus...
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  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CDs Ysaÿe:  Sonatas for Solo Violin, Roman Simovic (LSO Live CD & SACD)  ★★★★★ T he Belgian violinist and composer  Eugène Ysaÿe  (1858-1931) was nicknamed “The King of the Violin” for his amazing  virtuoso  technique and  refinement  as a chamber musician and founder of the lauded Quatuor Ysaÿe. He composed too but none of his eight concertos were published in his lifetime. He  wrote  one undoubted masterpiece,  a set of  Six Sonatas for Solo Violin of 1924 inspired by hearing the great Joseph Szigeti play Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas. Ysaÿe’ s set pays homage to them but he never indulges in pastiche and mock-baroque,   and uses the musical language of his own time. He does allow himself a moment of whimsy in the opening of Sonata No.2 which has a direct quote from the Prelude of Bach’s Partita in E minor, as if the soloist were overheard practising before be...
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                               MY FAIR LADY                                                           CHANDOS CHSA 5358(2) This, the latest in John Wilson’s exhilarating sequence of totally complete musicals with the Sinfonia of London, is another absolute joy, though with one minor caveat. We have here every scrap of material created by Lerner and Loewe, My Fair Lady’s creators, and that provides the only tiny problem. Shows in public presentation often cut segues and links, sometimes just for reasons of timing. These of course don’t apply in CD recordings, but s...
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