Midlands Classical Music Making

  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...

  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...

  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...

                               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...

  DAVID TAYLOE and DYLAN PEREZ Red House, Aldeburgh (August 1) A recital of English song, accompanied on Benjamin Britten’s own piano in the library of his Red House, so full of resonances, promised a mouthwatering experience, and in many respects it was. But Britten himself proved only a fleeting presence in this hour-long programme promoted by Summer at Snape 2025. Had we heard more of him it might have enlivened a somewhat samey atmosphere created by many of the offerings. The emerging young American tenor David Tayloe has an attractive voice, creamy and appealing, and in the opening three Purcell items, realisations by Britten and Thomas Ades, he displayed an appropriate alto-like timbre. “Hark the Ech’ing Air” was a mite too hectic in its delivery, but pianist Dylan Perez brought crisp, harpsichord-like articulation to Britten’s accompaniment. Then began a lengthy sequence overladen with the melancholy which pervades so much song-writing by English composers of the fir...

  GWYN WILLIAMS BURSARY CONCERT                                                           St Andrew’s Church Wilmcote (20.7.25) Wilmcote’s St Andrew’s, a beautiful jewel of a church, was packed to the rafters for a fascinating concert on Sunday evening which included two-and-a-half world premieres (read on). The occasion was the latest fund-raising concert in aid of the Gwyn Williams Bursary. Gwyn played in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, where he was Sir Simon Rattle’s principal viola, for 30 years, and the Bursary was founded by his widow, Stephannie <SIC> in order to assist young string players. After a year making donations to the CBSO Youth Orchestra and inaugurating two Gwy...

                               THE BARBER OF SEVILLE                              Longborough Festival Opera (July13)   One of the many heartening elements of this joyous production is the fact that the cast was so youthful, many of them making their Longborough debuts. The future looks set fair. This was the final performance in a run which had begun early in June, insterspersed with Pelleas et Melisande , but there was no sense of end-of-term undisciplined high jinks. No, this was a grippingly tight presentation from a superbly well-drilled company, unfolding with unstoppable momentum under the fluent conducting of the batonless Elaine Kelly. Underlying everything was the deft playing of th...

                                             RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN                              John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London at Symphony Hall ***** It is a long time since I have been in a Symphony Hall packed to the rafters, with such an atmosphere of expectation, and an audience agog and appreciative of every note. And what engendered all this? The eagerly-awaited appearance of John Wilson and his remarkable Sinfonia of London in a Rodgers and Hammerstein programme, hot on the heels of their CD releases of ultra-complete performances of that more than talented duo’s Oklahoma! and Carousel. Wilson, now mended from a serious ...