CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ A lice Sara Ott’ s Symphony Hall concert in 2019 was a sombre occasion: a solo recital promoting her new album ‘ Nightfall’, with the platform swathed in black drapes illuminated by pinpricks of light. Unintentionally the setting matched the mood, for Ott had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Her playing, unsurprisingly, was muted and the concert cut short. Here though, all was effervescence and brilliance. G rieg’ s Piano Concerto was performed by a very different Ott – r efreshed, revitalised and raring to go. A sylph-like figure she pattered onto the platform bare-footed and then tore through Grieg’s titanic opening bars, with its tumbling cascade of notes, like a muscular giant. Nothing was routine in the virtuoso cadenza; Ott gave the impression of creating it spontaneously. The Adagio was gorgeous, Ott musing dreamily before bursting into an episode of romantic fervour. The CBSO, under Kazuki Yamada, gave excellent support right from th...
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ELGAR VIOLIN CONCERTO: THOMAS BOWES Rubicon Classics RCD 1224 Yet another new recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto comes tumbling through the letterbox, following on from distinguished offerings by Vilde Frang, Christian Tetzlaff and Frank Peter Zimmermann. Stiff competition, then, for Thomas Bowes, as well as for the Sinfonia Arcadiana conducted by Nic Fallowfield, but this totally home-grown production, cultivated in the environs of Elgar’s own countryside, comes through with more than flying colours. The whole recording breathes a freshness and spontaneity in which star-quality is not an issue. Here is a deeply-felt, honest response to this giant of a concerto ranking only behind Beethoven and Mendelssohn in my pantheon of greatness. The enterprise is also sprinkled with a bit of stardust, set ...
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CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ Take the following ingredients: CBSO orchestra, CBSO chorus, conductor Kazuki Yamada and a hugely demanding, super-scale, richly emotional score. What is the result? A triumph. Symphony Hall was packed right to the upper circle and when the final notes of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony died away the standing ovation and fifteen minutes of applause put the seal on a magnificent start to the new CBSO season. This wasn’t a fluke, the same recipe has worked in recent seasons in equally impressive performances of Berlioz’s ‘Faust’, Haydn’s ‘Creation’, Verdi’s Requiem and Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ – they have brought out the best in the CBSO’s music director with his flair for musical drama and passion pushed to the limits. Yamada, a dapper musical general, command ed his huge forces – 120 players and a 100-strong chorus – t o dazzle the audience in a bravura displa y o f Mahler’s intoxicating musical brew, by turns sentimental and transcendental with a light sea...
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A SOLD-OUT CONCERT AT ST ANDREW’S, WILMCOTE If Elf and Safetee had allowed, it would have been standing-room only in Wilmcote’s St Andrew’s Church on Sunday evening for the latest in the popular series of Gwyn Williams Bursary concerts. This jewel of a building was packed to capacity with an audience of 80+ to enjoy a mixed programme of vocal and instrumental items delivered by a team of highly -talented international professionals all giving their services free of charge in aid of this charity, founded to aid young string players, in memory of Gwyn, a long-term Wilmcote resident, and Sir Simon Rattle’s principal viola in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Much-loved local archdeacon, the Ven. Dr Brian Russell, gave informative and perceptive introductions to performances by Chinese violist Jinhe Chang, first prizewinner of the Gwyn Williams Viola Prize at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire ,accompanied by Jiayi Chen (Vaughan Williams and Elgar), American cellist Ni...
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ENTER A LIVING LEGEND Munich Philharmonic at Symphony Hall ★★★★ We live in the age of celebrity when the runner-up in a television reality show is hailed as a star and 1970s singers performing their two hit singles on the revival circuit are labelled legendary. In the midst of this devalued currency the audience for this concert had the privilege of seeing an authentic living legend perform. Martha Argerich first appeared on the concert platform, aged eight, 77 years ago, triumphed in every competition she entered becoming a star when winning the International Chopin Piano Competition in 1965. Look at the cover photograph of her first recording made that year for EMI and you'll see a pouting beauty with a mane of black hair for whom the word "sultry" could have been coined. She made Bardot loom prim. But tempus fugit; the Martha Argerich who was greeted with cheers and applause from an enthusiastic Symphony Hall audience is 85-years-old, the mane is grey, in black and ...
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Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Buckfast Abbey in Devonshire dates back more than a thousand years and has a chequered history, being demolished during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and its present site was reinstated as an abbey in 1902. It has a thriving musical life with the present Abbey Choir founded in 2009 and an organ by the Italian organ builder Fratelli Ruffati, their first to be constructed in Britain, which was installed in 2017 and given its inaugural recital in 2018. Both are featured in two new discs released on the Ad Fontes label handsomely housed in handsome CD-sized hardback books lavishly illustrated in colour, with beautiful views of the Abbey and its surroundings, and with informative notes. 'Cinquième Symphonie' ★★★★ shows off the Ruffati organ's splendid sound in a 76 minute programme performed by the Abbey's own organist Charles Maxtone-Smith. The album's title is of the disc's opening wor...
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Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Ondřej Kukal & Jiří Teml: Jan Fišer (violin), Czech Philharmonic / Jakob Hrůša, Tomáš Netopil (Animal Music CD) ★★★★★ Here's a fascinating find: two contemporary orchestral works, challenging, interesting, having direct emotional appeal and by composers who are, at least in Britain, virtually unknown. Kulak's Symphony No. 1 “With Glockenspiel”(Op. 15) (1999) has a tremendous opening full of foreboding and menace which reminded me of Nielsen at his most pugnacious. There are some amazingly deep, cavernous subterranean sounds as if Moby Dick were on the prowl in a murky ocean, accompanied by blisteringly fast timpani. Is this Captain Ahab and his ship in pursuit of the great white whale? I offer this description just to give you an idea of how dramatic, and potentially cinematic, the opening Andante Spiritoso movement is. The tinkling glockenspiel makes a consolatory, calm-after-the-storm entrance right at the end....
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ELGAR, POULENC AND JANACEK Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral **** On Monday evening Adrian Partington, Director of this year’s Gloucester Festival on the Three Choirs circuit, managed something a one-time Prime Minister ducked out of attempting. He held the pause on the first beat of the second bar of Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture perfectly, before releasing the Philharmonia Orchestra strings into a scurry of detail. This proved a reading both bustling and tender, revealing all the pageantry and poignancy the composer so loved in London Town. Of course allowances had to be made for the sounds of the various sec...
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SIMON RATTLE AND THE CBSO PLAY WALTON I returned this evening to my long-neglected CD of Simon Rattle conducting Walton with the CBSO, recorded nearly 30 years ago. This performance of the First Symphony, in my not so humble opinion the greatest British symphony (pistols at dawn, anyone?) is so powerful, so intense, that one cannot listen to it too often. No wonder that for once Radio 3's "Building a Library" got things right, when the person comparing all available recordings chose this one, saying the players performed as though their lives depended upon it. At the time of this recording Rattle was approaching the end of his tenure as the CBSO's Principal Conductor, a post he had held since 1980, and during much of which ...