Midlands Classical Music Making

  The Fairy Queen Longborough Festival Opera *****   ‘The Fairy Queen’ is often described as a “Restoration spectacular” and that term certainly proved to be apt in this fresh and vibrant take on Purcell’s semi-opera: a fascinating mash-up of baroque and folk music, interwoven with chunks of Shakespeare’s text from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that – whilst the inspiration for Purcell’s work – forms no part of the composer’s original libretto; indeed, this new production was as much ‘semi-play’ as ‘semi-opera’.   What so easily could have been an unhappy marriage of mixed musical styles was anything but in the sensitive hands of Co-Music Directors Harry Sever & Naomi Burrell; their realisation blended these styles seamlessly, and of course so many of Purcell’s masques in ‘The Fairy Queen’ are close in idiom to folk music of the time.   In the hands of Director Polly Graham and Designer Nate Gibson, Shakespeare’s wood became an abandoned urban theme p...

                                                                CBSO YOUTH ORCHESTRA ACADEMY                                                             Symphony Hall **** What might have appeared a somewhat wan winding-up of the CBSO Youth Orchestra’s year (a last-minute change of venue, an audience straggling across the stalls of the auditorium) turned out to be a fizzer of a concert, the h...

                                               CBSO PROM                                                             Royal Albert Hall ****   Written within six years of each other in the 1930s, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana are as different as chalk and cheese. The Stravinsky, hieratic and austere (no upper strings nor warm clarinets) seems to be distancing itself from the political turmoil of the period, while the Orff throws its...

                                                              l’Orfeo                                              Longborough Festival Opera ***** Nestling in the Cotswolds, this charming venue has long gained international renown for its Wagner presentations, so it might come as a surprise to find artistic director Polly Graham turning her attention to Monteverdi’s l’Orfeo. Yet this example of one of the earliest pioneering operas, creating a whole new art-form, does i...

                 CBSO PREMIERE AT THE CHELTENHAM FESTIVAL                                              By Christopher Morley     James B. Wilson owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Cheltenham Music Festival.   “They are renowned for their support of new music and have provided many opportunities to me.,” he begins.   “After graduating from the Royal Academy of Music I was invited to participate in their Composes’ Academy and wrote probably what I consider my Opus number one, a choral piece called ‘Lullaby’.”   That was in 2014 and since then I was commissioned again to write a piece for Chineke!   which was ‘The Green Fuse’, a response to a Dylan ...