CBSO’s new season – fresh start
CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★
Normal service has been resumed – after the most traumatic season for the CBSO since the orchestra almost went bankrupt just over twenty years ago. Birmingham City Council funding will be axed after a century of civic support. Then new CEO Emma Stenning’s infamous “Vision Statement” – a gospel for the trendy Holy Trinity of Accessibility, Relevance and Inclusiveness – urged audiences to get out the mobile phone, film the musicians, take selfies and bring in some drinks. In December Strauss and Beethoven were swamped by a vastly expensive, noisy, distracting and utterly irrelevant, light show. In April, tenor Ian Bostridge halted his performance of Britten’s ‘Les Illuminations’ until dimwits in the audience stopped distracting him with their mobile phones. My reviews of both concerts went viral and sparked many think pieces and diatribes in the national media. Perhaps in some small way they helped start the backtracking of the barmy ideas. Concerts have started to resemble concerts again.
New season, new start. Richard Strauss and Beethoven were back on the programme but the focus was purely on the music. It was like old times: Symphony Hall sold out even with the Grand Tier re-opened. Plenty of familiar faces, subscriptions renewed after the “visionary” innovations had been ditched, lots of new ones. The feelings of hope and high expectations were palpable. We were not disappointed. The performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ended tumultuously, a soaring, roaring appeal for togetherness in an increasingly fractured world. Presiding over the evening, a mixture of ringmaster, MC and charismatic conductor was music director Kazuki Yamada. His platform pep talks and synchronized hand-waving for the orchestra annoy some, as does his comic incitement for more audience applause. They are, however, a small price to pay for his boundless enthusiasm, the rejuvenation of the players’ and audiences’ enthusiasm after the Covid crisis. Not since early Andris Nelsons – before he deserted for the big bucks of Boston – have the CBSO’s audience taken a conductor to their hearts as they have Kazuki.
This is only the second time he has conducted the Ninth in the last fifteen years and one feels his approach will mature and deepen. The start was tentative rather than magical, the hushed shivering strings down-to-earth rather than an intimation of the beyond, But energy and conviction increased, the movement driven along by Matthew Hardy’s ferocious, hard-stick timpani. What fine fettle the orchestra is in, no weaknesses in any section and they delivered a crackling, devilishly fizzing scherzo. Yamada’s tempo for the third movement was tender but flowing, the two contrasting themes clearly delineated by the string sections, their magical intertwining a joy to hear. My eye was caught by principal second fiddle Lowri Porter playing as if channelling the music directly from the source. The CBSO Chorus have had a wonderful couple of years, triumph after triumph, and again were magnificent. Julian Wilkins is celebrating twenty years working with the CBSO’s three choruses, and, like the orchestra, I have never heard them sounding better. Their cry of “Seid umschlungen, Millionen!” was a shiver-down-the spine moment. There was a strong quartet of soloists with Lucy Crowe(soprano), Jennifer Johnston (mezzo soprano), Joshua Stewart (tenor). I’ve heard more authoritative and stentorian cries of “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!” than Jonathan Lemalu’s and feel that it benefits from having a genuine bass. The movement ended with an ecstatic outburst and a thunderous, joyous response from the audience.
Yamada designed the programme and started shrewdly with two works showcasing the orchestra’s sections. In Stravinsky’s ‘Symphonies of Wind Instruments’ the interplay between the high winds, youthful, bright and energetic and sober voice-of-authority low brass worked well with Stravinsky’s ear for piquant sonorities to the fore. Strauss’s elegiac ‘Metamorphosen’, a threnody for the denigration of German culture by the Nazis and the destruction of his beloved Dresden by Allied bombing, was composed for 23 Solo Strings. It’s there in the title. The delicate, intricate, complex interplay of themes and motifs was meant to have a chamber music feel. So why did Yamada double the forces thus obscuring this, and homogenizing the sound? I suspect it was a belief that big is better. The result showed that, often, more means less.
Norman Stinchcombe