Midlands Classical Music Making

  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Donizetti ‘Songs’ Volumes  3  &  4 :  Spyres, Lemieux ,  Rizzi, Zappa  (Op era Rara   2  CD s available separately )  ★★★★★ Last year the enterprising Opera Rara label released the first two discs in a planned  eight volume survey of Donizetti’s songs, around 200 of them, many of which have  not been heard in decades. The project is masterminded by  Opera Rara’s  Repertoire Consultant Roger Parker  who has scoured musical archives in Europa and as far away as Australia searching for the opera composer’s solo songs. The first two volumes with  teno r  Lawrence Brownlee  and  baritone  Nicola Alaimo,  both accompanied on piano by conductor Carlo Rizzi,  were outstanding. Now come Volumes 3 and 4 with American singer Michael Spyres, accompanied by Rizzi, and Canadian Marie-Nicole Lemieux, accompanied by Giulio Zappa....

  STRAVINSKY’S DIAGHILEV BALLETS Kimichi Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall ***** If this feat has ever been accomplished before, then I’ve never heard of it. To perform any one of Stravinsky’s first three great Diaghilev ballets – Firebird, Petrushka, Rite of Spring – is a tour de force for any professional orchestra. To perform all three in one programme, and by a part-time orchestra of semi-professionals seems to be flying dangerously close to the sun or the wind. And the result was a triumphant return to earth after spreading glory. The Kimichi Symphony Orchestra, one hundred strong, gave more than impressive accounts of these taxing scores, demanding both technically and physically, under the supremely calm, reliable and reassuring baton of Keith Slade.  What is their secret, one might ask? The answers are brilliantly obvious: an inspirational conductor with a flawless stick-technique; enthusiastically motivated players devoted to their instruments; tight, efficient,...

 KIMICHI ORCHESTRA PERFORMS THE THREE GREAT STRAVINSKY BALLETS By Christopher Morley (for 20.3.25) Launched in 2014, the Acocks Green-based Kimichi School has a unique place among educational establishments in the West Midlands. It is an independent secondary school which has no barriers to ethnicity, disability or gender, and its main ethos is the fostering of musical awareness among every one of its students. Sally Alexander, herself a professional cellist awarded an MBE for services to education in the late Queen’s 2021 Birthday Honours list,, is its dynamic founder, and her nurturing of the school has run parallel with large-scale musical activities proudly spreading its name. And nothing gets larger than the event she has planned for Sunday afternoon at Symphony Hall on March 23.  All three of the great Stravinsky ballets composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – Firebird, Petrushka, Rite of Spring – are to be performed by the amateur Kimichi Symphony Orchestra, Ke...

 ALBERT HERRING Gas Street Central, Birmingham ***** Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s production of Britten’s witty satire on smalltown life has proved a triumphant collaboration between several colleges, and high praise to all involved. The cast is a compact one (13 singers), so in fact the four performances have been able to feature two teams. I caught the Blue Cast on Saturday afternoon. Matinees are obviously congenial times for those of us of a certain age, and this versatile, performance-leaning church just off Birmingham’s lively Broad Street, was packed. Fortunately the RBC Department of Vocal and Operatic Studies hasn’t totally followed the example of the legendary late Graham Vick, who preferred to present shows in a variety of spaces, from factories to churches, and to get the audience to mill and shift around as participants, There wasn’t any of that nonsense here, just an opening dining-room and then a move to a resourceful thrust stage where we all had surrounding...

  ROYAL PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY AWARDS 2025 Royal Birmingham Conservatoire As such events are usually mired in metrocentricity, readers will forgive me for rejoicing that the Royal Philharmonic Society, coming out of London for its annual Awards Ceremony for only the second time in the Society’s 200-year  history, (last year was Manchester) should honour its Birmingham hosts with such an acknowledgement of the proud musical achievements of the West Midlands. Hosted by BBC Radio 3 presenters Jess Gillam and Tom McKinney for a programme to be broadcast the subsequent evening, the evening began with a performance of “Sometime I Sing” composed by a composer long associated with Ex Cathedra, Alec Roth, and performed by Ex Cathedra Student Scholars under the directorship of Jeffrey Skidmore. Other local organisations featured were the Wolverhampton Symphony Orchestra, nominated in the Inspiration category for its reach-out to the disabled; Ex Cathedra’s Singing Medicine brighteni...

  A SUBLIME MAHLER FAREWELL FROM THE CBSO CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ Mahler’s orchestral song cycle ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ (‘The Song of the Earth’) has been straitjacketed into the symphony-in-all-but-name category. This arose from a notoriously unreliable source, his widow Alma, who claimed that Mahler superstitiously refused to name it as such because, as the concert programme has it,”no major composer had lived long after completing their ninth symphony. Beethoven and Bruckner seemed to prove the point.” So Mozart (41 symphonies) and Haydn (104 Symphonies) weren’t major composers? Nonsense of course but Alma was a serial mythologist. Listening to this passionate performance under conductor Alpesh Chauhan, making a welcome return to his home city, confirmed that song is the essence of this work and reinforces the judgement that Mahler was a genius when writing for voices. Which needs, of course, voices capable of doing justice to this sublime and vocally demanding work. Demandi...

  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Ravel, ‘Daphnis et Chloé’: London Symphony Orchestra, Tenebrae / Sir Antonio Pappano (LSO Live CD & SACD) ★★★★★ Thirty years ago a new recording of Ravel’s complete ballet ‘Daphnis et Chloé’ would have faced intense competition in a crowded field. The deletions axe wielded by the international media conglomerates which control most of the classical music market has changed all that. So the classic 1950s analogue recording by Monteux and the LSO, fine digital recordings by Boulez, Dutoit, Ozawa and Levine – all owned by Universal – Rattle (Warner Classics) and Munch (Sony) have gone. Which makes this excellent release from the LSO’s own label doubly welcome. Ravel’s lush score demands a virtuoso orchestra: it needs to be subtle and diaphanous, as in the ‘Lever du jour’ (Sunrise) of Part II; swaggering and exuberant as the pirates burst onto the scene; and with reserves of power for the climactic ‘Danse générale’ (Bacc...

  AN ALMIGHTY HAYDN ‘CREATION’ CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★ The scientific story of the creation of the universe arrived in 1931 when the physicist Georges Lemaître pictured it mysteriously arising from a single primeval atom. Haydn, a century and half before, presented the event more graphically, impressively and transcendentally without a single mathematical equation. His oratorio ‘The Creation’ begins with ‘The Representation of Chaos’ in a sinuously shifting hushed C minor which defeats our expectations by never reaching the musical closure we instinctively crave. Kazuki Yamada directed the CBSO as if in stealth mode, everything held in check. The bass Ashley Riches, towering over everyone as the Archangel Raphael, was just the man to intone, “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth.” Enter the CBSO Chorus, hushed and subdued describing the Spirit of God surveying the inchoate darkness. Then comes one of the greatest coupes in classical music – another surprise from the ma...

  A SUPER PERFORMANCE OF DVORAK’S POPULAR CLASSIC CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ In 1973 long before he found fame as the director of ‘Alien’, ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Gladiator’ the young Ridley Scott directed a television commercial advertising Hovis bread. It showed a boy pushing a bicycle, its basket laden with loaves, up a steep cobbled village street to the sound of the Ashington Colliery brass band playing an evocatively nostalgic tune. In just 47 seconds it captured the heart of a sentimental nation and has been voted Britain’s favourite advert of all time. More pertinently it introduced millions of people to the Largo of Dvorak’s Symphony No.9 with an immortal and hummable melody which conjured up a “land of lost content”. Music graduates at specialist classical record stores – remember them?– were bemused by people wanting a record of “the Hovis theme”. Sales soared, Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony became a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and half a century later it still is – as the full-...

  CBSO BENEVOLENT FUND CONCERT Symphony Hall ***** After many months away from the orchestra it was good to catch up with a CBSO in wonderful form, and on such a joyous occasion, a warm and packed audience joining in the annual celebration of the CBSO Benevolent Fund, and all it does to assist distressed musicians and staff. The players clearly adore performing under principal conductor Kazuki Yamada, indulging his all kinds of quirks from the podium, and following him down some surprise byways – of which there were many in the Tchaikovsky symphony which concluded this all-Russian programme. We began busily, with Shostakovich’s Festival Overture, no need for the composer to look over his shoulder for the KGB here, bubbling with woodwind (this was to be very much their afternoon), string detail scudding out of Yamada’s wide, sweeping, empowering beat. Then came a very different mood with the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, introversion desperately trying to liberate itself. Jam...

  A LONG DELAYED PREMIERE FOR THE CBSO CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ When an orchestra announces the UK Premiere of a work then it’s normally of something new, novel, up-to-the minute. Akio Yashiro’s ‘Symphony for Large Orchestra’ was commissioned in 1958 so why perform it now? It would no doubt gain a little cultural credit for the CBSO’s forthcoming tour of Japan later this year while also being a personal indulgence for Kazuki Yamada. So what if it was? All the CBSO’s music directors have been allowed to ride their musical hobby horses: Simon Rattle conducted Nicholas Maw’s gigantic ‘Odyssey’, Sakari Oramo showcased the forgotten British composer John Foulds and Mirga proselytized for Weinberg. Yamada introduced his late countryman’s work to the British concert hall and a much wider audience via a Radio 3 live relay. Good for him. But perhaps that 67 year wait signified that the symphony isn’t very good? Having heard many CBSO premieres over the decades – some instantly forgettable...

  THE JOHN WILSON PIANO SPECTACULAR V Royal Northern College of Music **** Having managed to assemble eight grand pianos onto one stage I suppose it is inevitable that one would want to wring as much out of the behemoth as possible. This was certainly the case with John Wilson’s joyous 85th birthday event attracting an overflowing and enthusiastic audience of ex-students and well-wishers to the RNCM Concert Hall. Wilson inaugurated these five-yearly events in 2005, raising funds for the John Wilson Junior Fellowship in Accompaniment at the College where he has been such a respected presence as student and subsequently teacher; his association with the establishment now goes back 60 years. Eight colleagues and past students each man one of the instruments, generously donating their services to the cause, as does Timothy Reynish, directing from the podium. This year’s complement comprised Harvey Davies, Peter Donohoe, Julian Evans, Peter Lawson, Nicholas Rimmer, Martin Roscoe, ...

  Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases Weill, 'The Seven Deadly Sins': Soloists, London Symphony Orchestra / Rattle (LSO Live CD & SACD) ★★★★ Sir Simon Rattle chose Weill’s work, an acerbic Berlin pastiche of the Hollywood musical, as one of his first recordings with the CBSO in 1982. The lead role of Anna was taken by his first wife American soprano Elise Ross. Forty years on and his new recording stars his third wife, the Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená. This 1933 collaboration with Bertolt Brecht was styled a ballet chanté (sung ballet) with dual personality Anna played by a singer and a dancer. No dancing for Kožená but she took both roles – singing one and speaking the other – and is very effective. Her portrayal of Lust is psychologically and vocally acute. Rattle has assembled an excellent male quartet of singers to portray Anna’s exploitative family: Andrew Staples (tenor), Alessandro Fisher (tenor), Ross Ramgobin (baritone) and Florian B...