Midlands Classical Music Making

 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...