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  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 brightening the lives of patients at Birmingham Children’s Hospital each week in the Impact category; in the Opera and Music Theatre category Birmingham Opera Company’s landmark production of Michael Tippett’s idiosyncratic New Year, involving hundreds of citizens (part of its mission-statement) lost out to Welsh National Opera’s production of Death in Venice, complete with acrobats from the gorgeously-named No Fit State Circus: the CBSO Chorus as runners-up in the evening’s crowning category Ensemble, deservedly won by the remarkable Paraorchestra.

But the greatest cheer went up when the winner of the Conductor award was announced: the CBSO’s own Kazuki Yamada, who filmed a very gracious “thank you”, delighting in his involvement with the CBSO “family”, and declaring that he was planning to display his award at Smethwick’s Shireland Academy, so deeply involved in its students’ musical development in order to encourage aspiring conductors.

In winning this award Yamada is following in the footsteps of his immediate CBSO predecessors, and indeed there was a clip from perhaps his greatest predecessor of them all, Sir Simon Rattle, endorsing the awarding of the Gamechanger accolade to NMC Recordings, set up in 1989 by Imogen Holst and Colin Matthews, among others, to spread the music of British contemporary composers, the total of which is now approaching 500.

Winners of the other categories, all trophies presented by RPS Chair Angela Dixon, were Sarah Lianne Lewis “Letting the Light In” ( chamber-scale composition); Re: Discover Festival – Streetwise Opera (Impact); Open Arts Community Choir (Inspiration, supported by Leamington’s Presto Music); Laura van der Hejden (instrumentalist); Katherine Balch Whisper Concerto (large-scale composition); the Cumnock Tryst (Series and Events, with founder Sir James MacMillan here to accept the trophy); Claire Booth (Singer); Classical Africa – BBC Radio 3 (Storytelling); GBSR Duo (Young Artist).

Some of the acceptance speeches seemed less spontaneous than others. Had they been prepared “just in case”?

Impressive live performances interspersed the award-giving. Leon Bosch’s virtuoso double-nass was accompanied by RBC student Maria Linares in Abdi by Grant McLachlan; the amazing French horn-ist Ben Goldscheider played Jorg Widmann’s Air, a resourceful piece in which the bell of the horn is directed into the open grand piano to create vibrating resonances; and Laura van der Heijden’s cello was accompanied by RBC student Joachim Lin in Night, by the currently inescapable Florence Price (is there a guilt complex attached to the previous justified neglect of this woman’s music?).

We also had an absolutely brilliant signing artist, but I’m afraid I couldn’t catch her name; maximum respect, however.

Much was made of the catering arrangements for the drinks interval sponsored by Decca, yellow vouchers one way, red vouchers another. Whatever the logistics, it was wonderful to have the opportunity to be hailed by some of Birmingham’s musical great and good who have moved on elsewhere, one lovely man to the Beacon in Bristol, another to the Three Choirs Festival. And it was the icing on the cake to find a taxi waiting hopefully bang outside the Conservatoire’s Eastside building. As Principal, Julian Lloyd Webber had long lobbied Birmingham City Council for a dedicated taxi rank outside the RBC.

It certainly needs one.

Christopher Morley


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