Midlands Classical Music Making

  Dvořák’s Brilliant Bohemian Rhapsody CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★ We have all heard about love at first sight, that joyous epiphany which instantly transforms drab sepia life into glorious technicolour as in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. There is also love at first hearing when a piece of music has the same effect. In his programme notes the young Portuguese conductor Dinis Sousa admits that it wasn’t quite like that for him with Dvořák’s Symphony No.8: “I remember first thinking that it was a bit over the top,” he admits, “but when I eventually came to conduct it, I completely fell in love.” His affection was evident during every bar of this joyous performance, sometimes achingly beautiful, frenetically abandoned and brimming with boisterous good humour. Pace is essential here knowing when to relax into Dvořák’s idealized nostalgic vision of Bohemia, sun-kissed hills, sylvan breezes and twittering birds, but also to limn the dark shadows that occasionally threaten this prelapsarian paradise...