Birmingham
Richard Bratby
“This year was supposed to be so very different” said Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra when he spoke to theartsdesk earlier this year. Talk about an understatement. The CBSO has hardly been alone in having cherished plans wrecked. But in the orchestra’s centenary year, the sudden cancellation of a programme of celebrations that had taken the best part of a decade to plan felt like a particularly cruel blow. And having finally pieced together a skeletal replacement season (the CBSO’s main venue, Symphony Hall, was able to re-open its doors only Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s start by echoing Simon Rattle’s sense of “how lucky we are”, in our case to be able to share with a 75-piece City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra its centenary to the very day, and celebrate the programme, the performers, the front man too (that superlative actor Adrian Lester, born in Birmingham to Jamaican immigrants). The overall presentation, alas, not so much. The welcome presence of Midlander Sheku Kanneh-Mason as soloist in Saint-Saëns' First Cello Concerto (pictured below) only reminded some of us how he was filmed playing the same work (don’t orchestras compare notes?), just Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Birmingham emerged from musical lockdown with Stockhausen. It couldn’t have been anyone else, really. There’s something about Stockhausen’s fusion of modernity and goofy intergalactic romanticism that clearly strikes a chord in the Second City, where the last three decades of music have been measured out in landmark Stockhausen performances: Rattle’s CBSO performances of Gruppen, Birmingham Opera Company’s astonishing 2012 world premiere of Mittwoch aus Licht, and, in 1992, a massive open-air performance of Sternklang in Cannon Hill Park, under the direction of Stockhausen himself.In Read more ...
joe.muggs
Given the collaborator list on this album, it should be a bit of a mess. Brit punks IDLES, Aussie woozy pop auteur Tame Impala, pumping bassline house producer Chris Lorenzo turning his hand to drum’n’bass, as well as Ms Banks, Dapz On The Map, Oscar #Worldpeace and a host of other UK rap talents all add their distinct musical personalities to the mix. Yet somehow, what Mike Skinner drolly called “really just a rap duets album”, put together while waiting for a film to accompany The Streets’s comeback album proper, is some of his most coherent work ever.It is sonically diverse, mind. In Read more ...
David Nice
It’s begun: very limited access to live music, the chance to sit before one or two players in the same room – as we were doing only three and a half months ago, in some cases thousands of us before an orchestra of up to a hundred musicians. When the big symphonies and operas can return is anyone’s guess; there is currently no real light at the end of the tunnel, in the UK at least, given the endless vortex into which governmental indecision and lack of funding have plunged us.Hope begins to fade with lack of a rescue package; without it, even flagships like the Royal Opera House will not be Read more ...
Nancy Evans
Next month (July 2020) marks 20 years since I started work at Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, initially as their first Education Manager and then in my current role as Director of Learning and Participation. So when we were awarded a significant grant from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Arts-Based Learning More and Better fund to lead an exciting new composing project, Listen Imagine Compose Primary, it felt like a real celebratory moment – recognition of years of hard work and enquiry into placing contemporary music into school life.Listen Imagine Compose Primary is a three-year project Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The odd-couple comedy duo is a time-tested concept, and Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan have discovered a chemistry that works. Rob is the giggling excitable one, while Romesh, aided by a sleepy right eye which conveys a sense of harsh judgmentalism, adds a blast of deadpan scepticism.Previously, the pair have squared up to such topics as Usain Bolt, fashion and country music, but they started this second series (Sky 1) with a leap off a very high cliff. They decided they were going to perform in a ballet, and persuaded Birmingham Royal Ballet to let them have a go at appearing in Swan Read more ...
Stephen Maddock
This year was supposed to be so very different. For the best part of the last decade we have been planning a series of major events to take place in 2020 to mark the centenary of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Having often commented on how remarkable it was that this institution should have been started by civic leaders in the wake of the First World War and the Spanish flu pandemic, the last thing I expected was that the worst pandemic since then would wipe out most of our centenary activities.In fact, it could have been even worse for us. The first of our five planned overseas Read more ...
Richard Bratby
No orchestra wants its conductor to cancel in the week of a concert. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s illness was announced only on Monday, but even in ideal conditions, if you needed to find a last minute replacement maestro for a programme of Bartók and Bruckner, you could hardly do better than Omer Meir Wellber: a conductor with whom the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has built a relationship that predates his recent appointment to the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester. And while it was unquestionably disappointing to be deprived of Gražinytė-Tyla’s first adventure into Bruckner (on these Read more ...
Owen Richards
Think of the phrase “music memoir”, and you might conjure images of wild nights and heavy mornings. You’re unlikely to think of suburban West Bromwich and tributes to Mike Batt’s Wombles back catalogue. But then, Pete Paphides’s story is comprised of unlikelihoods. What were the chances of one of the country’s leading music critics being the mute son of Greek Cypriot chip shop owners? Broken Greek tracks Paphides’s childhood from four to thirteen. In his early days, he was selectively mute to everyone outside of his family for reasons not quite clear to anyone, including himself. It was Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s a particular moment of a particular recording – I suppose every slightly over-obsessive record collector has one – that I just keep listening to over and over again. It’s in Fritz Reiner’s 1960 Chicago Symphony recording of Respighi’s The Fountains of Rome, and it comes right after the first flood of the Triton Fountain starts to recede. The violins glide up into their cadence; just two notes, but the gesture is so graceful, so effortless, and so gloriously, naturally stylish that it gives me shivers every time. I wondered if Kazuki Yamada would get the CBSO’s violins to do something Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In its seventeenth incarnation, Transatlantic Sessions - a concert comprising music from some of the finest names in Scottish, Irish and American folk - had its penultimate night of its UK tour in a packed-out Symphony Hall, Birmingham on Friday evening. At first it might feel like an overly large venue for a group of around fifteen musicians. After all, as the name suggests, the hall’s been designed with a symphony orchestra in mind. However, the velvet curtain which hid the organ gallery, clever use of lighting, and some seriously good sound engineering all came together to lend to the Read more ...