Birmingham
Adam Sweeting
Sometimes compared to Boardwalk Empire or The Wire, and raved over by the likes of Brad Pitt, Snoop Dogg and even Jose Mourinho, Peaky Blinders opened its third series by becoming positively Godfather-esque. Writer Steven Knight whisked us away from the satanic mills of Birmingham to Tommy Shelby's sprawling Warwickshire mansion, where the Peakies supremo was trying to celebrate his unexpected wedding to Grace.It was a fraught gathering of clans, set in a tenebrous anti-Downton. The extended Shelby brood, which teems with brothers and cousins and aunts like dynastic knotweed, is never more Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Left, alone, Hans Abrahamsen’s new piano concerto for the left hand, swirls out of the darkness to a jagged motor rhythm. Piano and orchestra clash and interlock; you’re reminded of Prokofiev and Ravel. Then something happens. A piano plays, but the soloist is motionless. It’s been there all the time, of course – an orchestral piano, up on the percussion risers. But now it’s turned threatening: upstaging the soloist with its full two-handed range and stealing his musical voice, his very identity. And although it doesn’t really intervene again until the last movement, you’re continually aware Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
International Dance Festival Birmingham (IDFB) is one of the unsung heroes not just of dance in Britain, but of festivals. It treats anyone within striking distance of the West Midlands to an exciting range of performers and public dance events over three weeks, and is cleverly scheduled in May – when lengthening days and bank holidays make us want to go out and have a good time, but it's not quite warm enough for camping. With IDFB 2016 opening in three weeks, on Sunday 1 May, theartsdesk casts an eye over the programme's highlights and finds out from festival founder and director David Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Funny thing, musical fashion. Most listeners would call Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances a popular classic – yet before tonight, I doubt they’d had a professional performance in Birmingham this century. Then there’s the case of Osvaldo Golijov. Remember him? The very fact that it’s taken 10 years for a work as substantial and appealing as his cello concerto Azul to receive this UK premiere tells you all you need to know about how far his stock has fallen – at least for now.It owed this performance to the CBSO’s assistant conductor Alpesh Chauhan and principal cello Eduardo Vassallo (pictured below Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
One strain of American music sprang up one evening early in 1950 from a chance encounter at Carnegie Hall, where the New York Philharmonic had played Webern’s Symphony to an audience of all-too-predictably restless patrons. Both bewitched by the Webern and upset at the response, John Cage and Morton Feldman bumped into one another as they left and stayed friends for life: now they have been reunited at a day of concerts within the new music festival hosted by the University of Birmingham.For John Cage (1982) is a 70th birthday present, one of the concert-length pieces in which Feldman quietly Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's appointment of the Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla as its new Music Director won’t have surprised many concertgoers in Birmingham – or indeed regular readers of theartsdesk. The post has been vacant since Andris Nelsons’ premature departure in summer 2015, and the last few months in Birmingham have seen a string of concerts clearly intended as thinly-disguised auditions for conductors of various ages and nationalities.But the buzz that developed after Gražinytė-Tyla’s short-notice CBSO debut last July was hard to ignore in Birmingham, and Read more ...
Richard Bratby
As pianist Beatrice Rana ran up the final bars of Schumann’s Piano Concerto, the conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla turned to her soloist and simply beamed. As well she might. Rana is an artist whose advance publicity belies the seriousness and selflessness of her playing. Her Schumann didn’t concern itself with flashy effects (though there were some daring variations of tempo) or even, particularly, beauty of tone (though the iridescent glow she gave to the little cascades of chords that link the Intermezzo to the finale showed that she commands an impressive palette).Rana’s performance was more Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Is it possible for a carol concert to have a cult following? Ex Cathedra's annual Christmas Music by Candlelight performances in St Paul’s Church have quietly grown into a Birmingham institution. The audience has evolved its own rituals: camping out through the long interval in the box pews, and sharing improvised picnics of mulled wine and mince pies.The formula, devised by Ex Cathedra’s director Jeffrey Skidmore back when Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter was still lit by gaslight, is simple enough to allow creative elaboration: a candlelit sequence of mostly a capella, mostly modern choral Read more ...
Richard Bratby
You can read a lot into the first two chords of Beethoven’s "Eroica" Symphony. Classical portico or violent detonation? Majestic assertion of E flat major, or the first shocking glimpse of a drama that’s already under way? Michael Seal, conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, accelerated through those first two bars before sweeping into a sleek, swinging first subject. He could afford to let his players sing. Those asymmetrical opening chords had done just enough to subvert the polished surface – to hint at the music’s latent potential for violent disorder.And at critical points Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“The first section, following a short introduction, places a rhythmic sequence on its retrograde. The two layers are transposed independently (one going up, the other down) as the music progresses, and points of symmetry are highlighted when they occur”. No, me neither. Apparently Patrick Brennan’s Polly Roe also features a brief rhythmic quotation from Birtwistle’s Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum. More erudite ears may have been able to detect it.What anyone could hear, however, was that this fantastic little moto perpetuo is something special, beginning in shadowy half-tones to the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
If Omer Meir Wellber is making a bid for Andris Nelsons’s old music directorship in Birmingham, he could hardly have signalled his intentions more audaciously. This concert began with Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude and ended with Brahms’s First Symphony – basically a surgical strike into the heartlands of Nelsons’s repertoire. And as soloist, he had the Latvian violinist Baiba Skride – an artist who was introduced to Birmingham by Nelsons and who appeared with the CBSO on disc and in concert throughout Nelsons’s tenure.Skride was there to play Schumann’s late Violin Concerto, and she found an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For a few very lucky competition winners there is a shopping trip where they are paraded around the world. A terrific opportunity, though a horrible experience, probably. Most competition winners have only a new line in their CV to stare at after the award ceremony, so the advantage of being a 2015 Tchaikovsky laureate, with a promise of an international tour with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, is self-evident.It also launches high expectations, given that Gergiev was also the competition’s chairman, and this year more than any the Russians were anxious to show that only talent Read more ...