CBSO
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 ...
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 ...
Gavin Dixon
With Andris Nelsons now moved to pastures new, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is without a chief conductor, so for this performance in Saffron Walden (repeating a programme given in Birmingham) it worked with a guest at the podium, the young Israeli Lahav Shani. At only 27, he’s something of a prodigy, winner of the prestigious Bamberg competition and now making his debut appearances with the world’s great orchestras.Technically, Shani is an accomplished leader, with excellent baton technique and clear ideas about the sound he is looking for. He also has an excellent ear for detail 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 ...
Jessica Duchen
So the feasibility study for the new concert hall – The Centre for Music – has finally surfaced, a little later than planned. It’s being greeted, generally speaking, as if it’s to be the next London Olympics. “A global beacon,” declares the Evening Standard... Nicholas Hytner (he who said that building the Southbank Centre extension would spoil the view from his National Theatre) compares it to Tate Modern, which he says enlarged audiences for other visual arts rather than taking them away. This should, he says, be “a Tate Modern for music”.Having written more times than I can count that it’s 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
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 ...
Richard Bratby
Cards on the table: the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is looking for a new music director. Having filled its new season with emerging talents – Andrew Gourlay, Daniele Rustioni, Ryan Wigglesworth and Ben Gernon, to name just four – it’s an open secret that any concert directed by a youngish, more-or-less unattached conductor in Birmingham for the foreseeable future is effectively an audition for the job. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.All of which created a certain buzz around this Birmingham debut by the Romanian-born, Philadelphia-based Cristian Măcelaru. As winner of the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This Prom was the final concert of Andris Nelsons's remarkable seven-year spell as principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Their Prom showed the astonishing level of responsiveness and flexibility which he and they have achieved together, over the course of more than 300 concerts.There had been more elaborate farewells and formalities last month at Symphony Hall in Birmingham, with performances of Mahler's Third Symphony, the speeches and all that. For this final coda, Nelsons took a supporting role. He accepted all the applause at the end of the concert from within Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is content to skim the play’s sunny surface – the comedy manqué that Shakespeare didn’t quite write. It’s a decision that makes sense of a difficult work on the Globe’s own terms, playing to a summer crowd, but one that also generates its own confusions and inconsistencies.The heat on press night only added to the Breugel-like spirit of Dromgoole’s opening – a smoky, sweaty, bawdy portrait of Vienna lost in lechery Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
This was a very "concert" performance indeed. Across the stage music stands stood like sentinels lest any rash singer attempted to stand out and – surely not – act. Such fears were misplaced (or the stands did their job) in the end, as the music was what mattered and everyone stood and sang, with one outstanding exception, the Kundry of Mihoko Fujimura.It can be no coincidence that of all the singers on stage she knew her role most intimately, and had worked for some years with Stefan Herheim in his celebrated production at Bayreuth. That said, Burkhard Fritz (pictured below) has sung the Read more ...
David Nice
A trio of Rosenkavaliers: what more could one want as we near Richard Strauss’s 150th birthday? Well, more of the less often performed operas, for a start. But as this is the Straussian cornucopia, it’s not going to tire those of us who love it beyond reason, and Andris Nelsons’ concert performance with his devoted City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra eventually delivered as much in its rather peculiar way as the Barbican excerpts earlier this month and Richard Jones’ gobsmackingly original, disciplined take at Glyndebourne.So it was time again to forget the wigs, and at first it looked as Read more ...