CBSO
stephen.walsh
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Blake asked the tiger. One might have asked the same question of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, with Mozart’s G major Piano Concerto, K.453, as the lamb, in this hyper-diverse Birmingham concert. The image of divine simplicity was in the delicate hands of Mitsuko Uchida, whose Mozart resisted every striped temptation that Andris Nelsons and the CBSO threw in her path. On their own in Scriabin and, to a lesser extent, Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces, they could emote at will, fearful symmetry and all.Often enjoyable, and with many exquisite moments, Mozart’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Despite the horror of the acid attack on their director Sergei Filin last week, the Bolshoi Ballet has confirmed its programme for its three-week Royal Opera House season from 29 July to 17 August. Filin's name remains at the head of the page as artistic director, though it is not yet known whether he will be able to come.Marking the 50th anniversary of the Moscow company's first Covent Garden tour with the veteran promoter Victor Hochhauser, the season is as conventional as usual, with brief glimpses of two shows that will have ballet aficionados scrambling for tickets.One will be the triple Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The quest for the spiritual in the musical has been the dominant preoccupation of Jonathan Harvey’s since his earliest works. Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy has been an acknowledged influence on the composer, who has made a career of exploring what Steiner described as “the special character of the individual note”, which “expands into a melody and harmony leading straight into the world of the spirit”. So when Swiss theologian Hans Küng and the Berlin Philharmonic were looking for a composer to set Küng’s massive new libretto as a full-length spiritual work for chorus and orchestra Harvey was Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
It is a rare treat for Londoners to have the CBSO with Andris Nelsons in town, and the Albert Hall was, if not fully sold out, then certainly well stocked. It would be fair to assume that the main draw was Shostakovich’s giant and much-debated Leningrad symphony after the interval; but first up was Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila overture and the UK premiere of Emily Howard’s Calculus of the Nervous System. Both together they added up to a mere 20 minutes and we were out in the interval in the blink of an eye: such are the challenges of programming around a 75-minute symphony. In its short span Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ask any young composer in this country who is the most important figure in modern British music, and the answer is likely to come back quick and sharp: Oliver Knussen. Himself a composer of dazzling brilliance when he gets round to it, and a conductor who gets far too much work for the peace of mind of those who want him to write more music, Knussen has also for years been a kind of guru figure to generations of young and not-so-young composers, sacrificing his own creative time and energy in their interests, advising, promoting, performing.At 60, after a spell of poor health and visibly in Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's one of the great perversities of modern cultural life that orchestras from America and Venezuela visit London more often than those from Birmingham or Manchester. A perversity and a shame, as last night's exceptional performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and CBSO Chorus on a rare visit to the Barbican showed.Not even the cancellation of their chief conductor Andris Nelsons (owing to a family illness) or Toby Spence was able to derail things. The essentials were simply too good. There's nothing quite like a first-class English orchestra Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was a lovely narrative to last night's CBSO concert. The muggy oppressiveness of Britten's Four Sea Interludes (and Passacaglia) appeared somehow explained by Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, then dissolved by the love letters that were the Strauss songs and then finally set free - psychologically and orchestrally - in Debussy's La Mer. Parallel to this, the great German tenor Jonas Kaufmann was being washed out to sea; his Mahler and Strauss songs were being lapped at from both directions by Debussy and Britten's portraits of the salty waters. Technically Kaufmann was anything but at Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Jealousy of people who live in Birmingham is not (I venture to hazard) so widespread a phenomenon as to merit a name all its own. After last night’s Prom from the CBSO and music director Andris Nelsons however, a term may well have to be coined for all of us Londoners whose green-eared envy seems unlikely to abate any time soon. We’ve heard the recordings and the rumours of greatness trickling down from the West Midlands, but the opportunity to see this partnership in action further south is rare. Conquering the Royal Albert Hall with an evening of generous, emotive music-making, the CBSO Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Yesterday afternoon's final concert at the Aldeburgh Festival saw an astonishing world premiere. A major new double concerto from a 102-year-old Elliott Carter. Imagine Schubert premiering a song cycle in 1900, or Van Gogh unveiling a self-portrait in 1956. Gob-smacking stuff. So what sort of music does a man born before Benjamin Britten have to offer 2011? Music of an amazingly energetic bent, it transpires. Conversations for piano and percussion reveals a composer who, at least in musical thought, hasn't slowed down one bit. From the off, fantastically industrious ideas are Read more ...
David Nice
Gustav Mahler died, according to his wife Alma’s memoirs, at midnight on 18 May, 1911. Anyone mystically inclined to connect noughts and "o"s – you see it crossed my mind – might find some spooky link between 00:00 (pedantically, the time of death was 23:05) and the fact that, for this centenary concert, indisposed conductor OramO (Sakari) was belatedly replaced by OnO (Kazushi). What transpired was delight – near-delirium, in fact – that a supreme master had total control of the composer’s Second (Resurrection) Symphony: a theatrical celebration of life and death rather than a transcendental Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Were the great Diaghilev alive today, surely he’d be working in the imaginative possibilities of electronic technology - this was the opinion given me by the arts panjandrum, the late Sir John Drummond. And given the developments of 3D, who knows? Would it be this manipulation of our perceptions that fascinated him? 3D is certainly everywhere in dance now, though the challenge is to leap the judgment of it as merely a gimmick. I reckon while Wim Wenders’ film Pina 3D achieved that, the version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by Klaus Obermaier doesn’t.Part of the Southbank Centre’s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group does star concerts, which fill (or nearly) the CBSO Centre; and they do old-fashioned New Music concerts, which don’t quite empty it, but leave one wondering who exactly – if anyone - some of the works being played are intended to reach. Their latest offering was of this latter kind. The performers came and went, the audience clapped politely, the electric keyboard went wrong, luckily near the start of Enno Poppe’s Salz, so that we didn’t have to hear too much of it twice. The instrumentalists, brilliant players as one knows, communed with some pretty Read more ...