Birmingham
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 ...
Miranda Heggie
Dubbed “classical music’s guitar hero”, the 36-year-old London based Montenegrin guitarist Miloš Karadaglić – more commonly known by just his first name – is back on the international stage. He returned in 2019 after a devastating hand injury which led him to take time out from playing professionally around the time of the launch of his 2016 release Blackbird: The Beatles Album. Playing to a packed out Birmingham Town Hall on Tuesday evening, he clearly delighted fans with his return. He opened his recital with his own transcription of Bach’s Suite in C minor, originally written Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound” wrote Gustav Mahler of his Eighth Symphony. “There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” It’s an image that captures the impossible scale and mind-boggling ambition of this so called “Symphony of a Thousand”. But it doesn’t begin to do justice to the freshness, clarity and sheer headlong energy of this performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and no fewer than five choruses under the direction of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Doesn’t the Earth alone move at 67,000 miles per hour? With around 600 Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Alongside the heartfelt tenderness, there is an emotional weight - as well as a compositional sophistication - prevalent in Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs. Perhaps this correctly discloses the word "early" as pertaining to the composer’s journey as an artist, as opposed to his lived years. Having written around 30 such pieces in his twenties, whilst being taught by Arnold Schoenberg, Berg chose to both publish and orchestrate these seven when he was forty years old. Though each penned by a different author, there’s more than an echo of wistful nostalgia in the text of every piece, and Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s programmes in Birmingham are so personal – so utterly bespoke – that in the event of her being indisposed, they present something of a problem. That’s what happened this week. The programme was vintage Gražinytė-Tyla – opening with Elgar’s two partsongs Op.26 (a reflection of her blossoming relationship with the CBSO Youth Chorus), and ending with that ravishing Cinderella of the Brahms symphonies, the Third: a nice nod, in the CBSO’s centenary season, to Elgar’s particular love of this work. In between came the UK premiere of the new orchestral version – co- Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It remains some of the most terrifying music ever written. Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony - the composer’s portrayal of the fear and anxiety felt under Stalin's regime - is a horrifyingly brutal musical portrayal of life lived under a totalitarian reign. The Moscow Philharmonic under the baton of Yuri Simonov gave a phenomenally accurate and moving performance of this work at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on Tuesday night.The intense claustrophobia of the work was at once expertly captured in the orchestra’s strong yet subdued sound. Simonov slyly upped the ante with a gradual increase in both Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Prior to this week, it had been 35 years since hardcore punk firestarters Black Flag had set foot in the UK. That said, it was not without some trepidation that I made my way to one of Birmingham’s more compact venues to see a band who had once been genre-defining, get on stage and do their stuff. After all, Black Flag’s golden years were more than a generation ago, in the mid-1980s, and with a very different line-up. Iconic vocalist, Henry Rollins has long since hung up his microphone to write books, tour his spoken word show and appear on all-manner of TV documentaries – mainly about punk Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s nothing like practising what you preach. “I say straight out that I regard all so-called 12-tone music, so-called serial music, so-called electronic music and so-called avant-garde music as utter rubbish, and indeed a deliberate conning of the public” said the composer Ruth Gipps to her biographer Jill Halstead. And sure enough, her Second Symphony – premiered by the then City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1946, and the opening item in this fascinatingly left-field programme from Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla – is unmistakably the work of what Arnold Bax would have called a “brazen Romantic”.It’s Read more ...
Simon Halsey
I was greatly privileged to know Sir Michael Tippett and to chorus-master his recording of A Child of Our Time. In my childhood, the two giants of English composition were “Tippett and Britten” - in that order. Since their deaths, Britten has flourished internationally and Tippett has slipped back a bit in the public consciousness. I hope the new Tippett biography by Oliver Soden will help rectify this.As a teenager, I loved Tippett’s early works. My favourite LP was a Marriner/ASMF Argo disc of his string music. And I was knocked sideways by my first encounter with the opera King Priam Read more ...