Birmingham
Graham Rickson
John Joubert: Jane Eyre April Frederick, David Stout, English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Somm)This is the second Brontë opera to have come my way in the past year; Carlisle Floyd’s Wuthering Heights is now joined by this involving adaptation of Jane Eyre, composed between 1987 and 1997 by John Joubert, born in South Africa but a British resident since 1946. He's still musically active, and this live recording was made at a performance given in Birmingham last October, now released to celebrate Joubert’s 90th birthday. An extended interview included as a bonus on the second disc is Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s been said – and with some justification – that John Wilson’s own Orchestra has the finest-sounding string section in the world today. What’s certain is that when Wilson guests with other orchestras, he transforms their string sound. It’s not merely the unselfconscious touches of period style – those perfectly gauged expressive slides – and nor is it just the unforced luminosity: how the surface sheen seems to be lit from within. It’s the phrasing, too: the sense of space that Wilson can generate around a melody, the way fast passages never feel hurried and slow passages have room to Read more ...
Guy Oddy
After a career that initially came to an abrupt end amid sibling fisticuffs on a stage in Canada during the dying embers of the Twentieth Century, the Jesus & Mary Chain have taken some time to ease themselves back into being a real going concern. Reforming a decade ago to tour their old material, it has taken until now for them to take the plunge and release Damage & Joy, their first new album in 19 years.Nevertheless, the wait has been worthwhile, as the reaction to tunes old and new from the crowd at Birmingham’s Institute duly confirmed. While the Reid brothers may have found a Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari has never quite been a one-work composer. No points for knowing the fizzy overture to his delightful 1909 pro-smoking comedy Il segreto di Susanna; quite a few more if you know the whole opera. Extra credit for being able to hum the once popular "Serenata" from I gioielli della Madonna: but move on to his major operas – L’amore medico, say, or I quatro rusteghi – and we’re definitely into specialist territory. So it’s not entirely surprising that Wolf-Ferrari’s Violin Concerto hasn’t been performed in the UK until tonight, even once you set aside the uncomfortable Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Who says Mozart is not like Rossini?” remarked Juan Diego Flórez, about a quarter of an hour into his debut recital at Symphony Hall. “There are seven high Cs in this aria.” And with a flicker of notes from the pianist Vincenzo Scalera, he was off into "Vado incontro", from Mitridate by the 14-year old Mozart. He wasn’t joking, either. You could count each of those Cs as they burst – the ultimate sonic weapon in the arsenal of the superstar tenor.There was no question of them sounding unforced; perhaps, no possibility. Phrasing went by the board as one after another they flashed out. The Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Birmingham audiences are a supportive bunch. There was never much likelihood that they’d greet Andris Nelsons’s first Birmingham appearance since he departed for Boston in 2015 with less than the same warmth that they keep for other former CBSO music directors. Even so, he must have been gratified to walk out to a capacity audience – for a programme of Bruckner and Maxwell Davies – and a 30-second ovation, complete with a couple of cheers, before he’d given so much as a downbeat.Of course, the CBSO has already embarked on a whole new adventure, and with an artist as exciting as Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Is there anything on a concert programme more guaranteed to make the heart lift – or to prove that a conductor has their musical priorities straight – than a Haydn symphony? If you're tired of Haydn, you're tired of life: there’s no music more joyous, more inventive or more resistant to vanity. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla chose his Symphony No 6 of 1761, called Le Matin for its opening sunrise and the freshness of its ideas, and it was a delight.The six wind players stood up to play, and the CBSO strings were slimmed down a little, but not a lot. There was no serious attempt here to fake a period Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Bruckner’s Third Symphony doesn’t so much begin as become audible. A steady heartbeat in the bass, oscillating violas lit from within by clarinets, and in the middle, slowly pulling clear of the texture, the proud, sombre trumpet motif to which Wagner himself agreed to attach his name. Not the least of Alpesh Chauhan’s achievements in this performance with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was that he established all of this with his very first gesture – not just the subtle, unmistakably Brucknerian layering of the music’s textures but that whole vast, mysterious sense of the music Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Edward Gardner gives the downbeat, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra bursts into Verdi’s great opening guffaw. Enter stage left Graham Clark, as Dr Caius. Enter stage right Ambrogio Maestri, as Falstaff. And before a note has been sung, the audience is laughing. I know that in the post-Dumpygate era we’re not supposed to discuss a singer’s physical appearance. It’s just that everything about Maestri – his stature, his gait, his rolling eyes, his genial manner and his big rubbery smile – suggests that he was born to play the Fat Knight. He simply is Falstaff.That being so, he’s not Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Memo to self: never read the director’s programme essay. Jacob Dorrell, director of the University of Birmingham’s summer production of Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera at the Barber Institute, explains: “I wanted to bring to the Barber stage a community of people one would never expect to appear in an opera: today’s working-class community.” Dorrell is a young director, early in his career, so let’s leave aside the fact that his vision of “today’s working-class community” – a world of jeggings, leopard print, trackie bottoms and midriff-baring maternity wear – seems to come out of Coronation Read more ...
howard.male
It’s not that there’s anything lacking in the writing quality on Ms Mvula’s second album (or third if you include her powerful orchestral revisiting of Sing To The Moon), it’s just that its overall effect becomes a little wearying after a while. It’s the production that’s the problem. The wall of voices that partly constitutes this Birmingham lass's signature sound is for much of the time so awash with reverb that the ear longs to escape the cavernous space being artificially simulated.This problem first became apparent to me during the hymn-like “Show Me Love”. The illusion that the music is Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I could tell you what the German word "Betroffenheit" means by giving a dictionary definition, etymology and connotations and so on. But I won't, because this dance-drama hybrid by Jonathan Young and Crystal Pite is precisely not about pinning down definitions or making sense through words in a descriptive, iterative sort of way, but about capturing feelings or states of being in a much more metaphorical, experiential, immersive way. Betroffenheit is in one sense, then, the feeling you have after watching the show Betroffenheit.But it started from a very specific and personal experience. In Read more ...