In concert – Alice Sara Ott, CBSO / Kazuki Yamada: Grieg, Bax, Clyne & Debussy

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Alice Sara Ott (piano), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada

Bax Tintagel (1917-19)
Grieg Piano Concerto in A minor Op.16 (1868)
Clyne Restless Oceans (2018)
Debussy La mer L109 (1903-05)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Tuesday 22 September 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Photo (c) Hannah Blake-Fathers

The sea, in various manifestations, was a dominant factor in this evening’s concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. One which began with Tintagel, long the most familiar (if not the only one now being revived) of Bax’s tone poems, where Kazuki Yamada showed a sure grasp of music more a reflection of its composer’s involvement with the pianist Harriet Cohen than of Arthurian times or places. Its ‘love music’ lacked nothing in rapture, yet it was the seascape from which it emerges then to which it returns that made the lasting impression.

Grieg’s Piano Concerto might not convey any overt maritime associations, but its expressive ambience is audibly that of the outdoors (unlike that of the Schumann concerto that provided its model in many particulars) and Alice Sara Ott – CBSO Collaborative Artist these next two seasons – responded with playing as impetuous and soulful as its opening movement requires. Fleeting hesitancies aside, there was no mistaking the rapport between her and Yamada; with its cadenza an emotional culmination in every respect. Soulful while never inert expressively, the central Adagio exuded inward warmth as found ideal contrast in the bracing energy of the finale – its poetic middle section artlessly rendered, and its apotheosis opulent with no undue bathos. Ott’s limpid rendering of John Field’s Ninth Nocturne made for an appealing encore.

The second half got off to a short if by no means sweet start with Restless Oceans, a compact yet eventful celebration of female identity from Anna Clyne – CBSO Composer in Residence for the current season – that lacked little in presence. Rhythmically incisive and harmonically expressive ideas, alternating purposefully on their way to the tersely unequivocal conclusion, were offset by vocal and gestural contributions from the musicians that added a layer of vivid theatricality. Further and more extended instances of Clyne’s music will follow in due course.

Bax can only have been too aware when writing Tintagel of Debussy’s La mer – this latter a game-changer in terms of orchestral composition, whose influence continues to radiate some 120 years on. Right from the opening of From dawn to midday on the sea, it was apparent Yamada had found the balance between the placing of detail within an overall structure that, if not symphonic per se, has a formal integration and expressive sweep as feels nothing if not symphonic – witness the majestic peroration with which this opening movement culminates.

Much the most elusive of these symphonic sketches, Play of the Waves yielded a lightness of touch and deftness of motion that only emphasized its emotional ambivalence. Unerringly phrased, its coda prepared ideally for Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, a finale where the combative and alluring are brought together for what proved a thrilling culmination (though Yamada might have dispensed with those trumpet entries which Debussy subsequently and unwisely added). Certainly it brought this concert to its unequivocal and impressive close.

Yamada returns to Birmingham just before Christmas and Ott does likewise next May, while the CBSO is back in a week’s time with a programme featuring Elgar’s Enigma Variations as well as a second hearing for the co-commissioned Saxophone Concerto by Gwilym Simcock.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2026/27 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names to read more on pianist Alice Sara Ott and conductor Kazuki Yamada, and more on composer Anna Clyne

Published post no.3,027 – Thursday 24 September 2026

In appreciation: Martin Wheeler, aka Vector Lovers

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by Ben Hogwood

In the last few days we have heard the very sad news of the death of electronic musician Martin Wheeler at the age of 70. Perhaps best known under his alias of Vector Lovers, Martin was a prodigiously talented musician who made some of his very best albums for the Glasgow-based label Soma Records.

One of these, IPhonica, was completed in 2013 on an iPhone, using just a pair of Sennheiser HD-25 headphones and Blip Interactive’s first Nanostudio app. I was fortunate to review it for DMC World

I also had the pleasure of reviewing two of Wheeler’s very best albums under his Vector Lovers pseudonym. The first, Capsule For One, was released in 2005, and featured the coldly beautiful City Lights From A Train, an example of his ability to capture the weird feeling of detachment often felt in a busy city. Here are my thoughts for musicOMH on a rather special album

Next up, two years later, was Afterglow, where Wheeler successfully blended his descriptive sound as a hybrid, moving from instrumentals to vocals such as Crash Premonition, an unexpectedly emotive song with the author as vocalist. My review is here, with both key excerpts available to listen to below:

Capsule for One was re-released in 2022, with remixes by Wheeler himself. You can explore it at the Bandcamp link below:

Published post no.3,026 – Wednesday 23 September 2026

New music – Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan: Industrial Growth (Castles in Space)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the album’s press release.

Industrial Growth is the new long player by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. First emerging in 2020, Gordon Chapman-Fox‘s WRNTDP project explores the modernist utopian aesthetic of the UK’s post-war new town development programme through timeless retro-futurist electronic music. Encompassing the programme’s progressive optimism and the dystopian echoes of its failure, the project has since explored a compelling range of connected ideas and resonances across a prolific body of work.

Expanding on the ambient excursions of earlier material, Industrial Growth augments WRNTDP’s scintillating soundworld with profuse volumes of distortion and dissonance, across arguably the project’s darkest LP to date. With sleek, engrossing synthesis, Kraftwerkian odysseys, proto-kosmische and uncanny atmospheres, the album dramatically confronts the spectre of societal decline. A stark, unflinching evolution for the project, it retains the civic mystique of WRNTDP’s best work while adding an increasingly uncompromising spirit.

“My music has been getting heavier and heavier over the years”, says Chapman-Fox. “As my music often reflects my feelings on the outside world, this is very much a visceral response to our current times. There’s always been a darkness to my work, but this felt like the time to unleash it all”.

A captivating record filled with murk and menace, Industrial Growth hints at hidden undercurrents and insidious forces, as Chapman-Fox reveals: “The ‘growth’ of the title isn’t about economics, this is something far more organic, eating away at our society.”

With the brutal, glowering sturm und drang of album opener This Machine, there’s the immediate sense of a gauntlet being thrown down. The discordant dread, jackhammer rhythms and searing white noise of this opening make for a monumental statement of intent. The track segues beautifully into The Wire, a passage which evokes the cyclical reprises of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, with Chapman-Fox reiterating and reshaping abiding musical themes and ideas.

A pervasive gloom hangs across the tracks Warrington Bank Quay and Heavy Industry, yet there’s still a sparkling beauty to be found at the heart of this music; an irrefutable sense of motion, dynamics, the use of light and shade. Chapman-Fox describes ‘Heavy Industry’ as a “rare moment of light” in all this. Evoking John Carpenter composing an iconic soundtrack theme for a lost public information film, it’s a stirring, resplendent highlight.

The album progresses fearlessly, from the eerie machine music of ‘Parkside’ to the hypnotizing industrial kosmische of Post Industrial Policy – like Chris & Cosey collaborating with Klaus Schulze – and into the melancholic dark ambient mist of Astmoor. Closing with the sublime, noise-contorted havoc of Industrial Unrest, Chapman-Fox ends an immense, foreboding album with one of his most discordant tracks to date. It’s a thrilling climax to an intransigent, hard-hitting work that bravely and cathartically contends with the adversities and injustices of our contemporary moment.

The majority of the album is part of a suite that was commissioned by Roadburn Festival for their 2024 edition in Tilburg, Netherlands. The studio version has been in gestation since then, with tracks being further honed on a tour of the UK.

The album is complimented on Bandcamp by a bonus remix of the lead track This Machine by TVAM. “I’ve worked with Joe from TVAM in the past. We grew up in the same area, and he’s an absolute joy”, says Chapman-Fox.

Designed by Chapman-Fox, the artwork is complemented by Michael Cooke, whose illustrations have appeared on the WRNTDP albums Districts, Roads, Open Space and Your Community Hub. Michael grew up in Runcorn and much of the artwork is based on his first-hand experience of living in the town.

Published post no.3,025 – Tuesday 22 September 2026

On this day – the birth of Gustav Holst, and forthcoming release of ‘Sita’

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by Ben Hogwood

On this day in 1874, composer Gustav Holst was born. Holst is of course widely celebrated for his dazzling and colourful orchestral suite The Planets, a favourite among many 20th century music collections (including my own!). However that piece – brilliant though it is – has overshadowed some of Holst’s radical compositions that combine Western and Eastern musical thinking, the latter shaped by his travels.

One of Holst’s landmark pieces, the opera Sita, has not even seen the light of day in recorded form…until now. For Sita is about to see its first release on the enterprising EM Records label, who take up the story in the following press release:

“It…almost beggars belief that Sita, Holst’s operatic masterpiece and the largest-scale work he ever composed, had not been published, recorded or even performed until 2024.

All that changed when a German opera company ⁠— ⁠the Saarländisches Staatstheater ⁠— ⁠undertook the mammoth task of transcribing and setting the manuscript and staging the work; and we at EM Records are absolutely delighted and proud to announce the World Première recording of this magnificent and captivating work, made in collaboration with the Staatstheater.

Sita took Holst seven years to compose, from 1899 to 1906, and is a substantial three-act opera based on the Hindu epic The Ramayana, telling the dramatic story of Sita’s abduction by the Demon King Ravana and the heroic efforts of Rama and his brother Lakshman to defeat the demon army and rescue her. While showing influences of Wagner and even, at times, Verdi and Mahler, it nevertheless has distinctively Holstian fingerprints, with tantalising foreshadowings of The Planets. It is a deeply moving and thrilling opera of immense beauty, poignancy and tenderness.

The new double-disc set from EM Records is issued with a separate 120-page book including full libretto, essays, composer profile and artist biographies, presented in both English and German.”

More details (and a review) will follow on Arcana in due course!

Published post no.3,023 – Monday 21 September 2026

On Record: Sondre Lerche – Acrobats (PLZ / Virgin)

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Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

This new album from Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche is his first in four years. The record explores a dissonance he has identified between the “increasingly dystopian world we live in and finding beauty and peace in your private life”, where “falling in love feels more and more like an act of defiance”.

Acrobats was recorded across no fewer than nine studios, Lerche’s eleventh album completed with long time partners and producers Matias Téllez and Kato Ådland, and Vetle Junker, Alexander von Mehren and Jørgen Trœen. There are orchestral arrangements by Sean O’Hagan of The High Llamas, with a substantial body of musicians from the Stockholm Studio Orchestra, Norwegian Radio Orchestra and sundry jazz and classical artists.

What’s the music like?

At times, epic – especially in the album’s core, where the songs Love Is All and Follow The River carry all before them. Lerche wears his heart on his sleeve in songs of unabashed romanticism, which works especially well when combined with his penchant for lyrical directness.

The music is pleasingly off-centre, with the urgent How Much Of This Was Planned also showing a carefree side. The strings of Little Kids curl around Lerche’s observations that “there’s cracks in everything”, while his playful side comes out best in Drive Me Away From You.

Love Is All is one for the romantics, beautifully observed and delivered, with an exquisite dialogue between Lerche and the clarinet of Solveig Wang. Meanwhile the chorus of Follow The River – inspired by an encounter with Mahler’s Resurrection symphony – is warm hearted and given with a ‘glass half full’ energy.

Does it all work?

It does, even if the songs sometimes have a lopsided structure. Lerche sings from the heart, and the arrangements are beauties.

Is it recommended?

It is. Lerche does not enjoy the same profile in the UK he perhaps did around 15 years ago, but this album shows his songwriting – and vocal delivery – are better and more meaningful than ever. In many ways he is the Nordic answer to Rufus Wainwright.

For fans of…Rufus Wainwright, Ed Harcourt, The Divine Comedy, Kings Of Convenience, Midlake

Listen / Buy

Published post no.3,022 – Sunday 20 September 2026