Janai Brugger (narrator/soprano), CBSO Chorus (Julian Wilkins, chorus-master), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada

Copland Fanfare for the Common Man (1942); Lincoln Portrait (1942)
Tower Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1989)
Price orch. Rosner The Heart of a Woman (c1930-50)
Adams Harmonium (1980-81)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Saturday 4 July 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

Marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and music director Kazuki Yamada duly pulled out the stops with a programme that placed musical achievements from the past century within an unlikely yet stimulating context.

The first half unfolded as two diptychs focussing, respectively, on male and female concerns. Thus a brazen but never brash take on Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man preceded his Lincoln Portrait – its sentiments as apposite to World War Two as to the American Civil War, after whose Battle of Gettysburg Lincoln made his famous ‘Address’. Yamada drew nobility and fervour from its lengthy preamble, then Janai Brugger delivered its subsequent narration with enough poise and understatement to offset any risk of hubris during the climactic stages.

Initiated by a visceral reading of Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, its brass and percussion deployed in notably combative manner, the female response continued with Florence Price’s The Heart of a Woman. Not so much a song-cycle as a ‘themed’ collection which has only recently been assembled from its composer’s extensive contribution to this genre, its 10 settings of black American authors have been orchestrated by Israeli-American composer Lior Rosner with no mean subtlety and eloquence, though on occasion softening the harmonic piquancy with which Price seeks to highlights aspects of her own experience.

Wistful and rapturous by turns, these merge into a rather generalized sequence lacking any more cumulative intensity to justify it as a whole; the exception being Don’t you say no to me which, with its vivid (if slightly self-conscious) elements of blues and ragtime, sounds like a number such as Ella Fitzgerald might have recorded in her youth. Brugger (with kit-percussionist Alex Henshaw-Van den Bos) made the most of its insouciance, with Yamada encouraging the orchestra to a warmly empathetic response elsewhere. Hardly a revelatory discovery, but attractive and affecting music such as reinforced the impression that Price is at her best freed from those formal constraints encountered in her symphonies or concertos.

After the interval came Harmonium, by which John Adams established his wider reputation almost 45 years ago. Now as then, its overall impact belies its relative concision and, while its streamlined ebb and flow arguably overrides the manifest ambivalence in John Donne’s Negative Love then emphasizes predictability over pathos in Emily Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for Death, the integration of chorus and orchestra is unfailing. To this end, coordination was not all that it might have been though the seminal passages were tellingly realized – not least that seismic build-up into a setting of Dickinson’s Wild Nights whose heady crescendos then raptly inward ending, both among its composer’s finest inspirations, were conveyed with conviction boding well for the CBSO performance at this year’s Proms.

Before that London concert, however, audiences in Birmingham can enjoy more Adams when Edward Gardner conducts his epic Harmonielehre and Edgard Varèse’s ambitious Amèriques, with the CBSO and CBSO Orchestral Residency Musicians at Symphony Hall on July 17th.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2026/27 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names to read more on chief conductor Kazuki Yamada, soloist Janai Brugger, the CBSO Chorus and composers Joan Tower and Florence Price

Published post no.2,939 – Monday 6 July 2026