Category Archives: Song

In concert – Roberts Balanas, Ealing Symphony Orchestra / John Gibbons: Electrifying Ealing – Bernstein, Ángela Luq, Coleridge-Taylor & Bliss

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Roberts Balanas (electric violin, below), Ealing Symphony Orchestra / John Gibbons (above)

Bernstein orch. Kostall & Ramin Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1957 arr. 1961)
Luq Electric Violin Concerto ‘Machina Humana’ (2023-24) [World Premiere]
Coleridge-Taylor Valse de la reine Op.22/3 (1899)
Bliss A Colour Symphony Op.24 (1921-22, rev, 1930)

St Barnabas Church, Ealing, London
Saturday 10 May 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture of Roberts Balanas (c) Kiril Kozlov

Another typically enterprising concert by the Ealing Symphony Orchestra and its longstanding music director John Gibbons, featuring the first performance (albeit not designated such) of a major work for electric violin and pieces from a diverse trio of British or American composers.

It might have been orchestrated by regular collaborators Irwin Kostall and Sid Ramin, but the Symphonic Dances from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story is as characteristic of the latter’s idiom as it is representative of his most successful musical. Rhythmically a little straightlaced in the Prologue, the performance audibly hit its stride with a Somewhere of melting pathos then a vivacious Scherzo leading to an impulsive Mambo, before the insouciant Cha Cha and ominous fugal Cool presaged a visceral Rumble then a Finale of heartfelt eloquence.

Lauded for her work with electronics, Spanish composer Ángela Luq evidently had no qualms when tackling a full-scale concerto for electric violin. Comprising four contrasted movements, Machina humana duly exploits those timbral and expressive possibilities of its solo instrument – whether in the intricate rhythmic dialogues of its opening Machina, the lucid textures and sensuous harmonies of Sueño (Dream), the impulsive conflict between soloist and orchestra of Animal, then the surging emotions of the final Amar (Love). Musical content may have lacked memorability, with the work rather falling short of its ambition (at least as expressed in the composer’s programme note), but the virtuosity or finesse of Roberts Balanas in realizing this innovative project was unarguable, with the Ealing SO audibly relishing its involvement.

No doubt this piece will secure even greater attention when soloist, orchestra and conductor tour it to Latvia in due course. Maybe on that occasion Gibbons will take the opportunity to give what would likely a first hearing there of Valse de la reine by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Third in a sequence of Four Characteristic Waltzes, this is a reminder that its composer was highly adept at ‘light’ music; its halting gait and its affecting lyricism to the fore in what was a welcome revival and a pertinent reminder of his legacy at the time of his premature death.

It also made a telling entrée into A Colour Symphony by Arthur Bliss. This 50th anniversary-year of his passing has led to a notable upsurge in performance and not least of what remains his best-known orchestral work. Whether or not Gibbons has previously conducted it, he had the measure of this piece. Purple made for a thoughtful yet never turgid prelude; one whose stately processional found immediate contrast in the alternate impetus and effulgence of the scherzo that is Red. Nor was there any underplaying of that ambivalent and even ominous element which underpins the outwardly placed unfolding of Blue, a slow movement which leads effortlessly into the finale that is Green with its intricately arrayed double-fugue that builds to a peroration whose outcome is a true declaration of intent thrillingly conveyed here.

An impressive performance, then, which once again confirmed Gibbons’s prowess across the broad spectrum of British orchestral music. Hopefully the Ealing SO will be able to include more Bliss in future programmes, this being music it had clearly taken to its collective heart.

Published post no.2,541 – Thursday 22 May 2025

In concert – The London Chorus and New London Orchestra / Adrian Brown: VE Day 80th Anniversary Concert @ Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square

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Petroc Trelawny (orator), The London Chorus, New London Orchestra / Adrian Brown

Vaughan Williams Six Choral Songs (1940)
Martinů Memorial to Lidice (1943)
Walton Spitfire Prelude and Fugue (1942)
Bliss Morning Heroes (1929-30)
Holst/Rice I Vow to Thee My Country (1921)

Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, London
Thursday 9 May 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

The London Chorus and New London Orchestra have put on notable concerts in recent years, few more ambitious than this programme to mark not merely the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day but also the 50th anniversary of Sir Arthur Bliss’s death in appropriate manner.

The first half comprised an unlikely but effective sequence of pieces written at the start of or during the Second World War. Rarely revived as such, Vaughan Williams’s Six Choral Songs to be Sung in Time of War works well as a whole: settings of Shelley that touch on aspects of courage, liberty, healing, victory, then pity, peace and war – before A Song to the New Age characterizes its utopian leanings in subdued and even ambivalent terms which seem typical of its composer. Suffice to add that the London Chorus had the full measure of its aspiration.

Two succinct if otherwise entirely different pieces brought out the best from the New London Orchestra. Rarely so overt in emotion, Martinů was well-nigh explicit when commemorating Nazi atrocities in music of plangent harmonies and chorale-like fervency both evocative and affecting. Derived from his score to the film The First of the Few, Walton had come up with a showpiece whose ceremonial prelude is vividly countered by its incisive fugue – making way for a brief if poignant interlude before matters are brought to a head in the rousing peroration.

Although intimately bound up with the First World War, Morning Heroes is wholly apposite for the present context. Conceived as the exorcism of his wartime experiences, Bliss’s choral symphony elides deftly between a distant past and its present; the first of its five movements featuring an orchestral introduction to set out the underlying mood and salient motifs, before Hector’s Farewell to Adromache had Petroc Trelawny eloquently evoking that scene on the ramparts of Troy without excess rhetoric. Adrian Brown’s understated direction meaningfully pointed up the expressive contrast between this and The City Arming – the setting of Walt Whitman whose interaction of chorus and orchestra was powerfully sustained right through   to the simmering unease at its close, with the onset of hostilities in the American Civil War.

The two parts of the central movement saw each section of the London Chorus come into its own: the women in Vigil, a confiding take on lines by Li-Tai-Po (Li Bai) such as relates the emotions of those left behind; and the men in The Bivouac’s Flame, plangently evoking life at the front with further lines from Whitman’s Drum Taps. Choral forces reunite in Achilles Goes Forth to Battle, a setting from later in The Iliad which brings about the work’s climax via The Heroes – a rollcall commemorating those of Antiquity. After this, the starkness of Wilfred Owen’s Spring Offensive is the greater for its sparse accompaniment – Trelawny’s oration a model of understatement as this segued into the setting of Robert Nichols’s Dawn on the Somme with those ‘morning heroes’ themselves evoked affirmatively if fatalistically.

A concert which ended in fine style with Holst’s stirring anthem had begun in subdued fashion with Dawn on the Somme – Ronald Corp’s elegy, given hours after his death was announced. Someone who had always given his all to this chorus and orchestra, he will be greatly missed.

Ronald Corp OBE (1951-2025)

Published post no.2,530 – Sunday 11 May 2025

In concert – Peter Donohoe, RPO / Brabbins: Elgar ‘Enigma’ Variations; Bliss Piano Concerto; Vaughan Williams @ Cadogan Hall

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Peter Donohoe (piano, above), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Martyn Brabbins (below)

Vaughan Williams Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus (1939)
Bliss Piano Concerto in B flat major Op.58 (1938-9)
Elgar Variations on an Original Theme Op.36 ‘Enigma’ (1898-9)

Cadogan Hall, London
Wednesday 16 April 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Pictures (c) Andy Paradise

June 1939 saw one of the more memorable occasions for British music with several premieres at the World’s Fair of New York, this multi-day festival with its theme of ‘Building the World of Tomorrow’ thrown into ironic relief given the outbreak of war in Europe three months later.

The first half of tonight’s concert by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra duly replicated that on June 10th, beginning with Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus which Vaughan Williams wrote for the event. One of the few non-symphonic orchestral works from his later years, its scoring for divided strings and harp gives a warmly evocative context to this succession of paraphrases whose steadily unforced evolution is rounded off by one of its composer’s most radiant codas. Various solo passages provided the RPO’s section-leaders with their moment in the spotlight.

That concert 85 years ago continued with the Piano Concerto that Arthur Bliss had written for Solomon which enjoyed frequent revival over the next quarter-century. This 50th anniversary of its composer’s death provided an ideal opportunity to reassess a work conceived within the late-Romantic lineage, notably an opening movement whose thunderous initial gestures set in motion this large-scale sonata design whose overt rhetoric is tempered by an expressive poise and more ambivalent asides which make it anything but the epigone of an already bygone era.

Among a few present-day pianists to have this piece in his repertoire, Peter Donohoe tackled its many technical challenges head-on; the RPO and Martyn Brabbins (who had never before conducted it) overcoming some occasional moments of mis-coordination so as to present it to best advantage. He brought a lighter touch and no little emotional poise to bear on the central Adagietto, its inwardness carried over into a finale whose probing introduction was a perfect foil to the bravura that followed. Whatever qualms Bliss may have had regarding the ‘world situation’, there was little sense of doubt as the music surged to its emphatic and affirmative close – thereby setting the seal on this memorable performance and a work which, whatever it lacks in distinctive invention, vindicates Bliss’s overall ambition to an impressive degree.

A pity that logistics (and economics!) made revival of Bax’s Seventh Symphony, which had originally featured in those New York concerts, impracticable but hearing Brabbins direct so perceptive an account of Elgar’s Enigma Variations was no hardship. Perhaps because of the immediacy of the Cadogan Hall acoustic, it was also one in which the relatively brief livelier variations came into their own – hence the unbridled impetus of the fourth (W.M.B), seventh (Troyte) or 11th (G.R.S) variations, though there was no lack of eloquence in the first (C.A.E) and fifth (R.P.A) variations, or suffused fervour in the ninth (Nimrod). The 10th (Dorabella) variation was made into an intermezzo halting if whimsical, and the 13th became a romanza such as opened out this work’s expressive remit onto an altogether more metaphysical plane.

Those having heard Brabbins conduct this work in the Royal Albert Hall quite likely missed that organ-reinforced opulence afforded the 14th (E.D.U) variation yet, as this finale built to its triumphal conclusion, the unfailing conviction of this performance could hardly be denied.

For details on their 2024-25 season, head to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra website. Click on the artist names to read more about pianist Peter Donohoe and conductor Martyn Brabbins, and also to discover more on The Arthur Bliss Society

Published post no.2,509 – Monday 21 April 2025

In concert – CBSO / Kazuki Yamada: Mahler Symphony no.9 & Takemitsu

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City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada (above)

Takemitsu Requiem (1957)
Mahler Symphony no.9 in D major (1908-09)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 10 April 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture of Kazuki Yamada (c) Hannah Fathers

Ninth Symphonies have been a recurrent feature of this season from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Kazuki Yamada. Tonight’s concert brought this to a culmination of sorts with that by Mahler and which naturally occupied almost the whole of the programme.

Whatever else, it was a performance whose scope matched the music’s ambition and not least in an opening Andante as lays claim to being its composer’s greatest achievement. Admittedly this took a few minutes to find focus, those initial bars not so much speculative as halting, but an overall sense of the movement unfolding seamlessly across its strategic peaks and troughs was undeniable, and Yamada was mindful to underline Mahler’s holding back of its expected culmination so the closing minutes mused eloquently if uncertainly on what might have been.

The middle movements can often emerge as incidental to the formal scheme, and Yamada’s take on the Ländler gave some pause for thought. Each of its constituents was vividly shaped and articulated, but a stop-start discontinuity arguably denied it that innocence to experience trajectory which, in turn, makes tangible the fatalistic humour at its end. The Rondo-Burleske was the undoubted highlight – its abrasiveness spilling over into violence towards the close, but not before Yamada had summoned the requisite anguish from its yearning trio section.

It might have been better to continue directly into the Adagio. As it was, a relatively lengthy pause left this finale sounding less a direct reaction to what had gone before than a delayed avoidance of the issues raised. Yamada’s overall handling of this movement was fine if not exceptionally so. Such as the twilit episode prior to the main climax was lucidity itself, but the conductor having already slowed to near-stasis then made it difficult to reduce the tempo further, so that the closing bars risked feeling emotionally gratuitous rather than inevitable.

What could hardly be gainsaid was the commitment of the CBSO’s response over what, for all its latter-day familiarity, remains a testing challenge whether individually or collectively. Wisely, Yamada has resisted any temptation to fashion a self-consciously virtuoso orchestra; emphasis seems to be instead on encouraging flexibility and sensitivity of response in terms of the music at hand – a more circumspect though productive approach which suggests he is happy to stay the course in terms of a partnership which is still in its relatively early stages.

Not a few performances of Mahler Nine opt for a scene-setting piece rather than first half as such. Yamada did so with Takemitsu’s Requiem – if not this composer’s first or even earliest acknowledged work, then certainly the one that established his wider reputation. The CBSO strings did justice to its subtle interplay of expressive threnody and more angular elements in a reading that fulfilled its purpose ideally. Hopefully the coming seasons will revive some of the more innovative pieces to have languished in the three decades since Takemitsu’s death.

This was the latest in what is becoming a tradition and rightly so – a page in the programme listing those ‘‘friends, members and colleagues’’ whom the CBSO Remembers with no little gratitude. From this perspective, tonight’s programme could hardly have been more fitting.

For details on the 2024-25 season A Season of Joy, head to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra website. Click on the name to read more about conductor Kazuki Yamada

Published post no.2,502 – Monday 14 April 2025

In concert – Ex Cathedra, CBSO / Robert Ames: Northern Lights

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Ex Cathedra (George Parris, chorus-master), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Robert Ames

Arnalds arr. Geoff Lawson Momentary (2018)
Jóhansson arr. Robert Ames Kanguru (2016)
Guðnadóttir arr. Ames For Petra (2022) [UK Premiere]
Jóhansson arr. Anthony Weeden Arrival – Suite No.1 (2016)
Guðnadóttir arr. Ames Ascent (2009)
Arnalds Og Lengra (2009)
Jónsi & Somers arr. David Handler Boy 1904 (2009)
Björk arr. Ian Anderson Jóga (1997)
Sveinsson Der Klang Der Offenbarung des Göttlichen (2014) [UK Premiere]

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Saturday 5 April 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

Saturday’s concerts often ring the changes in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s season and this evening proved no exception – Northern Lights comprising a programme by the younger generation of Icelandic composers that has come to the fore of European music.

Much has been made of the inclusivity and non-conformism of music in Iceland – spurred on, no doubt, by that country’s geographical isolation well into the 20th century with its lack of a classical tradition as regards composing or performance. Yet the main impression left by what was heard tonight was its overall lack of diversity in terms of sound and, as a consequence, its uniformity as regards expression. For a country which is synonymous with spectacular natural phenomena as well as its off-the-wall attitude, this was surprising and not a little disconcerting.

Any such trend was largely bucked by the late Jóhann Jóhansson, whose numerous film scores were represented by two extracts from that to sci-fi drama Arrival – the first enlivened with its quirky vocal syllabics, then the second building up an ominous and ever more menacing aura. They were preceded by a track from Ólafur Arnalds’s album Re:member that set the sombrely evocative scene, and each of them followed with music by Hildur Guðnadóttir – a simmering extract from the ambitious while overwrought film Tár, then a track from her album Without Sinking that ended rather less arrestingly than it began. An excerpt from Arnalds’ ballet score Dyad 1909 has atrophied even before its close, and the Jónsi / Alez Somers collaborative track from their album Riceboy Sleeps was appreciably less than the sum of its intriguing parts. At least the first half closed on a relative high with a track from Björk’s Homogenic – one of her finest achievements here given an arresting twist by Ian Anderson, whose album reworkings with his outfit Wooden Elephant should have garnered more attention in the classical domain.

Little of Björk’s bracing idiosyncrasy – let alone the eruptive physicality of Iceland’s musical ‘father’ Jón Leifs – was evident during Kjartan Sveinsson’s Der Klang Der Offenbarung des Göttlichen occupying the second half. A former member of that (over?) influential post-rock band Sigur Rós, his ‘opera’ inspired by Halldór Laxness’s seminal novel World Light eschews individual characters and specific actions, though its presumed scenario of acceptance within the midst of adversity feels vestigial at best. Admittedly its opening threnody unfolded with a Górecki-like eloquence, but the ensuing dialogue between choir and strings sounded akin to a Germanic liturgical setting by a forgotten composer of the later 19th century – far from those expressionist canvasses by Ragnar Kjartansson that formed a backdrop at its Berlin premiere.

It should be added that the members of Ex Cathedra gave their collective all for what was an all too rare appearance with the CBSO. As, moreover, did the orchestra itself when conducted with such expertise by Robert Ames who, as a violist with whom to reckon and founding co-director of the enterprising London Contemporary Orchestra, is nothing if not well-versed in this music. What a pity that the outcome as experienced tonight was music often uninvolving, sometimes dull and conformist in a way that contemporary Icelandic culture should never be.

For details on the 2024-25 season A Season of Joy, head to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra website. Click on the names to read more about conductor Robert Ames and the choir Ex Cathedra

Published post no.2,498 – Tuesday 8 April 2025