Tag Archives: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

In Concert – Carolin Widmann, CBSO / Tianyi Lu: Habibi, Korngold & Prokofiev

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Carolin Widmann (violin, below), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Tianyi Lu

Habibi Zhiân (2023)
Korngold Violin Concerto in D major Op.35 (1945)
Prokofiev Symphony no.5 in B flat major Op.100 (1944)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 25 February 2026, 2:15pm

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture of Tianyi Lu (c) Marco Borggreve

This afternoon’s concert saw the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in action with the Chinese-born New Zealand conductor Tianyi Lu, and a programme that prefaced established works from the mid-20th century with a recent piece by an Iranian-born Canadian composer.

Its title translating not only as ‘Life’ in Kurdish but as ‘indignant’ or ‘formidable’ in Persian, Iman Habibi’s Zhiân takes its cue from Iranian government repression in response to protests after the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Although not directly programmatic, there is a discernible trajectory from the initial explosion of violence, through a sequence of more ambivalent yet increasingly consoling episodes – during which solo instruments (notably the oboe) come into focus, towards a culmination of unalloyed fervour. Such a statement could easily have descended into overkill, but Habibi gauges its progress with audible sureness of intent; abetted here by the conviction of the CBSO’s response. Little heard as yet in the UK, Habibi is clearly a composer with something worth saying and the means by which to say it.

Those with longer memories may remember when Korngold’s Violin Concerto was far from being the concert staple it is today, its uninhibited romanticism held in check by orchestration as fastidious as it is sophisticated along with a formal concision that ensures this work never outstays its welcome. It was such a balance between effusiveness and discipline which came across most clearly in Carolin Widmann’s playing, by turns tensile and expressive so that the music retained its focus throughout. Even she could not quite prevent the finale from veering towards bathos, as Korngold’s otherwise judicious recourse to earlier film-scores rather gets the better of him, yet as its uproarious closing bars surged onwards, there was little doubting the sheer effectiveness of this work taken as a whole or of Widmann’s ease when realizing it.

The stage was set for a memorable performance of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony which, in the event, was no more than decent. Not that this was because of technical failings, yet the initial Andante never quite recovered from a sluggish opening such that the strenuous development was unduly hectoring then the climactic restatement of the main theme sounded turgid rather than implacable. The scherzo’s central phase had appealing insouciance, but its outer sections lacked impetus with little emphasis on the ‘marcato’ designation to ensure the necessary edge.

The ensuing Adagio was the sure highlight, Lu’s preference for leisurely tempos and gradual accumulation of tension coming into its own not least with a seismic climax which subsided towards a coda of melting pathos. The finale opened enticingly, but progress here was again undermined by a lack of momentum; without which, its ostensibly genial themes never took flight. This was most evident with a denouement, among the most hair-raising in symphonic literature, whose seeming matter-of-factness rather left the whole work hanging in abeyance.

A pity so relatively lacklustre an interpretation ended David Powell’s final concert as CBSO sub-principal cello. Your reviewer remembers his engaging presence from four decades ago, and is glad an overt dislike of Mahler did not end his 45-year tenure almost before it began.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names for more on conductor Tianyi Lu, violinist Carolin Widmann and composer Iman Habibi

Published post no.2,812 – Saturday 28 February 2026

In Concert – Sir Stephen Hough, Soloists, CBSO Chorus, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Omer Meir Wellber: Beethoven & Haydn

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Sir Stephen Hough (piano, below), Lauren Urquhart (soprano), Georgia Mae Ellis (mezzo-soprano), Luis Gomes (tenor), Alexander Grassauer (bass), CBSO Chorus (above), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Omer Meir Wellber (conductor & harpsichord/director)

Beethoven (/Hough) Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor Op.37 (1800, rev. 1803)
Haydn Missa in Angustiis, Hob.XXII/11 (‘Nelson Mass’) (1798)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 19 February 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

That tonight’s concert from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra featured music by Beethoven and Haydn might have been indicative of a straight-ahead or mainstream concert but, as things turned out, neither programme nor music-making could be deemed predictable.

Sir Stephen Hough has no doubt played Beethoven’s Third Concerto many times with, moreover, his take on the outer movements not far removed from his much-praised Hyperion recording. The initial Allegro was lithe and impetuous if at times a touch hectoring (and Matthew Hardy was uncharacteristically reticent in that spellbinding passage after the cadenza), with the final Rondo treading a fine line between humour and irony at its most distinctive in the modulatory transition to the main theme, or that improvisatory solo flourish prior to the nonchalant coda.

Interest naturally centred on the slow movement – a Largo designated Con gran espressione in its ‘re-imagining’ by Hough (above). Itself part of a project instigated by this evening’s conductor, Omer Meir Wellber, to re-examine works in the core repertoire, this duly retains Beethoven’s instrumentation but renders the main theme, introduced by the soloist, as a hushed chorale for strings which pervades what follows. All well and good had that chorale become more than a static backdrop, against which Hough’s welter of skittish figuration sounded overly confined to the upper register. Neither was the climactic return of the first movement’s principal theme other than an affectation, nor the upsurge leading directly into the finale without contrivance. One respected Hough’s following of his muse, even if the outcome felt less than convincing.

Having not unreasonably given Hough the benefit of any doubt, the audience was nonplussed with his encore – the last of Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces that, written after Mahler’s funeral on 17th June 1911, yields a rapt eloquence even at less than the ‘very slow’ tempo prescribed.

As searching products of his late maturity, the six ‘name day’ Masses that Haydn wrote around the turn of the 19th century remain too little heard at orchestral concerts; save for the ‘Nelson Mass’ whose actual title, Mass in Troubled Times, makes explicit the cultural turmoil from of which it arose. This must also have occasioned its unyielding orchestration with trumpets and timpani but no woodwind, plus a dextrous continuo part allotted here to harpsichord and from which Wellber directed with a sure sense of where this most combative of masses was headed.

Vocally the solo writing favours soprano and bass, with Alexander Grassauer making the most of his mellifluous contributions and those of Lauren Urquhart impassioned yet tonally uneven in more animated passages. Georgia Mae Ellis and Luis Gomes handled their secondary roles with real finesse, while chorus-master David Young drew a laudable response from the CBSO Chorus (arrayed on stage with what might be felt the choral equivalent of ‘free bowing’). Taut and incisive, the epithet ‘symphonic’ as applied to this work can rarely have been so apposite.

The performance certainly set the seal on a concert which rightly encouraged a reassessment of both works and, by so doing, underlined Wellber’s own interpretative convictions. Having last appeared with the CBSO almost six years before, his return should be so long in coming.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names for more on conductor Omar Meir Wellber, pianist Sir Stephen Hough and soloists Lauren Urquhart, Georgia Mae Ellis, Luis Gomes and Alexander Grassauer.

Published post no.2,804 – Friday 20 February 2026

In Concert – Natalya Romaniw, CBSO / Eduardo Strausser: Shekhar, Richard Strauss & Brahms

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Natalya Romaniw (soprano, below), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Eduardo Strausser (above)

Shekhar Lumina (2020) [UK Premiere]
Richard Strauss Vier letzte Lieder (1948)
Brahms Symphony no.4 in E minor Op.98 (1884-5)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 4 February 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Pictures (c) Rodrigo Levy (Eduardo Strausser), Frances Marshall (Natalya Romaniw)

Eduardo Strausser has been welcome visitor to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on several earlier occasions (see elsewhere on this website), with this afternoon’s programme demonstrating a keen ear for his juxtaposing of contemporary music and established classics.

Equally well-established as an instrumentalist and multi-media artist, Nina Shekhar (b.1995) is an Indian-American with a substantial output to her credit – not least Lumina. Premiered in Los Angeles and subsequently heard across the United States, its eventful 12 minutes explore what she has described as ‘‘… the spectrum of light and dark and the murkiness in between’’. The incremental emergence of sound and texture brings Ligeti’s 1960s pieces to mind, while the build-up of its central phase towards a culmination of palpable emotional fervour is both adeptly managed and powerfully sustained, before the gradual return to its inward origin. The present performance left little doubt as to Strausser’s belief in this music, even if that opening stage would have benefitted from a more attentive response by some of those in the audience.

Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs is too frequently encountered in concert these days, so that it takes something special to make one reflect anew on its achievement as among the greatest of musical swansongs. This account got off to rather an inauspicious start – Natalya Romaniw overwrought in the vernal deftness of Frühling, not aided by overly opaque textures – though it subsequently came into its own. Arguably the most perfectly realized of all orchestral songs, September found an enticing balance between joy and resignation, while if leader Jonathan Martindale’s solo in Beim Schlafengehen was not quite flawless, it eschewed sentimentality to a (surprisingly?) rare degree. Im Abendrot rounded off the performance with Romaniw’s eloquent retreat into an orchestral backdrop which itself faded into serene and rapt fulfilment.

If by no means his final work, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony surely marks the onset of his final creative period. In its overtly austere sound-world and an abundance of hymn-like or chorale-inflected themes, it is also the most Bachian of his orchestral works but Strausser was right to offset this aspect against that surging emotion as underlies even the most speculative passages of its opening movement. The coda built methodically yet not a little impulsively towards an apotheosis as dramatic as anything by this most Classically inclined of Romantic composers.

After this, the Andante emerged in all its autumnal warmth and expressive poignancy – if not the most perfectly realized Brahms slow movement then surely the most profound. Bracingly energetic if never headlong, the scherzo prepared unerringly for the finale – the effectiveness of its passacaglia format having on occasion been questioned, while conveniently overlooking that parallel sonata-form dynamism such as galvanizes this movement on its intended course. Suffice to add that the closing pages felt as inevitable as any performance in recent memory.

Overall, a fine showing for the CBSO – notably its woodwind and brass – and Strausser, who will hopefully return soon. The orchestra is heard later this month with Omar Meir Wellber in a no less stimulating programme of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with Haydn’s ‘Nelson’ Mass.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names for more on conductor Eduardo Strausser soprano Natalya Romaniw and composer Nina Shekhar

Published post no.2,791 – Saturday 7 February 2026

In Concert – Stewart Goodyear, CBSO / Kazuki Yamada: Gershwin, Ives, Simon & Mazzoli

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Stewart Goodyear (piano, above), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada

Simon Hellfighters’ Blues (2024)
Mazzoli Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) (2014)
Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Ives ed. Sinclair Three Places in New England (1911-14)
Gershwin An American in Paris (1928)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 21 January 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

The heady interplay of jazz and blues idioms (with a little help from pioneer W. C. Handy) of Carlos Simon’s Hellfighter’s Blues launched in exhilarating fashion this City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert, pertinent as the 250th anniversary of American Independence approaches.

Missy Mazzoli’sSinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) could not have been further removed with its formal parallel to that of the solar system; an abstraction offset by the ‘sinfonia’ connotations of a Medieval hurdy-gurdy whose modal drone, recreated here with harmonicas played by the horns and woodwind, underlies the piece’s increasing velocity. That this suggested a tangible connection with the past and, at the same time, absorbed accrued influences into an idiom of today said much about the effectiveness of Mazzoli’s modus operandi these past two decades.

It could have been a conceptual leap too far from here to Gershwin’s galvanizing of the ‘jazz age’ aesthetic almost a century earlier yet Rhapsody in Blue has lost but little of its edge in the interim, especially as Stewart Goodyear rendered its solo part with almost reckless enjoyment. With almost every focal point either underlined or rendered in inverted commas, this was not the subtlest of performance, but Kazuki Yamada was at one with his pianist in conveying the breezy excitement of this music, with the final stages emerging as a high-octane apotheosis. Goodyear is evidently a pianist with whom to reckon – maybe his next appearance will find him tackling Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F? For the present, he gave the slow movement of his own Piano Sonata (1996), poised midway between Copland and Piston, as plaintive encore.

Whatever his radical tendencies, Charles Ives embodies the ethos of an earlier age (Michael Tilson Thomas aptly described him as America’s greatest late-Romantic composer), such as felt uppermost with Yamada’s take on Three Places in New England. So the intensifying of feeling in The ‘St. Gaudens’ at Boston Common was secondary to a distanced recollection of time, while the elaborate march-fantasy that is Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut was genial rather than boisterous – albeit until its accumulation of activity for an ending of visceral abandon. The Housatonic at Stockbridge yet which left the deepest impression –   its fervent evocation of place from the vantage of marital bliss duly inspiring a welling-up    of emotion which not even Yamada’s slight over-hastiness could rob of its sheer eloquence.

An American in Paris might have been an awkward piece with which to close, but succeeded well on its own terms. Something between tone poem and symphonic rhapsody. Gershwin’s evocation of a compatriot (himself?) a little lost in the French capital received an impulsive yet perceptive reading. There was a start-stop feel to its earlier stages, while Oscar Whight’s rather forced take on the indelible trumpet melody was to its detriment, but what ensued was rarely less than persuasive – not least those final bars with their tangible sense of resolution.

It certainly brought to a resounding close a concert which conveyed much of the sheer variety of American music across little more than a century. Hopefully Yamada will programme more of this repertoire – perhaps an Ives symphony or music by the late, great Christopher Rouse?

To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names for more on pianist Stewart Goodyear, CBSO chief conductor Kazuki Yamada and composers Missy Mazzoli and Carlos Simon

Published post no.2,777 – Saturday 24 January 2026

In Concert – Peter Moore, CBSO / Kazuki Yamada: Dai Fujikura & Mahler

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Peter Moore (trombone), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada (above)

Mahler Blumine (1884)
Fujikura Trombone Concerto ‘Vast Ocean II’ (2005/23) [UK Premiere]
Mahler Symphony no.1 in D major (1887-88, rev. 1889-98)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 15 January 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Photo (c) Andrew Fox

Mahler has not been absent from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s schedule since those halcyon years of Simon Rattle, though even he never undertook a chronological traversal of such as the orchestra’s current music director Kazuki Yamada duly commenced this evening.

Although the First Symphony was heard in its customary four-movement version as finalized for a Vienna performance in 1898, the so-called Blumine taken over from earlier incidental music and included as second movement in the earliest performances was given as an entrée to this concert. With its lilting trumpet melody – effortlessly unfolded by Holly Clark – and its aura of rapt inwardness, this elegant intermezzo was audibly out of place given the transition from symphonic poem to symphony, but it retains an appeal that was winningly evident here.

Two years ago Yamada and the CBSO gave the premiere of Wavering World by Japanese-born composer Dai Fujikura, and it was heartening to see the association continued with this first hearing in the UK for Vast Ocean II. Not so much a reworking as the reconceiving of a piece from 18 years earlier, this trombone concerto unfolded within the context of an orchestra rich in alluring sonorities yet streamlined in texture. This latter entered gradually while remaining focussed on (if never beholden to) a soloist whose role is almost that of a ‘cantus firmus’ that guides the music, through waves of increasing activity, towards a fervent culmination before a suspenseful closing evanescence. It helped to have in Peter Moore a soloist who manifestly believed in the music and contributed greatly to the impact of this memorable performance.

And so to Mahler’s First Symphony that, following on from Yamada’s accounts of the Fourth and Ninth in recent seasons, drew a suitably visceral response from conductor and orchestra. Not that this traversal was without failings: the ‘coming of spring’ in the opening pages was unerringly judged, as too the transition into its genial main theme, though this first movement rather lost focus in the mounting intensity of its final stages which felt rather rushed through. There were no provisos about a scherzo whose impetuous outer sections found ideal contrast with its ländler-informed trio of winning poise. The ensuing funeral march was equally well judged, bassist Anthony Alcock setting in motion this unlikely processional whose pathos is tinged by irony and even ambivalence before its jaunty climax then withdrawal into silence.

Launched with piercing clamour, the finale may ultimately have been no more than the sum of its parts, but the best were indeed memorable. So if the expressive second theme sounded overly generic, the approach to the central peroration was astutely handled, with the hushed recollection of earlier ideas never less than spellbinding. Nor was the stealthy build-up to the apotheosis lacking purpose, even if this latter emerged as less than majestic given Yamada’s headlong rush to those brusque closing chords. Audience response was accordingly effusive.

One person who would no doubt have wanted to be present was Andrew Clements, who died just four days earlier. A regular CBSO reviewer for the Guardian, his laconic while considered observations were always centred on the premise that music, whether in or of itself, mattered.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names for more on trombonist Peter Moore, CBSO chief conductor Kazuki Yamada and composer Dai Fujikura

Published post no.2,770 – Saturday 17 January 2026