Tag Archives: classical-music

In concert – Janai Brugger, CBSO / Kazuki Yamada: Copland, Tower, Price & Adams

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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

In concert – Soloists, London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Antonio Pappano – Wagner: Tristan and Isolde @ Barbican Hall

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Barbican Hall, London, 1 July 2026

by John Earls. Photo credits of Clay Hilley (Tristan) with Gyula Oendt (Kurwenal) above and Sara Jakubiak below (c) Mark Allan

Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde is a piece of music like no other and this stunning concert performance by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Antonio Pappano (the first of two this month) showed why.

Such concert performances of opera must have been part of the thinking behind the appointment of Pappano as the LSO’s Chief Conductor in September 2024 (he had been Music Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, since 2002). The lack of onstage action in Tristan and Isolde makes it ideal for such performances, but that shouldn’t detract from this wonderful rendition which gripped for the whole of its near four hours.

American soprano Sara Jakubiak (above), making her Isolde debut, admirably negotiated the piece’s duration and range in delivery, including a powerful closing Liebestod, as well as looking the part of the Irish Queen in her green dress. American tenor Clay Hilley showed his experience of previously playing Tristan in a performance without score that was convincingly dramatic both in terms of his singing and theatrics which included leaning heavily on the conductor’s podium for support in the final act. Both singers were impressive together in the lovers’ tryst of Act Two.

Russian mezzo Marina Prudenskaya was glorious as Brangäne, including when singing off-stage (or behind-stage to be exact) where the sonic mix worked well where I was sat in the gallery. Franz-Josef Selig as King Marke was both clear and passionate.

The remaining soloists – Gyula Orendt (Kurwenal), Neal Cooper (Melot), Michael Gibson (Sailor/Shepherd) and James Emerson (Steersman) – all gave good performances and the male voices of the London Symphony Chorus were suitably robust in the first act.

But, for me, the real stars of the evening were the orchestra and their Chief Conductor (directing proceedings sans baton). The strings were expressive, even visually at one point as the synchronicity and swooping of the bowing put me in mind of a murmuration of starlings. Repeated alternating notes on clarinet early in Act Two hung in the air in a way that almost stopped time. And Drake Gritton’s cor anglais solos, both in the balcony and onstage, were captivating.

The whole performance was compelling throughout and thoroughly deserving of the rapturous standing ovation given by the audience at the end.

John Earls is Director of Research at Unite the Union and posts at @johnearls.bsky.social on Bluesky and @john_earls on X. You can subscribe (free) to his Hanging Out a Window Substack column here: https://johnearls.substack.com/

Published post no.2,936 – Friday 3 July 2026

In concert – Inmo Yang, CBSO / Dima Slobodeniouk: Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky & Martinů

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Inmo Yang (violin), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Dima Slobodeniouk (above)

Martinů Memorial to Lidice H296 (1943)
Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D, Op. 35 (1878)
Prokofiev Symphony no.6 in E flat minor Op.111 (1945-47)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 18 June 2026 2:15pm

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture of Dima Slobodeniouk (c) Marco Borggreve

If not quite an all-Russian sequence or, indeed, one centred on the Second World War, this was still a cohesive and satisfying programme that played to the collective strengths of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra along with this afternoon’s conductor Dima Slobodeniouk.

Just over eight decades since a first hearing in Prague (83 years following its premiere in New York), Memorial to Lidice has lost little of its fervency and pathos – qualities often present in the music of Martinů’s maturity yet seldom so graphically as here. The CBSO’s playing duly ensured a performance of sustained eloquence, with Slobodeniouk lightening the mood in its central section so that the return of the opening music – with its allusions to the St Wenceslas Chorale and the motto of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – left a tangibly cathartic impression.

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto received a far less cordial reception at its premiere in Vienna, but soon afterwards established a place in the repertoire as has never been challenged. Early audience may have found its first movement protracted, but Immo Yang ensured a seamless follow-though with due characterization of its subtly contrasted main themes. Imaginatively articulated, the cadenza was pointedly developmental as to make the wistful reappearance of the first theme the more affecting. Nor was there any lack of emotional depth in the ensuing Canzonetta – its musing uncertainty the counterweight to a finale which, after its (rightly) jarring introduction, found the right balance between impetuosity and plaintiveness on route to a coda no less uproarious for all its knife-edge coordination between soloist and orchestra.

Acclaimed at its Leningrad premiere, Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony was a victim of political intrigues such as hampered any wider dissemination (its first hearing in Birmingham came as late as 1980) or recognition as its composer’s finest and most finely achieved such piece. Slobodeniouk undoubtedly had its measure, not least that opening Allegro moderato whose diverse and even disparate ideas – which might be described as speculative, mesmeric then desperate – melded with an assured sense of where this disquieting movement was headed. In particular, the lengthy development proceeded with truly remorseless intensity toward a pulverizing climax – one whose bitter after-tones persisted through a summary reprise then on to a conclusion whose embrace of the major key could hardly have felt less affirmative.

If this movement finds Prokofiev at his most questing, then the Largo finds him at his most empathetic such as its searing introductory bars then heartfelt main theme are drawn into a powerfully focussed design leaving no doubt as to its composer’s awareness of the ‘human cost’ or this conductor’s conveying of what was at stake. Not that the final Vivace was at all pre-empted, the forced jocularity of its main theme offset by ambivalent episodes prior to a coda whose teetering on catastrophe seemed hardly allayed by those fateful closing gestures.

Taken as a whole, this proved an impressive conceived and realized performance that, having occurred ‘‘many years since my last visit’’ (to quote the conductor), was such as to make one hope that Slobodeniouk’s next appearance with this orchestra might not be so long in coming.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2026/27 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the name to read more on conductor Dima Slobodeniouk and violinist Inmo Yang

Published post no.2,925 – Monday 22 June 2026

On Record: Ofra Yitzhaki – Josef Tal: Piano Works 1936–2000 (NEOS Music)

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Ofra Yitzhaki (piano)

Josef Tal
Sonata for Piano (1949)
Five Densities (1975)
Three Pieces (1937)
Concerto no.5 for Piano and Magnetic Tape (1964)
By the Rivers of Babylon (1951)
Six Sonnets (1946)
Essay IV (1997)
Essay V (2000)
Chaconne (1936)

NEOS Music 12520 [82’04”]
Producers Alexander Hainz and Dominik Weinmann Engineer Robin Bös

Recorded 1-3 September 2022 at Hessian Radio Studio, Frankfurt am Main

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

The enterprising NEOS Music label releases an anthology of piano music by Josef Tal (2010-2008), the German-born Israeli composer who did much to advance the cause of new music in Israel during the post-war era and whose varied output confirms him as a significant creative figure.

What’s the music like?

Little heard in the UK (his Third Symphony featured at the 1979 Proms and his chamber opera The Garden at South Bank Centre in 1998), Tal wrote in all the main genres. His piano music, moving from overt Expressionism to innate Atonalism, is accorded focus by its motivic rigour.

This is evident from the earliest piece here – Chaconne being a consummate study in ‘less is more’ such that its variations on an austerely rhetorical theme merge into an intensifying and cumulative whole, capped by an epiphanic calm prior to the inevitability of a final onslaught. Elements of this language are further explored by the Three Pieces which, in their respective volatility, impetuousness or introspection, denote the influence of Schoenberg’s piano pieces -albeit less those emotional extremes of his Op. 11 than that fastidious subtlety of his Op. 23.

A subtlety duly refined in the Six Sonnets, miniatures of a formal ingenuity and expressive poise out of all proportion to their brevity. From there to the Sonata is to emerge at a crucial stylistic juncture in Tal’s output: again, the modest dimensions (each of its three movements lasting around four minutes) only makes more acute that growing ominousness of its initial movement, the plangency of its central Basso Ostinato (a favoured device throughout Tal’s career) then the mounting impetus of its final Rondo toward a viscerally unequivocal close.

Arranged from a theatrical work, By the Rivers of Babylon conveys a measure of eloquence prior to what became the most radical phase of Tal’s composing. Hence the Concerto No. 5 as replaces orchestra with electronics in a substantial single movement which, whatever the timbral limitations of its magnetic tape, ensures a tense while often combative interplay of mutually opposing forces. This intensity is channelled into the Five Densities, such that its starkly contrasted first four pieces find unlikely yet convincing rapprochement in the fifth.

The remaining works form part of a sequence that extends across Tal’s final creative decades. Essay IV moves stealthily between sharply distinct ideas to an ending which does not resolve but simply cease, and Essay V is more demonstrative as it heads to its terse yet forceful close.

Does it all work?

Indeed it does. A figure nowadays admired more for what his music represents than for what it achieves, Tal left a legacy which is highly significant in or of itself (and one which, unlike almost all Israeli composers of his generation, audibly transcends the idiom of Ernest Bloch). His piano output exemplifies that technical precision, underpinning a creative spontaneity, as are hallmarks of his maturity and which help make this music as relevant to our day as to his own. It also makes for an engrossing and sometimes even entertaining listen in its own right.

Is it recommended?

Indeed it is. Only the Sonata has previously been recorded, and Ofra Yitzhaki’s empathy with this music cannot be denied. Superbly recorded and informatively annotated, this deserves an enthusiastic recommendation, with hopefully a follow-up of Tal’s other piano works to come.

Listen / Buy

You can hear excerpts from the album and explore purchase options at the NEOS Music website. Click on the names to read more about pianist Ofra Yitzhaki and composer Josef Tal

Published post no.2,918 – Monday 15 June 2026

On Record – Linda Kouvaras: Piano Music, Chamber Works and Songs, Vol. 2 (Toccata Classics)

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Tiriki Onus (narrator), Coady Green (piano), Roger Alsop (sound design) – Herring Island Piano Sonata; Jane Magão (soprano), Karen Van Spall (mezzo-soprano), Georgia Lewis (piano) – Winter Came Early

Linda Kouvaras
Herring Island Piano Sonata
Winter Came Early

Toccata Classics TOCC0734 [78’33”] English text included
Producer / Engineer Haig Burnell

Recorded 16 & 24 November 2023 (Herring Island Piano Sonata), February 2024 (Winter Came Early)

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Toccata Classics issues the second volume in its ongoing survey of chamber and vocal works by Linda Kouvaras (b.1960), comprising two sizable pieces that examine those genres of the piano sonata and the song-cycle from unlikely while always thought-provoking perspectives.

What’s the music like?

A veteran of the New Wave scene from the early 1980s, Kouvaras studied in London and her native Melbourne where she has pursued her career as an academic and composer. Especially notable is her output for ensemble, with or without voices, which is currently being recorded by Toccata. Its second instalment demonstrates a keen sense of how to broaden and diversify genres that could all too easily be taken for granted as regards precedent then, in the process, making these relevant to the artistic and the cultural concerns of those having inspired them.

Inspired then dedicated to the physical and historical facets of an artificial islet in Melbourne, Herring Island Piano Sonata amalgamates an abstract entity with a text by N’arweet Carolyn Briggs and spoken by Tiriki Onus in the context of an environmental soundscape from Roger Alsop – though the piano component can also be performed independently (and can be heard here by selecting tracks 2, 3, 5 and 7). Musically it typifies Kouvaras’ predilection for modal harmonies and vibrant textures, allied to a determined if never excessive virtuosity. Just how far this three-way interplay comes together is for each listener to decide, though there can be no doubt as to the ambition of the whole. To which end, a visual (not necessarily illustrative) component might have helped with integrating these already interrelated aspects further still.

Written immediately before, Winter Came Early is a song-cycle to poems by Melbourne poet Catherine Lewis whose untimely death and her posthumous legacy is directly commemorated. The presence, indeed frequent concurrence, of two female voices represents a mother and her daughter – the latter being pianist Georgina Lewis who also contributes the central poem that gives the work its title – heard alternately and in dialogue, though this could be considered too much of a good thing given the overlap in vocal lines and consequent blurring of words such as makes it difficult (if not impossible) to discern what is being sung. Musically, the sequence alternates between knowledge of encroaching death and recollection of earlier but not always happier times, rounded off by an ‘Epilogue’ that sets the poet’s final love-note to her husband.

Does it all work?

For the most part. Kouvaras is evidently a composer with an inquiring mind and the means to realize her intentions, though the element of mixed media sometimes works to the detriment of her music by drawing attention away from its intrinsic content. All the performers provide contributions of unfailing sincerity, but there remains a feeling of sensory overload or merely reluctance to let this music speak on its own terms. Try those sonata tracks detailed above, or the final four tracks (11-14) of the song-cycle, to hear her music at its most communicative.

Is it recommended?

Yes, with these reservations in mind. Those who are unfamiliar with this composer would be best advised to start with the first volume in this survey (TOCC0729) with its works for solo piano or saxophone and piano that, in their different ways, find her music at its most potent.

Listen / Buy

You can hear excerpts from the album and explore purchase options at the Toccata Classics website. Click on the names to read more about performers Jane Magão, Karen Van Spall, Tiriki Onus, Coady Green, Georgina Lewis and Roger Alsop, and composer Linda Kouvaras

Published post no.2,916 – Saturday 12 June 2026