Tag Archives: Kazuki Yamada

News – The CBSO Announces New 2026-27 Season

Posted on by
Reply

adapted from the press release:

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) has announced its 2026–27 Season: a year of artistic ambition, civic pride and musical breadth under Music Director Kazuki Yamada. The season brings together major symphonic journeys – including Beethoven and Mahler cycles – with new commissions, international touring and landmark moments such as the CBSO Chorus’s 1000th performance. Looking both forwards and back, the orchestra returns to Coventry Cathedral for Britten’s War Requiem, while a wide‑ranging programme that embraces film, popular music and cross‑genre collaborations reflects the CBSO’s commitment to sharing exceptional music with the widest possible audiences.

Shaped by extensive listening to the people of Birmingham, the 2026-27 Season responds to a city where music plays a vital role in daily life, with 96% of residents saying it is important to them. Research also revealed a strong desire for live music and shared cultural experiences, with more than half of respondents valuing a ‘great night out’ with family and friends, alongside a growing appetite for diverse and cross‑genre programming. Embracing scale, risk and joy in equal measure, the new season opens on 17 September 2026.

Looking ahead to the new season, Emma Stenning, CEO at the CBSO comments: “Over the past two years we have listened closely to the people of Birmingham – through research, audience feedback and the work of our Community Board – and that dialogue has shaped a season designed to offer something for everyone. We continue our Mahler journey and present a complete Beethoven symphony cycle with our Music Director Kazuki Yamada, while welcoming Ilan Volkov as our new Principal Guest Conductor and Collaborative Artists Jess Gillam, Alice Sara Ott and Rushil Ranjan, each bringing fresh energy and ideas to the CBSO. Our return to Coventry Cathedral for Britten’s War Requiem will be a defining moment of the season, sharing a powerful message of peace that feels especially resonant today. Alongside this, film and pop concerts, cross‑cultural collaborations and our family programming allow us to broaden our audiences, reflect the diversity of our city and invest in the next generation of music‑lovers. We hope you’ll join us for a truly special year of music‑making.”

Full details can be found at the CBSO website

CBSO 2026-27 Season at a glance: 10 highlights

  1. War Requiem returns to Coventry Cathedral

For Remembrance Day, Kazuki Yamada brings Britten’s humanitarian masterpiece home to Coventry Cathedral, with a plea for peace as resonant now as the day it was written. A timeless, intensely moving meditation on man’s inhumanity to man, the CBSO gave the world premiere of the piece at Coventry Cathedral in 1962 and the Orchestra’s return in 2026 also marks 50-years since Benjamin Britten’s death. This performance will be followed by an international tour.

  • Mahler symphonies to open and close the season

KazukiYamada and the CBSO continue their Mahler cycle: a signature artistic journey that explores music grappling with life, death and renewal. The 2026-27 Season opens with Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, in a concert which also celebrates the 1000th performance of the CBSO Chorus. The season will close in June 2027 with Mahler’s 3rd Symphony.

  • Three Collaborative Artists redefining what an orchestra can do

This season sees the CBSO welcome Alice Sara Ott, Jess Gillam and Rushil Ranjan as Collaborative Artists, who each offer fresh perspectives and exciting programming across genres, venues and formats. Pianist Alice Sara Ott brings major concerto and chamber performances at home and on tour, saxophonist Jess Gillam appears as a soloist, presenter and creative collaborator across concerts and education projects, and composer‑producer Rushil Ranjan expands the orchestra’s sound world through his genre‑defying Orchestral Qawwali Project.

  • Beethoven’s full symphony cycle

Marking 200 years since Beethoven’s death, Kazuki Yamada and the CBSO will perform all nine symphonies in 2027, celebrating one of the most famous and enduring symphonic cycles of all time alongside performances of the Violin Concerto and a wide‑ranging programme of chamber music.

  • A major commitment to new music

In addition to exciting projects with CBSO’s Collaborative Artists – Alice Sara Ott, Jess Gillam and Rushil Ranjan – the CBSO’s first Composer in Residence, GRAMMY-nominated composer Anna Clyne, is central to the season; including the world premiere of her new viola concerto ‘Resonant Forms’ with Lawrence Power, a performance of PALETTE by the CBSO Orchestral Residency scheme, and a Decca recording of Glasslands with Jess Gillam and Alpesh Chauhan.

  • Ilan Volkov debut season

The CBSO will welcome Ilan Volkov for his first season as Principal Guest Conductor and repertoire will feature Bruckner’s 7th Symphony, Messiaen’s Turangalila and a Shakespeare inspired programme.

  • Film and pop music concerts

From Classic FM Hall of Fame and Jules Buckley’s Quincy Jones celebration to Guitar Heroes, ABBA and Home Alone – the CBSO season is packed with popular family-orientated concerts that celebrate milestones in popular culture. There will also be concerts that celebrate special anniversaries; such as  50 years of Star Wars: A New Hope and the 20th anniversary of Casino Royale in partnership with esk live and B:Music; and 25 years of the legendary film, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring presented by The Flying Music Company at BP Pulse Live.

  • Kazuki Yamada’s generous and joyful programming

The CBSO’s Music Director,Kazuki Yamada also champions programmes that invite audiences in through joy and familiarity this season, treating much‑loved repertoire with the same care, imagination and musical rigour as the symphonic canon. From a festive ‘double Nutcracker’ that sets Tchaikovsky alongside Duke Ellington’s sparkling reinvention, to a Night at the Opera with an all-star cast, celebrating the enduring power of great melody and drama.

  • Concerts for young children and families

From toddlers to teenagers, the CBSO’s family and Notelets concerts are presented by CBSO musicians and designed to remove barriers and spark a lifelong connection with music. Created especially for under‑6s, Notelets are joyful, interactive performances where children can sing, dance and discover orchestral instruments for the very first time, supported by free creative activities and opportunities to meet the musicians. Across the season, BSL‑interpreted family concerts further widen access, ensuring orchestral music is welcoming and inclusive for audiences of all ages.

  1. A season that embraces scale, risk and joy in equal measure

From vast, ambitious works such as Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony and Weinberg’s rarely performed operatic epic The Passenger, to symphonic film, jazz‑inflected reimaginings and large‑scale popular orchestral projects, the season demonstrates a willingness to programme at full stretch – artistically, logistically and imaginatively. Rather than separating the serious from the celebratory, the CBSO places demanding contemporary and 20th‑century masterpieces alongside exuberant, high‑craft crossover, asserting that ambition, curiosity and pleasure can and should coexist on the same stage.

Kazuki Yamada, Music Director, CBSO, comments: “It brings me so much happiness to be looking forward to another season with this wonderful orchestra and our fantastic audiences. And what a year of music making it’s going to be: 18 concerts at home and another 21 across the UK and around the world. Wherever we perform, I am always proud to share the CBSO’s incredible energy, openness and spirit with our audiences.” The CBSO would also like to thank the many guest musicians, soloists and ensembles that will join them for the 2026–27 season.

Published post no.2,886 – Wednesday 13 May 2026

In Concert – Nelson Goerner, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada: Hindemith, Rachmaninoff & Bartók

Posted on by
Reply

Nelsen Goerner (piano) City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada

Hindemith Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943)
Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Op.43 (1934)
Bartók Concerto for Orchestra BB123 (1943)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 9 April 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Pictures (c) Andrew Fox (above) and Marco Borggreve (below)

There was a pleasing overall balance to this evening’s concert from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its music director Kazuki Yamada: the three works, written within a decade of each other, drawing extensively on earlier composers or, indeed, traditional music.

If not as familiar as it once was (and not least in Birmingham), Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber is always worth revival – not least for finding Hindemith at his most approachable and uninhibited. It was this latter aspect which came over most vividly here – Yamada securing a forceful though never blowzy response in the opening Allegro, then making the most of its ‘Turandot’ Scherzo’s freewheeling play on Weber’s already recalcitrant overture to which the CBSO responded in like fashion. Easily to underestimate, the Andantino emerged as music of no mean pathos as well as a foil to the final March’s breezy treatment of incisive then jocular melodies, with a close of real panache. Did a smile on the face of certain older punters indicate the latter tune’s audible resemblance to a once popular wartime song?

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini has become increasingly familiar in recent decades, as has Rachmaninoff’s music as a whole, and tonight’s performance amply underlined why. He may not have partnered the CBSO for several years, but Nelson Goerner secured a rapport from the outset – the initial 15 variations pivoting between impetuosity and inwardness with dextrous assurance, then those three which constitute a ‘slow movement’ rendered with a soulfulness and, in the evergreen Variation XVIII, a deftness such as banished any hint of sentimentality. The closing six variations duly unfolded as a ‘finale’ capricious and scintillating, Goerner at one with the orchestra in rounding off this work with a deathless payoff. Impeccably played if emotionally aloof, Brahms’ Intermezzo in A major (Op. 118/2) was the less than apposite encore.

The CBSO has an association with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra itself going back decades with the present account notable, above all, for its sheer virtuosity of playing. Interpretatively things was not quite this consistent – the expressive contrasts in its Introduzione just a little inflexibly drawn so that the movement felt no more than the sum of its admittedly impressive parts, with the succession of duets in Presentando le coppie a little too detached from each other for this to become the genial though equally vulnerable scherzando it ideally should be.

Conversely, the Elegia had an ideal balance between wrenching anguish and that unworldly ‘night music’ from which it emerges and into which it ultimately withdraws, while the quirky interplay of styles and parodies – whether Léhar or Shostakovich seems beside the point – in the Intermezzo interrotto never sounded at all contrived. Neither did the Finale disappoint as it navigated between pulsating energy and brazen high jinx, on route to a coda of hushed anticipation capped by a peroration which set the seal on this work in an exhilarating QED.

Overall, a fine showing for the CBSO and Yamada in the wake of their latest European tour. The orchestra returns next week in an enterprising programme of Respighi and Puccini, the latter represented by syntheses from two of his operas devised by the conductor Carlo Rizzi.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names for more on their principal conductor Kazuki Yamada and pianist Nelson Goerner

Published post no.2,854 – Saturday 11 April 2026

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

Posted on by
Reply

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, 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

Posted on by
Reply

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

In concert – Jonathan Kelly, CBSO / Kazuki Yamada: Richard Strauss – Tod und Verklärung, Oboe Concerto, Also sprach Zarathustra

Posted on by
Reply

Jonathan Kelly (oboe), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada

Richard Strauss
Tod und Verklärung Op.24 (1888-9)
Oboe Concerto in D major AV144 (1945)
Also sprach Zarathustra, Op.30 (1896)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 10 December 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture of Jonathan Kelly (c) Stefan Hoederath

Richard Strauss is among a relatively select number of composers, the range and breadth of whose output makes it suitable for a whole programme – as was evident from this evening’s concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and music director Kazuki Yamada.

Never one to miss such an opportunity, Strauss had evidently conceived his tone poem Death and Transfiguration in the wake of illness only to extend its remit accordingly. Yamada duly had its measure: whether in the not so stark fatalism of its opening pages, the tussle with his approaching demise audibly relished by the protagonist then emergence of that transfiguring state which, after the brief and rather jarring interjection of earlier angst (no more convincing here than almost any other performance) sees this work through to a fervent culmination then on to its beatific close. Not consistently more than the sum of its best parts, and with internal detail sometimes obscured in the onslaught of its vehement tuttis, this was still an involving account – lessened not a jot by its underlining Strauss’s enjoyment of his emotional strivings.

Onward 46 years to the Oboe Concerto the ageing composer wrote at the promptings of US army corporal and professional oboist John de Lancie. Much the finest of those concertante pieces from Strauss’s ‘Indian summer’, its three movements merge into the finely balanced continuity that Jonathan Kelly (above) – making a welcome return to the orchestra of which he was solo oboist during 1993-2003 – relished throughout. The elegance of its initial Allegro here abetted by a degree of nonchalance, as was the poise of its Andante with deftest pathos, his reading came into its own in a Vivace whose cadenza passages were as eloquent as the coda that Strauss duly extended to make this movement an unerring fusion of scherzo and finale. Kelly understandably offered no encore, but he returned to join the CBSO after the interval.

That second half consisted of Thus spake Zarathustra – if not the most ambitious of Strauss’ tone poems in size then surely in scope, whether or not the depths of Nietzsche’s existential musings are really plumbed. The indelible ‘Sunrise’ treading a fine line between profundity and portentousness, Yamada charted its idiosyncratic journey toward spiritual enlightenment with a sure sense of where this music was headed – no matter that the outcome felt as much   a glorification of orchestral power and opulence as of anything more intrinsically humane.

Highlights during its course included the sustained emotional force in ‘Of Joys and Passions’, the textural unanimity of the strings across their fugal writing in ‘Of Science and Learning’, and suavity then mounting animation of ‘The Dance Song’ with leader Eugene Tzikindelean in his element – before ‘Song of the Night Wanderer’ brought proceedings down from their orgiastic heights into that sombre repose whose tonal inconclusiveness may be an indicator  of Strauss’s own perspective; the certainly of those opening bars left pointedly unresolved.

Its pizzicato chords on lower strings made a telling farewell for Eduardo Vassallo, principal cellist throughout much of the past 36 seasons. His broad sympathies including Argentinian tango, and a characterful Don Quixote to boot, leaves players and listeners alike in his debt.

Published post no.2,747 – Saturday 13 December 2025

For more on the CBSO’s season for 2025/26, head to the CBSO website – and for more on the artists in this programme, click on the names to visit the websites of conductor Kazuki Yamada, oboist Jonathan Kelly and principal cellist Eduardo Vassallo