Tag Archives: Symphony Hall

In concert – National Youth Orchestra / Thomas Adès: Transcend – Liszt, Adès & Berlioz

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National Youth Orchestra / Thomas Adès

Liszt Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S110 No. 2 (1856-61)
Adès Dante, Part 2: Purgatorio (2019-20)
Berlioz Symphonie fantastique Op.14 (1830)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 5 August 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Photos (c) Tom Morley

If there is little space remaining on an extended Symphony Hall platform, the National Youth Orchestra is the likely reason. Tonight saw the start of its annual summer tour with a typically demanding programme that played to the strengths of some 150 players in no small measure.

All three of these pieces are focussed upon a journey of unforeseen consequences, not least Liszt’s First Mephisto Waltz. Setting a swift tempo for its propulsive initial section, Thomas Adès ensured the performance had the measure of this and of those halting evocations at its centre. If the sudden build-up to its climax felt a little tentative, the ensuing pensiveness and hectic coda (this being the more familiar loud ending) found these musicians comfortably in control. A showpiece with substance that deserves to regain its popularity from former times.

Adès’s ballet Dante has been often heard on stage or in concert. Its central Purgatorio makes a journey from out of darkness towards light, recordings of three sung prayers made the basis for its musical evolution. This would be fine were that evolution more varied in progress and more cumulative in impact. As it was, samples of this chanting were elaborated by woodwind and brass, singly or in ‘choirs’, before drawing to a climax on full orchestra. That this process was several times repeated would not have mattered had it been less systematic or predictable, while the actual writing had (surprisingly) little subtlety or finesse to offset its brazen impact. Whatever Adès’s orchestral command or the NYO’s commitment in realizing it, the result felt not so far removed from Wojciech Kilar’s folk-inspired symphonic poems half a century ago.

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is a work that has featured often on NYO schedules, but its music is tailor-made for an orchestra with not a few aspiring professionals to demonstrate its capabilities, and the present performance did not disappoint. Favouring relatively swift tempi, Adès steered an impulsive if never wayward course through Rêveries – Passions; at its best in the approach to a searing climax followed by its pensive ‘come down’. He found the right balance between elegance and ecstasy in Un bal (but this was not a waltz for dancing), then traversed Scène aux champs with due focus on that mounting despair which emerges out of then returns to the soulful isolation either side. The thunder effects of multiple timpani at its close were well realized, while the cor anglais (Leah Wiseman) summoned a melting pathos.

Steady if not unduly portentous (with, as in the first movement, its repeat included), ‘Marche au supplice’ made a properly baleful impact – not least through the addition of military drums after the fall of the guillotine – but it was a pity Adès did not head straight into Songe d’une nuit de sabbat, whose initial silence then feels more deafening. That said, he had the measure of its sardonic parodies of earlier themes, evocations of gothic horror and fugal orgies on the way to an apotheosis during which the NYO gave its collective all then some more besides.

The result was a performance that could not have failed to impress those unfamiliar with this singular work. Doubtless the programme overall will sound equally impressive with the NYO repeating in at Snape Maltings tomorrow evening, then at the Royal Albert Hall this Saturday.

To read more about the NYO’s 2026 summer tour, visit the NYO website – and click on the name to read more about composer & conductor Thomas Adès

Published post no.2,971 – Friday 7 August 2026

In concert – CBSO, CBSO Orchestral Residency / Edward Gardner: Varèse & Adams

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City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, CBSO Orchestral Residency Musicians / Edward Gardner

Varèse Ionisation (1929-31); Amériques (1918-21, rev. 1927)
Adams Harmonielehre (1985)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Friday 17 July 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

It was likely coming after the ‘official’ end of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s season that brought a disappointingly low turnout for this concert, itself the culmination of the initial CBSO Orchestral Residency. This saw some five-dozen musicians, aged from 21 to 25, working alongside the orchestra’s musicians for an intensive week of rehearsals with Edward Gardner – principal guest conductor of the CBSO during 2010-16 and whose expertise across a broad range of repertoire was duly demonstrated by the ambitious programme heard tonight.

A first half devoted to Edgard Varèse ensured a testing workout for percussion in particular – 13 of them placed across the rear of the platform for the scintillating interplay of timbre and texture that is Ionisation; not the first such piece for the concert hall, but certainly the first of consequence. A pity that remarks by the conductor and Residency musicians did not precede rather than follow it, allowing the climactic entry of tuned instruments (chimes, glockenspiel and piano) to fade into the solo flute as commences Amériques with spellbinding immediacy.

Long notorious in terms of scale and impact, the latter work has now become something of a showpiece as this builds from post-impressionist musing, via passages alternately speculative and strident, to an apotheosis where jousting brass underpinned by a ‘walking bass’ uncannily anticipates symphonic jazz a generation hence. Under Gardner’s guidance, there was no risk of its losing focus – the players responding with discipline and no little relish to music as has lost none of that capacity to provoke and enthral just a century after its Philadelphia premiere.

The CBSO has an association with Harmonielehre stretching back more than 30 years to the recording (only the second) made with Simon Rattle. That this orchestra, with its Residency contingent, now brings greater freedom and flexibility says much about the development in orchestral playing over that time – along with the integration of John Adams’s work into the repertoire such that, far from being a polemic for reasserting the supremacy of ‘tonality’, it now yields all the attributes of a showpiece and may even be thought of as a crowd-pleaser.

Symphonic in aim if not necessarily intent, let alone attainment, this is music that can easily sprawl and it was to Gardner’s credit the un-titled first movement – with its alleged imagery of a super-tanker taking flight – maintained the impetus of those seismic opening chords, via music of expressive luxuriance, to a conclusion that fairly hit the ground running. Even finer was The Anfortas Wound, its brooding sombreness suffused with wrenching starkness on the way to a climax whose anguish references a comparable passage in Mahler 75 years on.

As with many symphonies actual or otherwise, the finale seems more a rounding-off than a resolution of the issues at stake, though there was no lack of purpose in Meister Eckhardt and Quackie as this imaginary encounter between a Medieval theologian and the composer’s infant daughter yielded unstoppable momentum prior to a headily affirmative close. Nor was there any doubting the conviction by which an expanded CBSO brought this work, and with it the whole concert, to its impressive conclusion. Roll on the Orchestral Residency for 2027.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2026/27 season, visit the CBSO website, and to read more about the CBSO Orchestral Residency. Click on the names to read more on conductor Edward Gardner, and composers John Adams and Edgard Varèse

Published post no.2,953 – Monday 6 July 2026

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 – 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

In concert – CBSO / Ilan Volkov: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring & Stokowski transcriptions

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City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Ilan Volkov (above)

Frescobaldi arr Stokowski Gagliarda Seconda (1627/1934)
Purcell arr Stokowski Dido’s Lament (1689/1949)
Debussy arr Stokowski The Sunken Cathedral (1910/1930)
Mussorgsky arr Stokowski Boris Godunov: Coronation Scene (1874/1936)
J.S. Bach arr Stokowski Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV565 (c1708/1927)
Stravinsky The Rite of Spring (1911-13)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 3 June 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture (c) Hannah Blake-Fathers

He might not officially become Principal Guest Conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra until next season, but Ilan Volkov – a valued collaborator over the past two decades – gave notice of his intentions with this enterprising programme of Stokowski and Stravinsky.

Stokowski, that is, in his role as an arranger often interventionist, frequently provocative while always compelling. The first four of these pieces played without break – the hieratic poise of Frescobaldi’s Gagliarda Seconda, with its layering of wind and strings, leading into Purcell’s Dido’s Lament with its soulful interplay of solo and massed strings. This sequence moved up a gear with The Sunken Cathedral, here becoming the most evocative of Debussy’s Préludes as its washes of percussion prepared for an apparition of sonorous splendour before returning to the murky depths. Volkov will hopefully schedule Stokowski’s entire Symphonic Synthesis from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at a future concert though, for now, the Coronation Scene offered a tantalizing taster as its ringing ostinato patterns built toward a cinematic apotheosis.

It made sense to round off this sequence with Toccata and Fugue, most characteristic of the conductor’s numerous Bach reworkings and the most archetypal of all his arrangements. Its sonic opulence is balanced by an analytical acuity with the orchestral sections stratified so to bring out the motivic intricacy of its Toccata as well as the mounting impetus of its Fugue on the way to a glowering peroration. The CBSO gave its collective all in a piece that, whether or not this is actually by Bach, could not be an arrangement by anyone other than Stokowski.

Stokowski directed the American premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Philadelphia some 104 years ago and the questing zeal heard in his 1930 recording seemed no less evident in Volkov’s performance – assuredly no powerhouse conception and all the more impressive because of it. With bassoonist Nikolaj Henriques given his head in its plangent Introduction, the first part proceeded stealthily and its myriad shades of detail or expressive nuance given focus through the music’s unfolding at a consistent while unbroken pulse. Such as the innate violence in Ritual of Abduction and inexorable Ritual of the Rival Tribes were drawn into an indivisible whole whose accruing tension found release in a seismic Dance of the Earth.

If the second part emerged more episodically, this was owing more to its actual content than to any interpretative failing. Certainly the diaphanous haze of its Introduction segued with due seamlessness into Mystic Circles of the Young Girls of ominous import. Nor was there any wanton pictorialism in Ritual Action of the Ancestors, with the trenchancy at the start of the Sacrificial Dance a telling foil to the unbridled impetus which followed. Others may have drawn a purely visceral frenzy from this music, but relatively few can have channelled such impetus through to so conclusive and (strange as this sounds) satisfying a final gesture.

Impressive music-making, then, that augurs well for Volkov’s three concerts with the CBSO next season. Hopefully there will also be an opportunity for this conductor to expand on his extensive discography, as part of what should prove an arresting and productive relationship.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the name to read more on conductor Ilan Volkov, while you can watch him in action in a number of videos below:

Jorge E Lopez | Symphony No.4

Ilan Volkov conducts works by Schreker and Strauss – YouTube

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 – Brussels Philharmonic & Ilan Volkov – HD

Published post no.2,908 – Friday 5 June 2026