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In concert – James Ehnes, CBSO / Markus Stenz: Schumann Violin Concerto & Bruckner Symphony no.7

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James Ehnes (violin, above), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Markus Stenz (below)

Schumann Violin Concerto in D minor WoO23 (1853)
Bruckner Symphony no.7 in E major WAB107 (1881-83, ed. Nowak)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 25 April 2024

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture of James Ehnes (c) Benjamin Ealovega, Markus Stenz (c) Kaupo Kikkas

His appearance here for performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony two years ago had made one hope that Markus Stenz might soon be invited back to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – such being so tonight for this outstanding programme of Schumann and Bruckner.

Although it now enjoys frequent hearing, Schumann’s Violin Concerto yet remains under the shadow of its eight-decade limbo after the composer’s mental breakdown then decision by its intended soloist Joseph Joachim to withhold performance. Only in 1937 was it given in public, since when it has gradually come to be regarded (as Yehudi Menuhin believed it would be) as the missing link between Beethoven and Brahms. Certainly, there was nothing tentative about James Ehnes’ advocacy, which proved as interpretively acute as it was technically immaculate.

Pacing the initial movement so that its earnest character never becomes unduly sombre is not easy, but Ehnes ensured its halting progress never felt effortful and Stenz drew textures of no mean luminosity from these modest forces. The slow movement seemed more eloquent for its listless pathos, with its terse transition into the finale astutely judged. Its underlying polonaise rhythm deftly inflected, this rather gauche rondo yielded an easy-going momentum in the call and response between soloist and orchestra, through to a conclusion both genial and resolute.

A memorable performance which reinforced Ehnes as among the most consistent (as well as undemonstrative) of present-day virtuosi – something that was no less evident in his account of the Third Sonata (‘Ballade’) by Eugène Ysaÿe which here made for a scintillating encore.

The UK has seen little of Stenz since his tenure with the London Sinfonietta during the mid-1990s, a pity given he has few peers among conductors of his generation in terms of Austro-German repertoire. Such was borne out by Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony – Classical in its lucidity of motion, Romantic in its frequently impulsive emotion. Not least an initial Allegro moderato that elided between its contrasting themes with unforced rightness, the abruptness of certain tempo changes (accentuated by his rare recourse these days to the Nowak edition) channelled into a coda of surging sublimity. Even finer was the Adagio for the inevitability with which this drew respectively elegiac and lyrical themes into a sustained traversal, via an exultant peroration (cymbal and triangle duly outdone by timpani), to a nobly resigned close.

The latter two movements can easily seem anti-climactic, but there was nothing understated about the Scherzo as Stenz heard this – the impetus and acerbity of its outer sections finding accord with a trio whose lilting poise was delectably pointed. As for the Finale, most succinct of Bruckner’s maturity, Stenz emphasized its expressive contrast between themes through his choice of tempi – while managing to mould these into a convincing unity before heading into a coda which revisits that of the first movement with blazing affirmation in the here and now.

The performance would not have made the impact it did without the CBSO playing at or near its best throughout – such Bruckner interpretation having few, if any, equals when it comes to live music-making. One can only hope conductor and orchestra will work together again soon.

Click on the link to read more on the current CBSO concert season, and on the names for more on violinist James Ehnes and conductor Markus Stenz

Published post no.2,161 – Saturday 26 April 2024

In concert – Ian Bostridge, CBSO / Gergely Madaras: Thorvaldsdottir, Britten & Tchaikovsky

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Ian Bostridge (tenor), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Gergely Madaras (above)

Thorvaldsdottir Dreaming (2008)
Britten Les Illuminations Op.18 (1939)
Tchaikovsky Symphony no.1 in G minor Op.13 ‘Winter Daydreams’ (1866, rev. 1883)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 17 April 2024

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture of Gergely Madaras (c) Hannah Fathers

This evening’s concert with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra comprised what was an unusually cohesive programme centred on the concept of ‘dreams’, assembled and directed with consistent empathy and insight by the Hungarian conductor Gergely Madaras.

Dreaming was the title as well as the watchword of the piece by Anna Thorvaldsdottir which opened proceedings. Her first major work for orchestra is already characteristic in its eliding between evocations arcadian and desolate, with an undeniable sense of the ominous coming through as the final stages take on an extemporized quality; musicians gradually exiting the sonic frame with just the capricious asides of a cellist remaining. Eduardo Vassallo made the most of this brief spotlight, and the CBSO made its collective presence felt to striking effect.

Arthur Rimbaud’s brief but meteoric spell as a poet in the early 1870s had belated if decisive impact on numerous composers and none more than Britten, his song-cycle Les Illuminations among his finest achievements in any medium. Having sung it many times, Ian Bostridge (above) still manages to point up the growing anticipation of ‘Fanfare’ or breathless excitement of Villes; his wide-eyed wonder in Phrase then graceful musing in Antique matched by the resolute irony of Marine or glancing wit of Royauté. Madaras drew languorous playing from the CBSO strings in Interlude and brought out the ecstatic longing of Being Beauteous, before the fervid imagining of Parade brought this sequence full circle. It remained for Départ to offer a fulfilled exit as poet – and composer – resignedly bids farewell to the realm of dreams.

This gripping account should not have needed Bostridge to address members of the audience after the fourth song, asking they refrain taking pictures on their mobiles while the music was in progress. An overhaul of the management’s current laissez-faire approach might be in order.

After the interval, a comparatively rare outing for Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony. The ‘Winter Daydreams’ of its subtitle implies an unforced though rarely contrary take on formal precepts, as in an opening movement (oddly marked Allegro tranquillo) whose often portentous pauses were well integrated by Madaras into the cumulative symphonic flow. The CBSO woodwind came into own with the Adagio – its oboe melody among its composer’s most affecting, and not least when it returns at the movement’s climax in a mood of expansive if fateful grandeur.

Partly drawn from an earlier piano sonata, the Scherzo exudes a pert animation that Madaras judged to a nicety, as he did the wistful ruminations of its trio. Much the hardest movement to make cohere, the Finale unfolded persuasively from its sombre introduction to a celebratory Allegro replete with fugal episodes; the ensuing build-up (its effect not lost on Shostakovich) to the resounding restatement of its main theme duly capped by an apotheosis whose overkill was (rightly) kept well within limits, thereby setting the seal on this persuasive performance. For imaginative programming and convincing execution, Madaras is at the forefront among conductors of his generation – his rapport with the CBSO evident throughout. This should be equally true when Markus Stenz returns next week for a pairing of Schumann and Bruckner.

Click on the link to read more on the current CBSO concert season, and on the names for more on tenor Ian Bostridge and conductor Gergely Madaras. Click here for an interview Arcana conducted with composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir in 2023

Published post no.2,153 – Friday 19 April 2024

In concert – Stewart Goodyear, CBSO / Ilan Volkov: Ives, Zappa, Lewis & Gershwin

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Stewart Goodyear (piano), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Ilan Volkov (above)

Ives Three Places in New England (1911-14, rev. 1929)
Zappa Bob in Dacron and Sad Jane (1982-3)
Lewis Memex (2014)
Gershwin orch. Grofé Rhapsody in Blue (1924, rev. 1942)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 27 March 2024

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

Ilan Volkov is always a welcome presence on the Symphony Hall podium, and this evening he conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in a fascinating programme of works by American composers – three of them established in music notably removed from classical.

The concert was framed by what have now become repertoire pieces, but Ives’s Three Places in New England had to wait over half a century to be accorded this status. Using what sounded to be the most recent edition, Volkov stressed its late-Romantic impulsiveness and rhetorical eloquence, though some over-emphatic pauses or phrasing slightly undersold the cumulative majesty of The Saint Gaudens and coursing energy of Putnam’s Camp – which latter still teetered (rightly) on chaos at its close. If the build-up in The Housatonic at Stockbridge felt unduly precipitate, Rachel Pankhurst’s rendering of its cor anglais melody had ideal pathos.

The three decades since Frank Zappa’s untimely death have brought into focus his sheer range of musical preoccupations, though his pair of early 1980s albums with the London Symphony Orchestra made plain that being one of rock music’s finest guitarists and leading provocateurs was never enough. Despite their linkage via a ballet with its somewhat dubious scenario, Bob in Dacron and Sad Jane are individual entities and their respective two movements underline Zappa’s concern for musical and expressive diversity – whether in the reckless overkill of the male protagonist or halting fatalism of the female. Volkov secured dedicated playing from the CBSO as brought out Zappa’s debt to ‘third stream’ jazz as much as his modernist forebears.

George Lewis is another figure whose creativity ranges over multiple media – not least that of the orchestra which, thanks not least to Volkov’s advocacy, has gained some familiarity in the UK. Its title referring to a theoretical device for establishing connections across an otherwise unregulated body of information, Memex is typical of the composer through its complexity of textures which affords a heady virtuosity but also a measure of subtlety and inwardness, not least in those final stages when the earlier volatility gradually coalesces into something akin to resolution; as if all that information was, if not dispersed, at least finding discipline. Such, at least, was the impression left by this committed reading of a striking and absorbing piece.

It might have been a conceptual leap too far from here to Gershwin’s galvanizing of the ‘jazz age’ aesthetic almost a century earlier, though Rhapsody in Blue has lost relatively little of its edge during the interim – especially when Stewart Goodyear projected the steely spontaneity of its solo part with such gusto. Admittedly the large orchestral forces (a feature of each work heard tonight) lacked a degree of co-ordination in tutti sections, but Volkov was at one with his pianist in conveying the breezy and often brittle excitement of music which sounded as   if evolving in real-time – not least the final stages that emerged as a high-octane apotheosis.

No little excitement, then, was generated over the course of this performance as of this concert overall: just the sort of event the CBSO should be putting on each season, which latter would certainly be the poorer were artists such as Volkov not encouraged to follow their convictions.

Click on the link to read more on the current CBSO concert season, and on the names for more on pianist Stewart Goodyear, conductor Ilan Volkov and composers Frank Zappa and George Lewis.

Published post no.2,133 – Saturday 30 March 2024

In concert – Anu Komsi, CBSO / Sakari Oramo: Sibelius Tempest Suite & Sypmhony no.7; Richard Strauss & Merikanto

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Anu Komsi (soprano), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo (above)

Sibelius The Tempest (1925-6) – Suite no.1 Op.109/ 2
Richard Strauss Vier letzte Lieder, AV150 (1948)
Merikanto Ekho (1922)
Sibelius Symphony no.7 in C major Op. 105 (1923-4)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 28 February 2024

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

Could it really be 15 years since Sakari Oramo last conducted the orchestra of which he was music director for a decade? Time has passed, but his rapport with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was evident throughout what proved a well-planned and finely executed concert.

Sibelius featured prominently during Oramo’s tenure, with recorded and live cycles of the symphonies, so it was natural his music frame this programme. His music for The Tempest is the most diverse of his theatre works – the First Suite drawn from this lavish score opening with a searing evocation of The Oak Tree, before heading into a characterful Humoreske then Caliban’s Song with its telling bizarrerie. The Harvesters reminded of Sibelius’s gift for ‘light music’, as too the animated Canon and insinuating Scene, to which the plangent Berceuse then ominous Interlude made for startling contrast. A truncated version of The Tempest music that provided the prelude followed on with due seamlessness – its teetering on the metaphorical edge brought up abruptly if convincingly in this gripping performance.

Anu Komsi (above) then joined the orchestra for Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs – a sequence which often gains emotional gravitas as it proceeds, though a slight edginess in Frühling gave it greater expressive ambivalence prior to the fatalism of September – the most perfectly realized of these songs. The growing rapture of Beim Schlafengehen featured a poised violin solo from Eugene Tzikindelean, then Komsi gave of her eloquent best in Im Abendrot – its euphonious postlude accorded suitably spacious treatment by Oramo as this evanesces towards eternity.

Komsi returned after the interval with what must have been a first hearing in Birmingham for Ekho, a short but arresting scena by Finnish composer Aarre Merikanto. Written just after his opera Juha, at the start of his most innovative period, this draws on the example of Sibelius’s Luonnotar along with the post-Impressionism of Koechlin and Roussel. Its intricately detailed textures complement a vocal line as virtuosic technically as it is audacious expressively, one with which Komsi was in her element as this music heads almost intuitively to a furtive close.

Fascinating to recall while Merikanto was pursuing so fractured a musical discourse, Sibelius was working towards his most integrated statement. Oramo has given many performances of the Seventh Symphony, but the present one felt exceptional in the ease and inevitability of its formal follow-through. The eliding from one section to the next was realized with a rightness which, as with the motivic constituents from which this work emerges, never drew attention to itself other than during moments of greatest expressive focus – notably those appearances of the trombone theme which ensure unity, even when the music retreats from its emotional apex into a coda not so much final as immovable. Nor was this achieved through conscious interpretation, Oramo setting a course that allowed the musicians simply to play the music.

This impressive performance rounded off a no less impressive evening. Before the last work, Oramo spoke about the significance his CBSO tenure had for his conducting and his regret this ‘reunion’ had taken so long. Hopefully his next appearance will not be so long in coming.

Click on the link to read more on the current CBSO concert season, and on the names for more on soprano Anu Komsi and conductor Sakari Oramo.

Published post no.2,106 – Sunday 3 March 2024

In concert – Maria Dueñas, CBSO / Kazuki Yamada: Beethoven Violin Concerto & Elgar ‘Enigma’ Variations

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Maria Dueñas (violin, above), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada (below)

Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major Op. 61 (1806)
Elgar Variations on an Original Theme, ‘Enigma’, Op. 36 (1898-9)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 22 February 2024

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture (c) Tam Lan Truong

Having given its ‘first part’ yesterday evening, Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra moved on to ‘Elgar & Beethoven: Part 2’ this evening, with an astute coupling of the latter’s Violin Concerto being followed by the former’s ‘Enigma’ Variations.

Anyone having heard Maria Dueñas in Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole at last year’s Proms will know she is a violinist destined for great things, as was reinforced her take on the Beethoven. Admittedly she and Yamada were not consistently as one in its lengthy first movement – the soloist’s tendency to rhapsodize and to tease out expressive nuance jarring, however slightly, with the conductor’s forthright assertiveness in tuttis. Yet there was no absence of insight on either part, such undeniable eloquence continuing through a central Larghetto that was more adagio as Dueñas conceived it, though which still conveyed a rapt inwardness. The ensuing Rondo lifted this mood appreciably, its impulsive main theme and whimsical episodes deftly eliding into a purposeful traversal of a finale whose conclusion was nothing if not decisive.

As with her recent recording of this concerto, Dueñas played her own cadenzas. That for the first movement had Bach-like deliberation and a harmonic astringency which readily held the attention; if that connecting the latter two movements seemed a little too protracted, and that towards the close of the finale rather offset its overall momentum, there could be no doubting her underlying conviction. She duly acknowledged the considerable applause with a suitably serene, never cloying arrangement for violin and strings of Fauré’s early song Après un rêve.

In his initial remarks, Yamada recalled conducting a Japanese brass band in the First Pomp and Circumstance March as his first experience with Elgar, and this account of the ‘Enigma Variations amply reaffirmed his identity with the composer. Not that this was an integrated or seamless account – Yamada’s halting, even ambivalent take on the Theme intensified in the first variation and, while the swifter variations had no lack of character or impetus, it was in such as the fifth variation’s suffused earnestness with whimsy that this reading left its mark.

On one level the Enigma is a forerunner of the ‘concerto for orchestra’ with its emphasizing various soloists – not least viola in the sixth variation, dextrously negotiated by Adam Römer, or cello in the 12th where Eduardo Vassallo was at his ruminative best. Initially a little stolid, Nimrod built to a culmination of real pathos, and even finer was Yamada’s take on the 10th variation for an intermezzo of unfailing poise and deftness. A tangible atmosphere pervaded the 13th variation – uncertainty as to its dedicatee just part of its fascination, with those veiled allusions to Mendelssohn elegantly rendered by Oliver Janes. From here to the final variation in all its confidence and anticipation was to be recall the impact this music made at the end of the 19th century, Yamada steering it with unforced rightness towards a resounding peroration. Overall, a performance full of insight and one hopes that Yamada will be continuing his Elgar exploration in future seasons. Next week, though, brings two concerts for which former music director Sakari Oramo will be returning to this orchestra for the first time in some 15 years.

Click on the link to read more on the current CBSO concert season, and on the names for more on violinist Maria Dueñas and conductor Kazuki Yamada. Arcana’s Listening to Beethoven series will reach the Violin Concerto soon!

Published post no.2,101 – Tuesday 27 February 2024