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2024-03-24
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2022-10-17 08:21:00
Review of BBC Philharmonic 'centennial' concert
[…] North West is celebrating 100 years of paying musicians to perform for it, which is a good thing whether you call that having an orchestra or not. The Philharmonic marked this with a great performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Bridgewater Hall, conducted by Eva Ollikainen. It was full-bodied Beethoven, with 60 strings and effectively triple woodwind, and the vocal line-up of Tuuli Takala, Kitty Whately, Steve Davislim and Simon Shibambu, abetted by the CBSO Chorus, made a strong body indeed. Big bodies can still be light on their toes. Ollikainen brought energetic tempi to the first two movements, resulting in playing of incisiveness, vehemence even, and the timps pounded by Paul Turner were emphatically prominent in both. The Adagio was all suavity and songfulness, and the finale eloquent, full of gloriously realized counterpoint and surging and bounding in rhythmic energy to its climax. Before it there were just […]
2021-08-05 06:30:49
Debuts on the podium, a final season, centenary premieres and The Cunning Little Vixen: CBSO launches Autumn 2021
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (Photo Hannah Blake-Fathers) The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) is opening its 2021/22 season with a celebration of being able to make music together. Principal guest conductor Kazuki Yamada will be leading forces including the orchestra, the CBSO Chorus and CBSO Youth Chorus, the three groups together for the first time since early 2020, in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Poulenc’s Gloria and Saint-Saens' Symphony No. 3 (with organist Anna Lapwood).2021/22 is Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla's final one as music director and her concerts this Autumn nclude Faure's Requiem (in memory of the lives lost throughout Covid-19) and a concert performance of Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen with Elena Tsallagova in the title role plus Roland Wood as the Forester, which the orchestra will be touring to Dortmund, Hamburg and Paris. Finnegan Downie Dear (winner of the 2020 Mahler Competition) will be conducting the orchestra […]
2020-04-22 09:48:39
Rating: 0 The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has launched a free ticket scheme for NHS workers following the coronavirus lockdown. 5000 tickets will be made available at selected concerts, which NHS workers can register for via the CBSO website. Around 10% of the CBSO Chorus work for the NHS. The chorus today has released a video of its members performing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ from their various homes across the UK. The full list of concerts will be available at a later date. Related articles: Virtual […]
2019-02-15 19:14:00
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla : Peer Gynt and other choral stars
Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt a choral blockbuster ? Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducted Grieg's full incidental music to Ibsen's play with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, showing how the choral sections make a difference to the way the drama is received. Peer Gynt is so well-known through extracts that the original context is lost. Not a fjord in sight, except in a metaphorical sense. Peer Gynt isn't a hero. Ibsen's original as a Leseopera, an opera to be read and meditated upon, not "just" entertainment. He satirized aspects of Norwegian mentality in the period when the country was a colony of Denmark. Peer's adventures are fraught with danger, supernatural as well as physical, The innate tension between moments of beauty and wildness creates a dynamic which is fundamental to interpretation. Gražinytė-Tyla's approach brought out the power that lies beneath the surface : a vivid reading, bristling with energy. Not for nothing […]
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