• Blog
  • Clients
  • About Me

Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Birmingham Post

Review: James Ehnes plays Bach

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bach, Barber Institute, Birmingham Post, James Ehnes, Reviews

Bach

JSB

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at the Barber Institute on Wednesday 15 November 2017.


Ah, Bach. That’s what The Bluffer’s Guide to Music suggests you say if you’re ever stumped for opinions on old JS. He’s the greatest composer in Western music, you see. Everybody says so. And if it’s your job to have opinions on classical music, and you’re a Bachsceptic – you don’t care for fugues, say, or your enthusiasm for Lutheran dogma wears thin after the first hundred cantatas – you learn to keep that to yourself. What’s that, a whole evening of unaccompanied violin music? Ah, Bach!

That said, if any violinist could convince a doubter, it’d be James Ehnes – a virtuoso of golden tone and old-school brilliance, who never lets either ego or (commanding) intelligence get between him and the composer. He cut a smart if unassuming figure as he walked out at the Barber Institute. And then; well, the first thing you noticed was his sound – rich, firm, lustrous and layered. He’s generous with vibrato: there wasn’t a single coarse sound. From the very first notes of the B minor Partita, his violin sang.

But it danced, too. For every movement like the Fugue of the A minor Sonata – a study in controlled tension – there was something like the whirling verve that he brought to the finales of the A minor and C major Sonatas. Ehnes never imposed himself: the character here sprang from Bach, and it was unstinting, with the translucent sound Ehnes found for the A minor Sonata giving way to a solar radiance in the C major Sonata’s massive fugue. And every note felt honest. I’ve never seen a Barber Institute audience give a standing ovation before – and given the quality of so many of the Barber’s recitals, that’s saying something. Especially from a Bachsceptic.

Review: The Golden Dragon (Music Theatre Wales)

16 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Music Theatre Wales, Reviews

The Golden Dragon - credit Clive Barda

Male cast member playing a female but racially non-specific cricket.

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is a review of a performance at Birmingham Rep on Tuesday 3 October 2017, originally published in the Birmingham Post on 5 October.


The Golden Dragon is a “Thai – Chinese –  Vietnamese” restaurant. Four chefs stand at their stations, dicing and frying. A fifth – The Little One – sits on the floor chopping peppers and pak choi, a martyr to toothache. And behind them sits the orchestra of Music Theatre Wales, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson: unlikely kitchen staff in aprons and headbands. Peter Eötvös’s 2014 chamber opera has a striking premise, and director Michael McCarthy’s production establishes it with brilliant economy.

Then it’s down to the cast and Eötvös’s glistening, juddering score. Metallic percussion and guiro become the clang of knives, synthesiser chords billow into the air like fragrant steam, and squirming clarinets evoke The Little One’s nagging pain. His rotten tooth is the centre of a nest of interlocked tales of exile, exploitation and economic migration. And amidst the restlessness of Eötvös’s music, he’s the one who finds a macabre sort of transcendence, and the opera’s final, darkly beautiful flight of lyricism.

It’s all performed with needlepoint precision and exuberant physical verve by a multi-tasking cast: Lucy Schaufer’s Woman Over Sixty had a rough-cut compassion, while Daniel Norman and Johnny Herford never overcooked the comedic potential of tattooed, bearded men doubling as hair-flicking air stewardesses. Llio Evans’s Little One was unquestionably the heart of the drama, tender-voiced and poignantly resigned to his / her fate.

But for all its inventiveness The Golden Dragon left a sour aftertaste, even beyond its stereotyped representation of Chinese restaurants as unhygienic sweatshops, or the fact that only the western characters are permitted names. Librettist Roland Schimmelpfennig’s mixture of narration and direct speech means that the characters never acquire more depth than a cartoon: a serious problem in a story that uses sexual violence as a rhetorical device. Still, a programme note in unreadable academic prose justifies it all by reference to (who else?) Bertolt Brecht. So that’s alright then.

Review: Gerontius at the Three Choirs

01 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Elgar, Reviews, Roderick Williams, Three Choirs Festival, Worcester

Worcester Gerontius

Just before Prince Charles arrived

 

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Worcester Cathedral on Tuesday 25 July 2017.


There’s something very special about hearing The Dream of Gerontius in Worcester Cathedral during the Three Choirs Festival. “There is music in the air”, said Elgar: and when the very stones of the Cathedral seem to vibrate, as they did tonight when the organ held a deep, quiet pedal-note at the end of Part One, you can almost sense Sir Edward’s invisible presence.

So this performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Festival Chorus under Martyn Brabbins had a lot going for it even before a single note had been played. With the performers located (for the first time in many years) at the east end of the nave, the clarity and transparency of the orchestral sound was evident from the outset, as Brabbins gently blended the misty colours of Elgar’s Prelude.

That set the tone for a performance that was expansive (new layout or not, the Cathedral acoustic doesn’t allow much leeway on that front), but consistently lyrical and loving. David Butt Philip was almost a bel canto Gerontius, and while his voice felt perhaps too fresh for the dying man of Part One, his vocal radiance and sense of wonder made Part Two glow. As the Angel, Susan Bickley had “something too of sternness”, cresting her Alleluias like a Valkyrie – but found limitless compassion in her great Farewell. Roderick Williams was both a warmly expressive Priest, and a majestic Angel of the Agony.

Chorus and Orchestra responded in kind, with the Girl Choristers of Worcester Cathedral giving a gleaming golden top to a Festival Chorus whose pianissimos were luminous, even if they struggled for clarity in the Demons’ Chorus and Praise to the Holiest. But the spirit, clearly, was willing: and in The Dream of Gerontius, nothing matters more.

Review: CBSO / Canellakis / Tiberghien

02 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, CBSO, Cedric Tiberghien, Karina Canellakis, Reviews, Symphony Hall

CBSO 2 c. Upstream Photography resized

CBSO: hangin’ with my homies

 The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Symphony Hall on Wednesday 17 May 2017.


 

We need to hear more César Franck. Historically speaking, Debussy is meaningless without him – and his blend of fervent Wagnerian harmonies with high Gothic grandeur makes Franck’s orchestral music intoxicating listening. So huge plaudits to the CBSO’s guest conductor Karina Canellakis for opening her Birmingham debut with Franck’s terrific symphonic poem Le Chasseur Maudit. With its hell-bound horns and eerie moments of calm, it’s a real white-knuckle ride, and the CBSO sounded as if they were enjoying every bar.

As well they might: in her enthusiasm, Canellakis went at it with off-the-scale energy, generating within the first few minutes the kind of volumes that some CBSO chief conductors reserve for the climax of Mahler’s Eighth. She’d dialled it back slightly by the final item in the concert, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. This was an intelligent bit of programming, with the baleful chimes of Rachmaninoff’s finale echoing the Franck, and Canellakis conducted with a powerful sense of direction. I’ve never been more convinced that this piece is a symphony in disguise, and the CBSO’s strings were so lush that you felt you could almost reach out and squeeze the sound.

In between, Cédric Tiberghien was the soloist in Saint-Saëns’ Fifth Piano Concerto, the “Egyptian”. Given that the CBSO won a Gramophone Award for its Saint-Saëns concerto recordings a few years ago, you’d think we’d hear this more often too. But its blend of Parisian glitter and sunny orientalism make it worth the wait, and Tiberghien played it with a winningly light touch – and in the sultry second movement, a surprising amount of muscle. Canellakis accompanied with loving care, reinforcing the impression that this is one young conductor it’d definitely be worth asking back.

Review: Orchestra of the Swan

02 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Birmingham Town Hall, Orchestra of the Swan, Reviews

Orchestra of the Swan

Orchestra of the Swan

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Town Hall on Wednesday 24 May 2017.


A change, they say, is as good as a rest. It’s rare that we get to hear the Orchestra of the Swan conducted by anyone other than David Curtis. But it’s no reflection upon Curtis’s tireless work to say that under the American guest conductor Franz Anton Krager, they sounded like a band renewed. Krager served as OOTS’s principal guest conductor back in the noughties, but this was his Town Hall debut, and on the strength of this performance it’d be good to have him back rather sooner next time.

True, Schubert’s Fifth Symphony and the teenage Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto aren’t the stuff of which ovations are made. Still less, the symphony formerly known as Mozart’s 37th – actually a work by Michael Haydn to which Mozart, for reasons known only to himself, added a short introduction. Under Krager, OOTS played it in big, buoyant phrases, propelled by buccaneering horns and a real feeling for this underrated music’s ebullient personality.

That verve and sense of colour were even more noticeable in the Schubert, with some of the most stylish playing I’ve heard from OOTS. Krager brought out the shadows in this usually sunny symphony, letting woodwind lines sing through the texture, and weighting the stormier string passages towards the basses to generate a powerful momentum. It all went with a terrific swing, as did Jennifer Pike’s larger-than-life account of the concerto – delivered by Pike with a glinting tone and a series of brilliant, startlingly Romantic cadenzas. Krager and the OOTS were more than ready to meet her on the same terms. Played by a symphony orchestra, these three pieces can seem like miniatures. Here, they became whole worlds.

Review: Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra

02 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Reviews, Stravinsky

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Symphony Hall on Tuesday 16 May 2017.


It’s not every day you hear a sheng played by a virtuoso – at least, not in Birmingham. This Chinese instrument looks to western eyes like a miniature organ played through a bassoon mouthpiece. It sounds something like an accordion. And sensitively played by the Beijing-trained Lei Jia, it was the centrepiece of this first ever Birmingham concert by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra under its music director of 14 years, Long Yu.

Strictly speaking, Jia shared the limelight with cellist Jian Wang; the work in question, Duo by Lin Zhao, is effectively a double concerto for sheng, cello and orchestra. Inspired by the ancient Chinese story of the monk Xuanzang’s journey to the West (remember the 1970s TV series Monkey?), it’s a lush, lyrical score with melancholy overtones, and Wang in particular played it with sincerity and considerable refinement. After the interval came another discovery (for me, anyway): Xiaogang Ye’s Cantonese Suite. The subtle, fantastic orchestral colourings of these four instantly-appealing settings of Cantonese folk melodies sounded uncannily French; the finale, Thunder in Drought, was a dead ringer for Ravel’s Laideronnette.

Both these works were GSO commissions – and how refreshing, amidst the endless parade of Tchaikovsky-touting Russian orchestras and Czech bands with their inevitable New Worlds, to encounter a touring orchestra with a bit of imagination and daring. The risk paid off handsomely; and the GSO’s brilliantly colourful playing carried over into a vivid account of Stravinsky’s 1919 Firebird suite and a disarmingly fresh and forthright performance of Britten’s Four Sea Interludes. Wonderful, too, to see the players smiling and swaying in two deliciously-played encores based on Chinese folk melodies. Who says all orchestras sound the same these days?

Review: Patience (English Touring Opera)

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, English Touring Opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, Reviews, Wolverhampton Grand Theatre

Patience ETO

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on Monday 10 April 2017.


You have to be pretty silly to take Gilbert and Sullivan seriously. But a lot sillier not to. With the CBSO’s superb concert performance of The Yeomen of the Guard still fresh in the memory, English Touring Opera’s staging of Patience arrived in Wolverhampton (it visits Cheltenham and Warwick shortly). Patience is G&S’s satire on Aestheticism: the 19th century fad for languid sighs, poetic airs and generally wafting about trying to live up to one’s blue china.

And if we don’t see it more often, that’s probably why. Gilbert’s never sharper and Sullivan’s score is Mendelssohn-level ravishing, but unless you’ve got a sensational Reginald Bunthorne (G&S’s version of Oscar Wilde), you haven’t really got a show. The great news is that ETO have. Bradley Travis drifts in wearing a velvet beret and brandishing a peacock-feather quill. With a hand to the brow and an infinite variety of languorous poses, he sashays away with every scene in which he appears.

Which, given the quality of the rest of the cast, is saying something. Ross Ramgobin is dapper and droll as his rival Grosvenor, Lauren Zolezzi is picture-perfect as the milkmaid Patience and Valerie Reid gets the audience very much on side as Lady Jane – another of Gilbert’s ladies of a certain age. The singing throughout is both clear and expressive; Ramgobin’s baritone is particularly handsome and Zolezzi shapes a line with real style.

Add lovesick maidens, a detachment of heavy dragoons who deliver patter songs with rollicking vigour, Liam Steel’s lively direction and Timothy Burke’s luminous, feather-light conducting, and it’s hard to imagine Patience being revived more persuasively. Or indeed a funnier, fresher or more delightful night at the opera. Abandon any lingering prejudices about G&S: this was delicious.

Review: Louis Lortie at Birmingham Conservatoire

17 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham Post, Chopin, Reviews

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Conservatoire on Tuesday 17 March 2017.


 

ABH

Not in here. It’s just a huge hole in the ground now.

These are the end times for the old Birmingham Conservatoire building. The demolition crews circle, and all eyes are already turned to the promised land of Eastside. But artistically, the Conservatoire is already well more than halfway there. For proof, look at the sheer calibre of the artists giving this spring’s concerts in the doomed Recital Hall: Jennifer Pike, the Heath Quartet, and on this occasion the eminent French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie, playing music by George Benjamin and Chopin.

This is not a time for sentimentality, and Lortie’s Chopin was defiantly unsentimental. No romantic languour here; the emphasis was on tone-colour and rhythmic clarity. Lortie instantly and unfussily found the character of each of Chopin’s 24 Preludes Op.28: letting the melodic line of the swifter pieces glint like a darting fish in a crystal stream, making bass notes snarl and thunder, and in the gentler Preludes, allowing the melody to find its own level: falling easily over its accompaniment without any undue prodding or tugging.

Lortie can generate a blindingly intense tone on a single note, and after an emphatic finish to Prelude No.12, he seemed to expand into the second dozen. These were freer, more fantastic, and often fierce, and the cycle peaked with a Prelude No.15 that moved from limpid tenderness to a central climax of blazing severity. The softness and transparency of No.23’s spring shower felt all the sweeter for it.

George Benjamin’s Shadowlines – frigid, angular studies in grey – didn’t hold up well next to Chopin. But Lortie approached them with the same focus, offsetting the harshness of the musical foreground with misty echoes in the left hand. A musical reminder that there is, after all, a world elsewhere.

Review: RLPO / Petrenko & Daniil Trifonov

08 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Daniil Trifonov, Reviews, RLPO, Symphony Hall, Vasily Petrenko

rlpo

My old pals the RLPO looking weirdly wonky

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Conservatoire on Wednesday 1 February 2017.


Brummie pride manifests itself in some odd ways. It’s fantastic that we’ll pack out Symphony Hall for the home team, Mirga and the CBSO. But offered the chance to hear an artist as remarkable as the young Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, to leave banks of seats empty seems very like cutting off your nose to spite your face. True, Trifonov has been extravagantly hyped since winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2011. But what his performance with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra demonstrated beyond any doubt is that sometimes, hype is justified.

Trifonov played the Cinderella of Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, the Fourth. His tone is rich and bright; he sculpts phrases as well as sings them, and he can flash in an instant from sonorous power to quicksilver brilliance. The effect, with Trifonov trailing luminous streams of fantasy across Rachmaninoff’s twilit skies, and Petrenko and his players supplying yearning, lovingly-phrased string tone and powerful rhythmic kicks as required, was as poetic as it was thrilling.

Petrenko and the RLPO had opened with a boisterous account of Stravinsky’s Jeu de Cartes, and devoted the second half to Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. The RLPO has an utterly distinctive sound, at its most recognisable when the lower strings glow softly out of the silence. But these players can bite too, and in the monumental first movement Petrenko found a compelling tension between lyricism and steel-toothed aggression.

The scherzo threw coloured sparks in all directions, and the unstoppable machine-music of the finale developed a terrifying momentum. I have it on unimpeachable authority that this performance was a good ten minutes slower than when the CBSO Youth Orchestra played the Fifth a few years back. But I wouldn’t have guessed.

 

Review: Christophe Pregardien & Christophe Schnackertz

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham Post, Reviews

ABH

This venue no longer exists.

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Conservatoire on Tuesday 18 October.


Sweet are the uses of adversity. It’s not that there was anything wrong with Christoph Prégardien and Christoph Schnackertz’s recital at the Conservatoire before, five songs into Britten’s Winter Words, all the lights failed.

It’s just that (after some smart work from the Conservatoire’s concert management), Prégardien and Schnackertz handled the situation with such grace and good humour that everything suddenly felt a little different – as if a bond had been established between audience and performers. The pair gamely performed the rest of their programme by daylight alone, at the mercy of passing clouds and to the accompaniment of metallic creaks from the slowly cooling spotlights. At the end, the audience erupted in cheers.

As well they might. Prégardien’s tenor is a lovely thing; flexible, fluid, with no break in tone quality between registers – it’s elegantly focussed in all areas. At the top, it’s ringing without being strident. At the bottom, where it shades towards a baritone, it’s marvellously oaky. I was reminded of a clarinet, but that’s to overlook Prégardien’s alertness to the text. He characterises lightly, with tone-colours – a quiet, confiding glow at the end of Schubert’s Um Mitternacht, a mix of fragility and robustness in Britten’s At The Railway Station, Upway.

But that’s all rolled into a long, sweet, singing line, deftly moulded to Schnackertz’s crisp, vivid accompaniments, complete with splashes of impressionist colour in Britten’s Midnight on the Great Western and a heroic swagger in Schubert’s Lebensmut. Each song came across as a single, natural whole, and under any circumstances this would have been a deeply rewarding recital. Shame and shame again, though, on whoever let their mobile phone ring mid-concert. No excuse: end of.

← Older posts

Contact Details

38 Beacon Street
Lichfield
United Kingdom
Staffordshire
WS13 7AJ

07754 068427

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Archives

  • June 2020 (1)
  • October 2019 (2)
  • January 2018 (1)
  • December 2017 (2)
  • November 2017 (2)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • August 2017 (2)
  • July 2017 (1)
  • June 2017 (3)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (2)
  • February 2017 (2)
  • December 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (3)
  • August 2016 (1)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (3)
  • March 2016 (6)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (3)
  • December 2015 (6)
  • November 2015 (4)
  • October 2015 (6)
  • September 2015 (5)
  • August 2015 (5)
  • July 2015 (8)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (12)
  • April 2015 (1)
  • February 2015 (1)
  • January 2015 (2)
  • December 2014 (4)
  • November 2014 (3)

Archives

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy