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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: CBSO

Forward, looking backward

19 Friday Jun 2020

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Anniversary, BBC, Birmingham, CBSO, Christmas, Jessica Duchen, John Suchet, Norman Lebrecht, Symphony Hall, The Spectator

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It was very wet in December. That’s my excuse for those shoes.

Life comes at you fast, they say: Forward was published in November and for the next few weeks it seemed like there was hardly a night that I wasn’t at a CBSO concert or at CBSO Centre, signing copies. It was exhausting but huge fun: not just because of the many kind comments about the book itself, but also because it was a chance to meet and chat to the CBSO’s supporters. That was always my favourite part of the job when I was duty manager for concerts at CBSO Centre – the enthusiasm that people feel for “their” orchestra is genuinely touching, and the stories that they have to tell of their concert-going activities are endlessly enjoyable. I spoke to ex-players, ex-singers, and audience members with memories stretching back to the George Weldon era in the late 1940s. Since I always intended the book to be a centenary gift from the orchestra to its friends and followers, this was enormously gratifying.

Maria & Forward

My fabulous colleague Maria made the whole thing possible (and discovered most of the best pictures). When the  very first copy of the book arrived at CBSO Centre, the occasion  seemed to call for at least one bottle of fizz.

But it was still something of a surprise to realise that it was actually out there, making its way in the world and being read far beyond Birmingham. I popped into Waterstones on New Street and Foyles in Grand Central to sign copies. “It’s nice to have something in the local history section that isn’t Peaky Blinders” commented the manager. I gave an interval interview about the history of the orchestra on BBC Radio 3, and recorded a series of short films for the CBSO website. The Spectator kindly asked me to write something about the history of the CBSO for its Christmas edition, and BBC Music Magazine followed suit shortly afterwards.

Then there were the reviews, which if I’m honest I dreaded – but since I dish it out regularly as a critic, I was hardly in a position to expect sympathy. In fact, reviewers seem to have been very positive. I was particularly delighted to be reviewed in The Oldie; Richard Osborne wrote that “Such books can be a terrific bore but this is a gem: a lovingly researched, entertainingly written and handsomely designed and printed volume”. Jessica Duchen gave the book one of her end-of-year personal “Awards” on her long-running blog: “gorgeously produced, seamlessly readable, superbly expressed and full of splendiferous anecdotes. A wonderful anniversary tribute to the orchestra, with the lightly-worn engaging touch of the insider who knows exactly how it really works”.

John Quinn, on MusicWeb International, did the book proud: “Richard Bratby has told the story uncommonly well. His style is eminently readable and clear. It’s obvious that the book has been scrupulously researched.” Nigel Simeone, in Gramophone found it “thoroughly engaging” and Norman Lebrecht, in The Spectator (a review of which, like the Gramophone write-up, I knew nothing in advance), noted – with typical acuity – that “no nation state in modern times has chosen great leaders so unerringly well as the CBSO”. BBC Music Magazine gave it five stars.

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John Suchet was kind enough to endorse the book, so it was a lovely coincidence that we both ended up signing at the same table at Symphony Hall on 22 November. One purchaser wanted John to sign Forward instead of me: and who can blame them?

Since then…well, we all know the story and the fact that the book is currently only available for purchase online is of no significance beside the fact that the CBSO’s long-planned centenary celebrations are on hold and that everyone involved with the orchestra is intensely, anxiously trying to find a way to salvage something. There isn’t much comfort to be had in the current situation, and I’ve never believed that history repeats itself.

But one constant of the CBSO’s history has been the depth of the support that it has received from the community that it serves; that, and a near-miraculous ability for doing great things under intense pressure. The CBSO has turned a crisis into a triumph quite a few times over the last 100 years. Things are worryingly quiet at the moment – though as the orchestra’s CEO Stephen Maddock pointed out a few weeks ago, if you think planning a concert season is hard work, just try cancelling one. But we wait; we hope; we keep the faith. Let’s hope the dawn is not far away.

Potting history

30 Wednesday Oct 2019

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Birmingham, CBSO, Forward, George Weldon, Research, Ruth Gipps

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An unconventional guide to the CBSO’s 1949 season – commissioned by Ruth Gipps and published in “Play On”, the orchestra’s short-lived first in-house magazine.

Forward: 100 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is published by Elliott & Thompson on 29 November 2019, and is available from the CBSO website from 14 November 2019. I will be signing copies at the CBSO concert at Symphony Hall on Saturday 23 November.

A few weeks ago I wrote a short article about the writing process for the CBSO’s in-house magazine, Music Stand. Here it is:


It’s January 2018. Stephen Maddock and Abby Corfan have just asked me to write a new centenary history of the CBSO, to be published in November 2019. And I’m sitting there in Starbucks at Symphony Hall: flattered, of course. Excited, obviously. But also, if I’m honest, feeling a little bit like I’ve just been asked to level Barr Beacon with a teaspoon.

I mean, where to start? There’s already one excellent history of the CBSO. Crescendo!, by Beresford King-Smith, was published in 1995 and it’s a tour-de-force – unsurprisingly, since Beresford was on the CBSO staff for more than half of the orchestra’s entire history, and also created (and for many years curated) the CBSO’s archive. I’d be drawing heavily on his work whatever I did, so I headed over to Sutton Coldfield for a chat. Generous as always, Beresford gave his blessing, and encouraged me to use many of the terrific unpublished anecdotes that never made it into the final version of Crescendo!

Still, the question remained: what could a new book bring to the party? Obviously, I’d need to chronicle the 25 years (a quarter of the CBSO’s existence) that have elapsed since Crescendo! appeared. As a staff member from 1998 to 2015, I’d witnessed many of those years at first hand, but if there’s one thing that a History degree teaches you, it’s that personal memories are unreliable things. Eleven months isn’t a long time to research and write a book, so I began by scheduling interviews with as representative a selection of long-serving CBSO veterans as time and travel allowed.

I was thrilled that each of our living music directors (Simon, Sakari, Andris and Mirga) made time to talk to me – and startled by how candid they were. Former Chief Exec Ed Smith plied me with excellent wine at his London club; Sheila Clarke didn’t hold back (I’d hoped she wouldn’t); Mike Seal spilled the beans on the CBSO football team, and of course Stan Smith – the 96-year old father of our CBSO “family”, who played in the first violins from the 1950s through to the Rattle era – had some irreplaceable memories to share. Hearing about the premiere of Britten’s War Requiem from someone who actually played in it isn’t so much a perk of the job as an unforgettable privilege.

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But as I dug back beyond living memory, the archives took over – and that’s where it got really intriguing. I was too late to talk to Louis Frémaux (even if he’d been willing), but a personal statement, enbargoed during his lifetime, means that for the first time we’re able to read his side of the controversy that led to his sudden resignation in March 1978. Further back, through the music directorships of Hugo Rignold and Andrzej Panufnik, the Holocaust survivor Rudolf Schwarz and the former racing driver George Weldon; well, the more I rooted around, the more vividly they sprang to life. And then on past Leslie Heward (I’d love to have heard him conduct live) and a youthful Adrian Boult, to 1920 and the orchestra’s founder, the brilliant but clearly maddening Appleby Matthews.

I wanted to tell this story in full colour. When I was duty manager at CBSO Centre, I loved chatting to audience members about the orchestra, and I’ve tried to recreate the pleasure of those conversations – to put together a proper 100th birthday present for our audience, a lively and entertaining narrative with no specialist knowledge required. Along the way, we’ve aimed to share as many treasures from the archive as possible. Picking out the illustrations (there are over 120, many unseen for decades) has been huge fun (Maria Howes, of the marketing team, has a real eye for a quirky visual). Stephen was also anxious for me to explore some of the bigger themes of the CBSO’s first century: there are chapters devoted to touring, recording, new music and the Chorus. Much of the established history of UK orchestras is, in reality, merely the story of London orchestras. In the areas of public funding, education work and opportunities for women, Birmingham was decades ahead of the field.

So when I’ve encountered someone particularly interesting, I’ve paused to enjoy their company. Orchestras attract outsize personalities, and the CBSO story is full of them, from founding father Granville Bantock and his homicidal parakeet Scheherazade, to second oboe Ruth Gipps, who’s only now starting to receive her due as a major post-war composer. I’ve tried to let the audience have its say too – remembering always that this is Birmingham’s orchestra, rooted in its city, and growing and changing with it. Who’s to say that a concert in Vienna’s Musikverein touched more lives than one at Saltley Coliseum – or whether Elgar got a bigger ovation than AR Rahman? (spoiler alert: he didn’t). There are so many tales to tell that we’ll never run out of new perspectives. I’ve chosen the ones that I enjoyed the most; and I really hope that you enjoy them too.

Forward

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Andris Nelsons, Birmingham, CBSO, Forward, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Sakari Oramo, Simon Rattle

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Forward: 100 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is published by Elliott and Thompson on 29 November 2019, and is available from the CBSO website on 14 November 2019.

It’s been a while since I wrote here, and the only real excuse I can offer is that in January 2018 I was commissioned by Stephen Maddock and Abby Corfan of the CBSO to write a new illustrated history of the orchestra to celebrate its centenary in 2020. It was a thrilling commission to receive, but also an overwhelming one. With a copy deadline of Christmas 2018 – and no relaxation in my usual working schedule – that meant devoting almost all of my free time in 2018 to research in the CBSO Archive, reading some 61 books on the general subject, conducting interviews with over 30 living witnesses of the CBSO story (including Sir Simon Rattle, Andris Nelsons, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Sakari Oramo and Simon Halsey), and then untangling various (often conflicting) narratives to write the story – trying all the while to make it both historically rigorous and an entertaining read. The aim was to create a sort of ‘100th birthday gift’ from the CBSO to its supporters: something that they could genuinely enjoy.

And then, after submitting the manuscript, there was almost as much work to be done again: proofreading, rewriting and discussing the design with my brilliantly sympathetic and patient editor Olivia at Elliott and Thompson; then seeking out around 100 historical images and obtaining the necessary legal permissions – a task in which I was helped, with enormous patience, imagination and enthusiasm, by my old CBSO colleague Maria Howes. The CBSO Archive is full of rarely-seen treasures; the aim was to get a few of them out there for people to enjoy. This sort of thing, for example:

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CBSO associate conductor Harold Gray rehearses a group of management and music staff in Haydn’s ‘Toy Symphony’ some time in the 1970s – percussionist Annie Oakley (left) assists.

You wouldn’t imagine how much legwork is involved – even obtaining the necessary permissions for the cover image, Concerto by Alexander Walker, took us about two months of research. Who owns the intellectual property of a deceased Catholic monk, who had taken a vow of poverty? This was exactly the sort of thing I didn’t expect to learn when I started out on this project, and which kept me, Maria, Abby, and Olivia and her team busy right through until the end of last month (Even the index required weeks of work). Whereupon we all breathed an enormous sigh of relief and I, for one, cleared off on holiday to look at more Austro-Hungarian relics in Transylvania.

 

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Even the title took some thought and a few drafts. Forward is the motto of the City of Birmingham, and the book is about the city as much as its orchestra. The two cannot be separated and both share the same ambitious, forward-looking, sometimes impatient outlook – a subject that I’ve written on before now.

Anyway, it’s with the printers now – and rather to my surprise I feel distinctly nervous. It feels a bit like waiting to go onstage; there’s already been some press and part of me is terrified to see what glitches and howlers we missed (there are always some), just as an equal, if quieter, part of me is excited to see how people react. Above all, I hope that readers enjoy it, and that it deepens their enjoyment of and appreciation of the CBSO. It’s on sale from the CBSO website from 14 November and from Amazon and all good real-world bookstores from 28 November 2019. I may well be talking about it again…

Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s Box of Delights

14 Thursday Dec 2017

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Birmingham Town Hall, Carol Symphony, CBSO, Christmas, Leslie Heward, Victor Hely-Hutchinson, Wolverhampton

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The wolves are running

I first published this post about a forgotten giant of Birmingham musical life and his solitary, much-loved seasonal masterpiece a few years ago on an early, now defunct iteration of the CBSO blog, and I’ve reposted it on a couple of subsequent Christmases. I’m hoping to write something more substantial about Victor Hely-Hutchinson in time for the CBSO’s centenary in 2020, but in the meantime, this always seems to draw a reasonably lively response. So in the spirit of the season, I hope you’ll forgive me for putting it up again. Happy Christmas, folks!


 

So here it is, Merry Christmas, and we have it on unimpeachable authority that everybody is having fun. Forgive me: I lived in Wolverhampton for eight years (well, it was good enough for Percy Young) and Noddy Holder is like a god there.

I’m not the world’s greatest fan of seasonal pop music. But I am, however, a fan of Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s A Carol Symphony – a work with a deep connection to the English Midlands, and not just through its association with successive dramatisations of The Box of Delights. Here’s a blogpost I wrote in 2009 about the music and its (largely forgotten) composer. When it was first published I was delighted to receive a charming and kindly email from the composer’s then-78 year old son Christopher, who was living in Ludlow. Hopefully he still is.


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Victor Hely-Hutchinson (1901-1947)

When I was 11, my younger sister and I were both captivated by the BBC’s TV adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. She liked the fantastic story, and the Christmassy atmosphere; I liked the steam trains. But one thing that we both loved, and which seemed to capture the whole wintry magic of the thing, was the signature tune – which we could tell, even then, was “proper” music, not just a typical children’s TV theme (this being the early 1980s, the lack of synthesizers was the giveaway). Here’s that title sequence in full (warning, unseasonably noisy Youtube advert may play first!).

I asked my father if he knew what it was – not realising that a pre-war radio dramatisation of The Box of Delights, with the same music, had become a seasonal classic for an earlier generation. Or that my father – at much the same age – had asked exactly the same question. He pulled out a Classics for Pleasure LP with a snowy landscape on the cover. The piece on it was called Carol Symphony, and the composer was Victor Hely-Hutchinson.

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Sleeve art the way it used to be.

The record-sleeve told us that he’d been born on Boxing Day 1901, and had been Regional Director of Music for the BBC in Birmingham. It wasn’t very easy to find out much more back then, but it is now, and for the full story, there’s an excellent online biography by his son John. In short, Christian Victor Hely-Hutchinson was born in Cape Town, studied music with Charles Villiers Stanford and Donald Tovey, and at the age of 12 played a Mozart piano concerto with the LSO. In 1933 he landed the Birmingham job, and rapidly involved himself with every part of the city’s musical life – not least the 13-year old City of Birmingham Orchestra and its then music director Leslie Heward.

Hely-Hutchinson never held an official post with the CBO – but he was a tireless supporter of the Orchestra throughout the 1930s and 40s. The CBSO’s performance record-cards from that period are dotted with the initials VHH – indicating that he’d written the programme notes for a particular work. He gave pre-concert lectures (he took a doctorate in 1941, though he’d held the Chair of Music at Birmingham University since 1934). He appeared as piano soloist with the orchestra, notably in Mozart concertos, and in 1944 he performed his own rhapsody The Young Idea (intriguingly subtitled “cum grano salis”) with George Weldon conducting. It’s recently been recorded by Dutton.

And he did it all with consummate professionalism. The CBO’s manager Gerald Forty (of the piano-makers Dale, Forty) remembered that:

His quiet confidence was most reassuring. I see him in my mind’s eye, sitting at my desk. He knocks out a half-smoked pipe, his inseparable companion: fills it, lights it, takes a few puffs – finds it won’t draw – scrapes it out, refills it, wastes more matches – and so on da capo. While my ashtrays were being filled, his mind was concentrated on the matter at hand, and with a remarkable economy of words, he stated his views and recommended a solution.

Leslie Heward

Leslie Heward

But it was during wartime that Hely-Hutchinson gave his greatest service to the CBO. In early 1940, while working as a volunteer Air Raid Precaution warden, he performed (from memory!) a complete cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas at the Birmingham and Midland Institute – in aid of Orchestra funds. Meanwhile, he corresponded regularly with Leslie Heward, then recovering in Romsley Sanatorium from the TB which was to kill him just three years later. When Heward died in May 1943, Hely-Hutchinson rallied to the support of the CBO. As Forty recalled:

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Birmingham Town Hall in wartime. Hely-Hutchinson took part in ARP fire drills on the roof.

The problem of finding another conductor at short notice and of maintaining a full complement of players with War staring us in the face, was one of extreme perplexity; but Victor solved it by the apparently simple expedient of doing the entire job himself – including the compiling of programmes, rehearsing the orchestra (which he did anonymously and gratuitously for many years), conducting the concerts and dealing efficiently and decisively with the innumerable emergencies…

Hely Hutchinson was initially unconvinced by Heward’s successor, George Weldon, but with typical fair-mindedness was happy to revise his opinion after Weldon had settled into the post a year or so later:

“I want to tell you how right I think you were about George Weldon – and by the same token, I was wrong – eighteen months ago” he wrote to a colleague in June 1944. “As a pure musician, I cannot think him the equal of Leslie, but then, practically nobody is, and some of George’s performances – notably of Mozart – made me feel that he has the root of the matter in him”.

The following year, Hely-Hutchinson was offered the post of Director of Music for the BBC in London, and swapped his home near Droitwich for one in St John’s Wood. But he remained a familiar face in Birmingham music, and there was genuine shock in the city in March 1947 when the news arrived that he had died of pneumonia, aged just 45. The CBO paid its own tribute three weeks later, when Weldon conducted the first performance of Hely-Hutchinson’s recently-completed Symphony for Small Orchestra. (The concert was broadcast, and an incomplete recording survives in the CBSO archive).

Somehow, in this short but full musical life, Hely-Hutchinson found time to compose around 150 original works. The best known (by a country mile) is the Carol Symphony, from 1927, but there’s also an irresistible setting of Old Mother Hubbard “in the style of Handel”, which amusingly skewers the absurdities of baroque vocal style; and two shorter works, the Overture to a Pantomime and The Young Idea. Both have recently been recorded. They all show superb craftsmanship, a masterly ear for orchestral colour and a warm, thoroughly engaging sense of musical humour. They’d all merit an outing in the concert hall.

But the Carol Symphony has never quite left the repertoire (the most recent Birmingham performance was in December 2000). Far more than a mere seasonal medley, it’s actually a lovely and very English folk-song sinfonietta in four movements, in the spirit of Moeran, Vaughan Williams and John Ireland.

It’s packed with good things: the bustling mock-baroque figuration of the first movement (a sort of chorale-prelude on O Come All Ye Faithful), the jazzy, Walton-esque verve of the scherzo (God Rest Ye Merry); splashes of Handel, Elgar, and polytonal Stravinsky; the way Here We Come A-Wassailing trips in on the woodwind as the fugal finale bounds towards its grand, horn-trilling finish. And above all, that slow movement, in which Hely-Hutchinson sets the Coventry Carol to bleak, frozen harmonies that anticipate Vaughan Williams’ Sixth – and then, with dancing harp, muted strings and finally full orchestra, lightens our darkness with the gentlest and most enchanting setting ever made of The First Nowell.

A Box of Delights, indeed. Whatever else we remember him for, in the Carol Symphony Victor Hely-Hutchinson gave us something very special, and enduringly beautiful. Hely-Hutchinson’s CBO colleague and friend Gerald Forty, once more:

The Carol Symphony has become a standard Christmas piece for the City Orchestra: may it long continue to figure in those programmes as a reminder of the well-loved man to whom the City of Birmingham Orchestra and the Birmingham musical public owes so much.


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Review: CBSO / Canellakis / Tiberghien

02 Friday Jun 2017

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

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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.

Flashback (Good) Friday

14 Friday Apr 2017

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Andris Nelsons, CBSO, Parsifal, Wagner

Paul_von_Joukowsky_-_Bühnenbild_Parsifal_-_Gralstempel

That Friday Feeling

Something seasonally appropriate: a sort of beginner’s guide to Parsifal that I wrote in 2015 for the CBSO’s in-house magazine, ahead of Andris Nelsons’s concert performance.


Cards on the table: if you’re a regular orchestral concert-goer, there’s a fair chance that you’re a bit suspicious of opera. If you’re a normal sort of opera fan, it’s more than possible that you’re a little intimidated by Wagner. And even if you snapped up tickets for Andris Nelsons’ CBSO concert performances of Lohengrin, The Flying Dutchman and Tristan und Isolde, you might still view Parsifal with a mixture of awe and trepidation. Because this is the big one: Wagner’s crowning achievement. It makes the Ring seem down-to-earth, and The Flying Dutchman sound like The Pirates of Penzance. Read much of the vast literature about Parsifal and you’ll quickly find yourself lost in an impenetrable thicket of medieval mythology, political theorising and the worst kind of musicology. Meanwhile, try and explain the plot to a modern English-speaking listener and it’s hard not to be reminded of Monty Python. I’m here to tell you that none of that matters. Anyone can listen to Parsifal, anyone can understand it, and anyone can be moved by it. No prior experience is required: in fact, Parsifal might even be the ideal entry point into Wagner’s world. But, without question, it’ll tell you a powerful and timeless story in some of the most heartfelt, involving and transcendently lovely music ever written. And if all that’s stopping you from having that experience are a few questions – well, here’s an attempt at a few answers.

What’s the story?

In the castle of Monsalvat an order of knights guards the Grail, a sacred relic with the power to renew life itself. They’re supposed to be pure of heart; but their king, Amfortas, has succumbed to worldly temptation, fallen into a trap laid by the demonic Klingsor, and is now incurably wounded. The order is ailing with him, until the arrival of an outsider – Parsifal, a naïve young man. Initially baffled by the knights and their rituals, Parsifal seems like easy prey for Klingsor, but – being truly pure of heart – he resists even the temptations of Klingsor’s unwilling slave-seductress Kundry, and in doing so, starts to understand Amfortas’ suffering. He defeats Klingsor and returns to Monsalvat on Good Friday to restore life and hope to the keepers of the Grail.

Isn’t it complicated?

That’s the thing with opera plots – explain them on paper and they sound ridiculous (It’s not only opera: try summarising Game of Thrones. Or, for that matter, The Archers). And it’s true, there’s more to Parsifal than the outline above: infinitely more. Wagner thought about this opera for nearly 40 years before its premiere in 1882. The Christian imagery of resurrection and the Grail, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, plus Buddhism, with its ethos of renunciation: they’re all encoded in Parsifal, and you can take them at face value, or dig as deep as you like. But like so many great stories, it all feels – somehow – familiar. The story of the Knights of the Grail comes from the legends of King Arthur (where Parsifal is Sir Percival); Kundry is the eternal femme fatale and the wounded king appears in both Celtic myth and Star Wars. Terry Gilliam retold the tale with Robin Williams in The Fisher King; Shakespeare, Tolkien and CS Lewis knew it too (we’ll pass over Monty Python for now). Elements of Parsifal keep popping up in western culture, sometimes startlingly close to home. An ancient artefact known as the Nanteos Cup was stolen from a house in Herefordshire last July – it’s believed to have healing powers and had been loaned by its current owners to a sick friend. “Village pub raided by police in hunt for Holy Grail” was the headline in The Daily Telegraph.

Wagner uses powerful symbols and characters, but after five decades working in theatre, he knew how to tell a story too. His libretto (he wrote his own) explains everything necessary, at a comprehensible pace. And it’s supported by truly miraculous music.

Is the music loud?

Ah, the old prejudice about Wagner, born from years of hearing only edited fragments like The Ride of the Valkyries and the Meistersinger prelude. Yes, Parsifal is thrillingly loud – when it needs to be. But for long stretches – most famously, the ecstatic “Good Friday Music” in Act Three, where a spring meadow blossoms with hope – it’s blissfully quiet and tender. Wagner travelled in Italy while writing the music for Parsifal; his set-designer travelled with him, and the Grail Temple of Monsalvat is modelled on Siena cathedral. Klingsor’s magic kingdom was inspired by a lush sub-tropical garden at Ravello, near Amalfi.

This isn’t the stormy Nordic world of The Flying Dutchman or the dark German forest of Siegfried. Parsifal is Wagner’s Italian opera, and it sounds it: long, singing melodies, distant bells, and warm, glowing orchestral colours. There’s a reason why David Hockney loves this music. Books have been written on the orchestration alone – Debussy famously described it as “lit from behind”. But the important thing is that it serves the story, gently, persuasively taking you where Wagner leads, and quietly gathering power as it goes. Before you know it you’re on that Good Friday meadow – don’t be surprised if you find yourself in tears. And if Wagner’s story still hasn’t won you over? Never mind: at least you’ve heard what Debussy called “one of the most beautiful monuments of sound ever raised to the eternal glory of music”.

But Wagner wasn’t a very nice man, was he?

Not especially. Artists are often a nightmare to deal with: the personal lives of John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky and Charles Dickens (to choose a few names at random) don’t bear very close inspection either. Yet even Wagner’s bitterest enemies seem to have revered him. After Wagner had stolen his wife, the conductor Hans von Bülow called him a “glorious, unique man”. Friedrich Nietzsche – after publishing a series of vicious anti-Wagner polemics – still described him as “the greatest benefactor of my life”. Wagner’s personal prejudices are a matter of record; the ends to which Hitler (who wasn’t even born until six years after Wagner’s death) twisted Wagner’s artistic legacy have been well-documented. Interestingly, although the Nazi hierarchy enthusiastically patronised the annual Wagner festival at Bayreuth, no performances of Parsifal were given there during the war years. However readily the Nazis were able to misrepresent Wagner’s other works, Parsifal eluded them. Its compassionate vison is entirely true to itself, and at odds with any political agenda. D H Lawrence – a devoted Wagnerite – summed up the issue with typical bluntness. “An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth”.

Isn’t it long?

With intervals, it’s a little over five hours long. “The first act of the three occupied two hours” quipped Mark Twain, when he saw Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1891 “and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing”. That’s just the scale on which Wagner operates. It’s still only the length of two DVDs (basically half a series of Mad Men).

 And I promise you this: you won’t notice. “Here, time becomes space” comments the knight Gurnemanz in Act One, and once the music starts and Wagner begins to cast his spell you’re simply drawn in. There’s no experience in all music so compelling, so immersive, so moving and consistently, ravishingly beautiful. “Absorbed in this unique soundworld” writes the critic Jessica Duchen, “we become someone else. We blend our spirits, and Parsifal shows us how.”

A bit much? People do get like that after hearing Parsifal. There’s only one way to find out if you’re one of them. And with Andris Nelsons conducting, odds are that when, five hours later, you finally leave Monsalvat, you’ll want to go straight back in and hear it all over again.

Review: CBSO and Mirga at the Proms

04 Sunday Sep 2016

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BBC Proms, Birmingham Post, CBSO, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Reviews

RAH Crop
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 the BBC Proms on Saturday 27 July.


 

No-one goes to the Proms for the sound quality. Even by London standards, the Royal Albert Hall has a poor acoustic – it’s like hearing a concert from half a block away. For Birmingham concertgoers, it’s impossible not to keep thinking how much better it’d sound in Symphony Hall. No, you go to the Proms for the atmosphere; to be part of one of the biggest classical audiences in the world, whose breathless silence in that vast space says more than any applause. And if you’re an orchestra, you go to the Proms to show what you’re made of.

And it’s hard to think of a better programme with which the CBSO could have introduced Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla to a London audience – demonstrating how once again, Birmingham’s picked a winner. Mozart’s Magic Flute overture can sound like a toy in the Albert Hall; but not at this voltage, with trumpets and timpani cutting thrillingly through vibrato-less strings.

Hans Abrahamsen’s song-cycle let me tell you offered a different sort of showcase: Andris Nelsons and the CBSO gave its UK premiere in 2014, and the soloist then – Barbara Hannigan – also sang tonight. Hannigan’s rapt, radiant singing in this modern masterpiece continues to captivate and astonish. What differed was Mirga’s more urgent sense of the piece’s drama, and the subtle, questioning way she clarified its textures: a less romantic approach than Nelsons’s, perhaps, but every bit as affecting. Amidst playing of breathtaking quietness and refinement, Adrian Spillett’s percussion team worked a special magic.

As for Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony – well, it’s probably too soon to start analysing Mirga’s fingerprints. But if it wasn’t, we’d pick out her refusal to play for easy thrills: building and controlling the tension of the musical argument in order to release it with thrilling power where it really counts. Plus, of course, the balletic grace and warm-hearted lilt she brings to a dance-rhythm or a melody – and the way the CBSO players seem to follow, body and soul, wherever she takes them.

The encore – a fizzy little number from Act Two of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty – was one of those joyous, perfectly-timed Proms moments that linger in the memory years later. “See you in Birmingham!” yelled Mirga after the final flourish. We’re already there.

Review: CBSO & Nic McGegan

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

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Birmingham Post, CBSO, Nicholas McGegan, Reviews, Symphony Hall, Vaughan Williams

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  Symphony Hall on Wednesday 1 June.


nic mcgegan porch-photo-by-randy-beach-jpg.jpg

Nic!

What do Berlioz, Purcell, Nicolai, Vaughan Williams and Cole Porter all have in common? On the strength of this Shakespeare 400 concert by the CBSO under Nicholas McGegan, they all wrote Shakespearean music that doesn’t seem to contain much actual Shakespeare. And that’s about it. But they did add up to a very long concert – finishing just shy of 10pm, even after Sullivan’s delightful Merchant of Venice suite had been cut to a paltry three movements.

Still, as Birmingham audiences well know, Nicholas McGegan’s concerts are never routine: he’s so enthusiastic that those two and a half hours positively danced by. McGegan brings such warmth that you have to ask why we don’t hear Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor overture or Sullivan’s suite more often. And of course, both Cole Porter and Purcell were basically in showbiz: singers Sandra Piques Eddy and Duncan Rock waltzed stylishly through a selection from Kiss Me, Kate (the orchestra could have done with keeping down) before McGegan unleashed four soloists and the full CBSO Chorus on a performance of Act IV of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen that will have silenced all but the sourest of early music fundamentalists with its style and splendour.

Earlier, soprano Fflur Wyn had sparkled and charmed her way through Arne’s Shakespeare settings – a rare bit of actual Bard – and held the entire hall rapt as she and Eddy floated the duet from Berlioz’ Béatrice et Bénédict over McGegan’s shimmering accompaniment. But the real discovery was Vaughan Williams’s In Windsor Forest: a playful choral suite, sung by the CBSO Chorus with a radiance and subtlety that made you long to hear them again in the Sea Symphony. It’d be perfect for the Last Night of the Proms.

Review: CBSO / Buchbinder

27 Saturday Feb 2016

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Beethoven, Birmingham Post, CBSO, Reviews, Rudolf Buchbinder

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 Symphony Hall on Saturday 13 February.



When a pianist directs a concerto from the keyboard, it’s supposed to be a liberation. Soloist and orchestra commune together without any distraction from that tiresome character with the baton: the result is like large-scale chamber music. Well that’s the theory, anyway. It stands or falls on the soloist’s basic ability to keep the whole thing in time.

There was never any likelihood of that being an issue in this final instalment of Rudolf Buchbinder’s Beethoven concerto cycle with the CBSO. The CBSO players are too skilled, too alert and too consummately professional to let anything fall down on the job. And with leader Zoë Beyers gesturing heroically from the front desk, the orchestral playing was crisper, smarter and more characterful than you’d think possible from Buchbinder’s vague, infrequent hand gestures.

If only he’d stuck to the piano! Buchbinder’s a hugely experienced artist, and the warmth of his reception shows that he has a natural connection with the Symphony Hall audience. But with his role split two ways, he never sounded wholly comfortable. Moments – a chain of translucent, feather-weight chords in the Largo of the First Concerto, the rapturous way he spun the melodic line over the Adagio of the Emperor concerto – showed what Buchbinder might have given us under different circumstances. Elsewhere cadenzas sounded fumbled, his fortissimos clangourous and harsh.

Of the two works in this short concert, it was the Emperor that came off best, taken at a cracking pace with a martial swagger that made the most of Buchbinder’s sometimes breathless approach. The First Concerto, by contrast, was baggy, and while the CBSO woodwinds delivered some lovely solos (Buchbinder gave clarinettist Oliver Janes a well-deserved bow), this was Beethoven as prose rather than poetry. You couldn’t help feeling that both soloist and orchestra were sketching only the bare outlines of the performances they would have given if a conductor had been present.

 

So that was January…

31 Sunday Jan 2016

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CBSO, Grieg, Halle, Liverpool Philharmonic, The Arts Desk, The Spectator, Wigmore Hall

105

Bit of a jolt to notice the date – and I realise I’ve been rather quiet on here this month. It’s not that I haven’t been up to anything; it’s that I’ve had my hands gratifyingly full – this is peak season for copywriting and some of my best clients have been launching some very exciting projects, which tends to keep me busy.

My pre-Christmas review of the Royal Opera’s Eugene Onegin appeared in The Spectator a couple of weeks back, and next week I’ll be reviewing Mozart revivals at Opera North and English National Opera. I wrote a piece for The Arts Desk on the CBSO’s thinly-veiled public audition of Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla; whether or not (as many audience members and all the critics in Birmingham are hoping) they offer her the vacant music-directorship (and the CBSO players have strong opinions of their own, often far-removed from what audiences and critics think), I’m in no doubt that she’s a hugely impressive and serious artist, with musicality just streaming out of her fingertips.

Omer Meir Wellber seems to be regarded as another front-runner: he’s a strikingly intelligent artist with something powerful to say (qualities not always valued in the UK), and would also be a fascinating appointment. At least that’s how it sounds from the stalls. The players may feel differently, and if we suddenly heard that either Nicholas Collon or Andrew Gourlay was the anointed one; well, that’d be no bad thing either. But a lot of the rumours that are floating around are transparently nonsense (when dealing with Birmingham, you can generally discount any speculation that originates in London): we’ll just have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, I’ve been delighted to acquire some new clients since the New Year: including the Halle, the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition and Gramophone – hugely excited to be working for them.  I’ve also been working on sleeve notes for Warner Classics’ next Rattle / CBSO box set – an enjoyable pretext to catch up with my old colleague Peter Donohoe, who always has something thought-provoking to say. I popped up to Liverpool and saw the astonishing backstage transformation of my favourite concert hall in the world, the beautiful Philharmonic Hall. I wrote a concert script for Margherita Taylor – fun job. And there was a substantial programme note for a major concert at the Wigmore Hall – something to really get my teeth into.

And purely for pleasure, we took in the live New York Met cinema relays of The Pearl Fishers and Turandot (eye-popping) – the baristas at the Tamworth Odeon branch of Costa are starting to recognise us – and drove over to Sheffield for the last night of The Crucible’s production of Show Boat, a musical I’ve wanted to see on stage for a very long time.

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Seems a very long time since we were in Bergen for new year, clambering around Grieg’s house at Troldhaugen – closed and completely deserted, and somehow all the more magical for it – on a clear but icy Norwegian morning. By pure coincidence, I was writing about Grieg’s C minor Violin Sonata as soon as I returned. He’s a composer I can’t help loving, and the more I listen, the more fascinated – and moved – I am by his music. I’d like to have the chance to write more about him – anyone..?
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