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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Michael Seal

Review: Sinfonia of Birmingham

02 Thursday Jun 2016

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Birmingham Post, Michael Seal, Reviews, Sibelius, Sinfonia of Birmingham, Tchaikovsky

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 Adrian Boult Hall on Monday 23 May.


Sutton Coldfield

Yes, it says “Royal”. What?

If it’s true that you can always tell when non-professional orchestras haven’t rehearsed the concerto properly, boy, can you hear it when they have. When Savitri Grier played the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Sinfonia of Birmingham under Michael Seal, it was her playing, of course, that took the spotlight – a deep, eloquent tone, making every line sing, and all delivered with remarkable poise and flair. But you also noticed how Seal and his orchestra were behind her, and inside the music, every bar of the way.

That began with the very opening: in those brief seconds of icy rustlings Seal created both a sense of space, and an atmosphere (never the easiest thing to achieve in Sutton Coldfield Town Hall). Orchestral tuttis surged up like lava, woodwinds danced and swirled, and the whole thing felt like one huge, unified, sweep of music: the symphony Sibelius never wrote.

Earlier, Seal and the Sinfonia had given us a foretaste of what to expect in Berlioz’s King Lear overture. The brass snarled and snapped, cellos and basses thundered out their recitatives with a suitably black voice, and – in the introduction – the whole band achieved a magical transparency as Berlioz layers hushed violins over throbbing woodwinds and a sombre brass chorale.

And they followed up with a Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony that exceeded even the already high voltage of the Sibelius. If the strings were starting to buckle slightly under the strain, the woodwinds (and the bassoons in particular) were gloriously on song. It was heartening to see what looked like a larger than usual audience for this Sutton Philharmonic Society concert, too. With standards as consistently high as this, no self-respecting music lover in North Birmingham should still be staying away from these Monday evening concerts.

 

Review: Sinfonia of Birmingham & Michael Seal

05 Friday Jun 2015

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Birmingham Post, Michael Seal, Reviews, Sinfonia of Birmingham

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 Sutton Coldfield Town Hall on 18 May 2015.


There’s more than one great conductor / orchestra partnership in Birmingham. Michael Seal has been principal conductor of the Sinfonia of Birmingham since 2002, and they’ve grown together. To hear them is to experience something that’s rare even with professional orchestras: a conductor who knows exactly how to get the best from his orchestra, and a band that knows exactly how to respond. We’ve heard things from this team at Sutton Coldfield that, for pure musicality and communicative power, have far outstripped certain big-name concerts at Symphony Hall.

Those thoughts followed naturally from a performance of Nielsen’s Four Temperaments symphony that seemed to make every one of those points: taut, powerful and ebullient, yet with moments both of lyrical sweetness and real danger. Seal found space for detail, and to let his players sing (the Sinfonia has a wonderfully characterful woodwind section) while still maintaining the long line of the symphony’s architecture and propelling the music forward. The third, “melancholic”, movement grew imperceptibly from expressive oboe and cor anglais solos to two positively volcanic climaxes: the Sinfonia’s low brass made the floor shake.

Earlier, we’d heard violinist Charlotte Moseley in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto; an accomplished, energetic performance with a big heart – the tone of her lower strings as she duetted with the clarinet in the Canzonetta was particularly treasurable. And Sibelius’ Finlandia grew as if in one single phrase from snarling opening to defiant finish. The last time we heard it done so convincingly, the conductor was Sakari Oramo.

2014 appears to have vanished…

05 Monday Jan 2015

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Birmingham Post, Elgar, English Touring Opera, Henze, Lichfield Cathedral Chorus, Michael Seal, Royal Opera House, Sinfonia of Birmingham, Tippett, Welsh National Opera, Wolverhampton Grand Theatre

Everyone’s doing it so, a few days late, five selected musical highlights of 2014.


Welsh National Opera: Boulevard Solitude I know, I know…I’m supposed to go for WNO’s Moses und Aron, but I can’t help feeling that a really stupendous musical performance – plus an understandable missionary zeal amongst my colleagues – can’t quite make up for a production that basically avoided the issue. (Review here). Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, though…what a score! What a set of performances! And how they all came together to do exactly what this opera is surely supposed to do. (Review here).


English Touring Opera’s Spring Season ETO’s annual spring seasons at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre are a guilty pleasure for me – and a secret one, apparently: you’d think the music-lovers of Birmingham (population 1.1 million) would have worked out by now that with a 20 minute train-ride they could be seeing opera of this quality. Apparently not, judging from the empty seats for the Britten (though it can’t have helped that the Grand’s box office had mixed up the dates for Paul Bunyan and The Magic Flute – leading befuddled first-timers in the audience trying to work out why Papageno was strumming a guitar). They missed a Magic Flute that charmed and probed in equal measure, and, as I hoped, turned out to be the perfect choice of first live opera for my 12-year old godson  (“I didn’t know it would be like panto” he said when we saw it in Sheffield a month later). (Review here) A big-hearted, beautifully-designed Paul Bunyan (Mark Wilde as understatedly magnificent as always) that made the best possible case for – sorry – an absolute car-crash of a piece (Review here). And – thanks to the belated discovery that Cheltenham and back is do-able in a night from Birmingham – a shattering, monumental King Priam. (No review: there purely for pleasure) A tremendous achievement: god, Tippett is undervalued, isn’t he? Quite indecently excited now at the prospect of Birmingham Opera Company’s forthcoming The Ice Break.


Lichfield Cathedral Chorus: The Apostles Local choral societies don’t get national reviews. But I’ve been trying to persuade the Birmingham Post for some time that something a bit special is happening at Lichfield Cathedral (and not just because it’s 3 minutes from my front door). The cathedral’s musical team of Ben Lamb, Cathy Lamb and Martyn Rawles are young, gifted, and ambitious in the best possible way (the budget for the orchestra and soloists for this performance alone apparently cleaned out the Chorus’s coffers for the foreseeable future: respect due). And there’s no getting around the fact that Elgar’s choral writing taxed the Chorus beyond its limits. But the soloists were first-rate, the orchestra (Alex Laing’s DECO) was on fire and the sweep, musicality, and sense of shared adventure about the whole enterprise…well, it glowed in exactly the way it must have done in Elgar’s imagination. Grass-roots music making in the UK, and a living amateur tradition, continues to give us something as stirring – and as profoundly musical – as the most lavishly-funded international orchestra or opera house. (I submitted a review to the local paper but it never appeared in print. Two weeks later a review at three times the length by a writer I don’t know did appear, which I suppose is the main thing, but still…*rolls eyes*.)


Royal Opera House: Die Frau Ohne Schatten I adore Strauss and having missed the last UK production of FrOSch in the 90s, I realised that I couldn’t really risk waiting 20 years for another chance. Having shelled out for the necessary hotels and train tickets, and booked two days off work (in the absence of weekend matinees, the only way to do it from the Midlands) I can only say that boy, it was worth it. I can add nothing to the praise that’s already been heaped on this production: it echoed in my head for days afterwards. Yes, London receives an indefensible 15 times as much arts subsidy per head as the rest of the UK; an attempt to buy a drink in the Floral Hall left images of underfunded education projects, rejected funding grants and decades of shoe-string compromises in the regional arts swirling furiously in my mind. (“We don’t serve Prosecco” sniffed the barman – well, there’s one thing that the Royal Opera House has in common with Wolverhampton Grand Theatre, then.) But with singing like we experienced that night, you can at least hear where the £££s are going. File under “sinful pleasure”. Normal service will be resumed shortly.


Mihkel Poll in Sutton Coldfield It’s received wisdom that small local music clubs are dying out. Martyn Parfect, who runs the Sutton Coldfield Philharmonic Society, merely sees that as a provocation – he thinks big, and never bigger than when he’s twisting the arms of international soloists to play in Sutton’s Victorian linen-cupboard of a Town Hall. Pianistically, Pohl’s performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto with local semi-pro band the Sinfonia of Birmingham was as fine as you’d expect. What lifted this to another level was watching and hearing the effect that an artist of his calibre had on the orchestral players – and the masterly (there’s no other word for it) way that the conductor, my colleague Michael Seal, coloured the music and shaped the concerto’s architecture in one huge, cumulative symphonic line. It’s always nice to be able to give a glowing review to artists you like and admire; in this case, no critical detachment was required. The performance set its own terms (Review here).

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