A Sunday treat from Birmingham Chamber Music Society

Jan 15 2010 By Christopher Morley

Birmingham Chamber Music Society plans a fresh way to attract a new audience. Christopher Morley reports.

Birmingham Chamber Music Society takes a brave step into the future on Sunday, when it promotes an afternoon concert at the Adrian Boult Hall in the Birmingham Conservatoire building.

What’s brave about it is that after nearly 60 years of giving concerts on Saturday evenings, BCMS has grasped the nettle of falling audiences and decided to go for a more congenial time for its latest event – although this is a one-off experiment.

For many years BCMS attendance has been dwindling.

Thanks to a combination of funding cuts and the conflicting attractiveness of similarly-programmed events at Symphony Hall and Birmingham Town Hall, gone are the days when there were queues in Birmingham Art Gallery for BCMS concerts that brought the world’s best chamber-music performers to the city.

BCMS has tried all kinds of initiatives in recent years to drum up audiences: a mini-showcase for local young performers slotted into each concert, the increased use of regionally-based musicians supplanting some from farther afield (thereby cutting down on expenses), and a discernible link with Birmingham Conservatoire, whose student composers are invited to submit works to BCMS programmes, and from which a specially-recruited education officer has been co-opted to the committee.

A summer presentation at Birmingham University’s Winterbourne on Edgbaston Park Road has also been an attractive addition to the annual calendar.

But the elephant in the room has always remained the determination to give concerts in Birmingham on Saturday nights.

The city centre is not what it was in the 1950s. Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that it is a threatening place nowadays, particularly to the kind of age-group which constitutes much of the BCMS audience. Car-parking difficulties on busy Saturday evenings are a further disincentive.

At last has come the realisation that it might be a good idea, one which might prolong the existence of this much-respected society, to think about changes of concert-times (changes of venue might indeed follow, such as the out of centre Barber Institute, but still, perhaps, on Sunday afternoons, following the example of the much-missed Birmingham Ensemble).

The programme the society that received my first-ever review for the Birmingham Post (in the autumn of 1969) will present this Sunday afternoon is an attractive one.

It will feature an enticing song-recital from soprano Patricia Rozario, accompanied by Mark Bebbington. Both of them huge favourites on the concert-platform, and both enjoying brilliant recording careers.

Their programme includes works by Schubert and John Ireland, Cuatro Madrigales by Rodrigo, and L’Invitation au Voyage by Henri Duparc, the French composer who despite an impressively long life (1848 – 1933) produced only 13 songs before a crippling psychiatric condition caused him to abandon composition at the age of 36.

And an inclusion of particular interest to a Birmingham audience is the Chansons de Verlaine by John Casken, a student of the Moseley-based composer John Joubert at Birmingham University during the late 1960s.