Review: CBSO Youth Orchestra Academy at Birmingham Town Hall

Jul 30 2010 By Norman Stinchcombe

Beethoven’s eighth symphony may be short but it lacks nothing in musical stature, as this blisteringly energetic performance showed.

Under Michael Seal’s baton these outstanding young players negotiated every twist and turn of Beethoven’s musical argument, learning leavened by humour, with ease. It does not demand the sheer physical stamina of the Eroica but its mercurial changes of mood require constant alertness. What shone through in this performance was its unbuttoned sense of fun and life-affirming joy.

The symphony was aptly prefaced by Jörg Widmann’s 2008 work Con brio which takes Beethoven’s musical gestures and shards from movements of his seventh and eight symphonies, re-combining them into a work which is not pastiche but an amusingly distorted mirror of classical form. It was played with immense gusto – with timpanist Rachel Starmer leading by example.

Milhaud’s jazz-influenced ballet score La Création du Monde went with a real swing with nicely inflected blue notes from the wind players. Loré Lixenberg utilized the flexibility of her warm vibrant mezzo-soprano to great effect in Berio’s colourful Folk Songs which, from the Copland-like simplicity of “I wonder as I wander” to the earthy uninhibited “Azerbaijan Love Song” demand a wide variety of delivery and declamation.

Rating: 5/5