Christopher Morley looks back at the highs – and lows – of 2011
Having a wonderful team of colleague reviewers, I’ve probably missed many of the noteworthy musical events which have happened in our region over the past year, so here are just a few of my own personal highlights.
Opera figured very large, beginning with revivals of two of Welsh National Opera’s best-loved productions at Birmingham Hippodrome, the company making full use of the facilities offered by that wonderful stage.
Christopher Alden’s strikingly compassionate directing of Puccini’s Turandot was conducted probingly by music director Lothar Koenigs, and Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Giles Havergal directing the original 25-year-old production, Simon Phillippo conducting, simply fizzed with intrigue and irony.
WNO’s superb orchestra found an equal with that of Opera North, who climbed out of the theatre pit back home in Leeds to grace Symphony Hall with a tremendous account of Wagner’s Rheingold.
Richard Farnes was the conductor of this semi-staged performance, the first in a complete Ring cycle which will unfold over the next three years. Watch out for Walkure in the summer.
Another Ring is unfolding at Longborough, the little (but professionally-equipped, and with a full orchestra-sized pit) country-house Festival theatre nestling cosily in the Cotswolds.
This remarkable enterprise is nearing the fulfilment of its complete Ring cycle, and this year’s offering was an astonishingly resourceful Siegfried.
We’ll stick out of town for other memorable presentations during this musical year, beginning at the Cheltenham International Festival of Music for the well-received premiere of Worcester-based composer Ian Venables’ 30-minute setting for soprano, tenor, string quartet and piano of Andrew Motion’s elegy on the death of the Queen Mother, Remember This.
George Vass’s Presteigne Festival, such a well-established annual attraction in the beautiful Welsh Marches as summer comes to its end, was especially distinguished this year by an emotionally powerful account of James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross, with Vass conducting the Choir of Royal Holloway and the remarkably adept Presteigne Festival Orchestra.
There was a similar aura to a memorable evening at the Bromsgrove Festival last spring, the choral group Tenebrae bringing crepuscular devotional Russian Orthodox religious music to the town’s ancient parish church as the sun set outside. Not only was this expertly sung, there was also well co-ordinated choral movement around the nave.
Another historic church nearby, the parish church at Tardebigge, is the perfect venue for the “Celebrating English Song” series which has graced the last seven summers in this peaceful corner of north Worcestershire.
This year there was something of a jinx on the three-recital series, with the first having to use an electronic piano (the pre-ordered “proper” one having failed to arrive) and the third, with two hours to go, bereft of a soloist, the announced soprano incapacitated with a throat infection.
But the much-loved baritone Roderick Williams came to the rescue, and he and accompanist Christopher Glynn presented an absorbing and delightful programme, saving the day.
Still out of town, in fact as far out of town as you can get, at the other end of Europe, it was my privilege to be invited to Bucharest for the biennial Festival devoted to Romania’s greatest composer, Georges Enescu.
I heard two orchestras while I was there: the world-renowned Vienna Philharmonic under Franz Welser-Most boring me to tears with its smug playing, devoid of any personality; and, having come even further than I had, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra performing with masses of personality and enthusiasm under its inspirational young principal conductor Vassily Petrenko.
From the RLPO’s two concerts I particularly treasured vibrant readings of Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony, Prokofiev’s Seventh, and the latter’s Piano Concerto no.3, Alexei Volodin the scintillating soloist.
But it’s about time we returned to Birmingham, and concentrated on the CBSO, which shares a friendly rivalry with the RLPO. These two, together with the Halle, make up a trio of the most followable orchestras in the country; and all of them miles from London.
Andris Nelsons continues to astonish the musical world with the depth of his musicianship, his ability to communicate his enthusiasm to both players and audience, and the fascination of his programming, and this year the spell he casts has remained undiminished.
It would take a feature much longer than this already lengthy one to enumerate all his triumphs with the CBSO during 2011, but here are just a few: an appropriately testosterone-fuelled Strauss Ein Heldenleben, concertmaster Laurence Jackson’s solo violin bringing a mollifying influence; a profound Mahler Ninth Symphony in a concert where he also directed the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s perennial Kai, Ulrich Heinen (who premiered this gripping piece so many years ago) the cello soloist; a powerful Prokofiev Alexander Nevsky, the CBSO Chorus singing so convincingly in Russian and Latin, in a programme which also included an equally powerful Beethoven Eroica Symphony; a glowing, lovingly-shaped Brahms St Antoni Variations which was almost my highlight of the year; and introducing us to Rolf Wallin’s Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra with the unobtrusively virtuosic Hakan Hardenberger as soloist, in a concert which ended with an interpretation of Shostakovich’s epic Leningrad Symphony which almost persuaded me that this sprawling piece can actually come off.
