Brahms 2, CBSO, Symphony Hall, Birmingham 10 October 2024, 4✩✩✩✩. Review: David Gray & Paul Gray.

Brahms 2, CBSO, Symphony Hall, Birmingham 10 October 2024,

4✩✩✩✩. Review: David Gray & Paul Gray.

“A thrilling piece by Thomas Adès, contrasting nicely with some more familiar fare.”

R Strauss – Don Juan

Thomas Adès – Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths)

Brahms – Symphony No. 2

A well-balanced programme married some sturdy Brahms, exuberant Strauss, and something less familiar from Thomas Adès.

Conductor, Thomas Søndergård - together with a highly responsive CBSO - delivered a thrilling Don Juan in a performance full of detail. Søndergård kept the texture bright, letting light shine through, and used the build and release of tension to maintain dramatic momentum. Soloists were all excellent and the horns were impressively commanding. This is an orchestral showpiece, and the band really took the opportunity to display their wares.

Violinist, Leila Josefowicz shone visually (and WOW, that was some frock!) and musically in Thomas Adès vibrantly imaginative Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths. This is an intense composition. The virtuosic opening movement gives the soloist no respite. The central movement is full of declamatory gestures, alternating with passages of bleak, hollowed- out lyricism reminiscent of Shostakovich at his most despairing. The melodic line of the dance-like closing movement, has a haunting, twisted nursery-rhyme quality. Josefowicz met the concerto’s many technical challenges head on. Playing with total, unrelenting commitment, she perfectly captured the unique mood of each of the movements, and seemed to have intentionalized each phrase. As a result, every moment was charged with a vivid emotional intensity.

Conductor, Thomas Søndergård, controlled the complex ensemble between orchestra and soloist perfectly, and shaped the whole thing with a sense of relentless inevitability, towards its sudden and arresting conclusion.

After a slightly stodgy opening movement, Søndergård’s reading of Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 caught its stride in a thoughtfully structured Adagio that built to a towering mid-point climax. Again, the horns were impressive with a delicious solo from their leader, Elspeth Dutch. This was a fluid, yet muscular interpretation of a work that can seem rather laid back. Søndergård gave the third and fourth movements just the right amount of energy and edge. The orchestra played with an intuitive feel for the way the music flows, so that all of the motivic elements dovetailed with well-crafted precision.

Thomas Søndergård - Conductor

Leila Josefowicz - Violin