Royal Northern Sinfonia, Birmingham Town Hall, 21st February 2024. 5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: David Gray & Paul Gray.

Royal Northern Sinfonia, Birmingham Town Hall, 21st February 2024.

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

“A glorious evening of music from a similarly glorious band of players under their Principal Conductor, Dinis Sousa, and solo clarinetist, Julian Bliss (pictured).”

Programme 21/02/24 Prokofiev – Symphony No.1 in D Major, “Classical”

Mozart – Clarinet Concerto in A Major

Beethoven – Symphony No. 3, “Eroica”

It was a joy to hear the 37-or-so players of the Royal Northern Sinfonia performing in the exquisite and acoustically gorgeous Birmingham Town Hall, as part of the THSH B:Music Spring Concert Series (see What's on | B:Music (bmusic.co.uk) for details of the whole B:Music season.

The players were under the baton of their exciting, young Principal Conductor, Dinis Sousa (b.1988). At 36 – just a year older than Beethoven when he wrote his extraordinary Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” (“Heroic”) – Dinis Sousa, like Beethoven, is a worker of magic & marvels.

One could not take one’s eyes off Maestro Sousa. He conducted with total precision, unambiguity, a deep understanding of the music, and with great attention to the tiniest of details. He also delighted his audience with his ‘body-cum-conducting’ choreography – with occasional bounces, dance-steps, and many a vertical leap: this is a most gymnastic of conductors! Admittedly, Dinis is a very tall chap, but his sense of presence, expression and depth of communication was utterly riveting. This is someone to watch – quite literally!

Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony was a joy from start to finish. The conductor and players gave a wonderful interpretation, full of the fun of Prokofiev’s pastiche on Classical musical forms. It was also a work no-doubt written to please Stalin - or to at least keep him off Prokofiev’s back: Stalin – the self-appointed censor of anything in the arts that stepped over his idea of the ‘acceptable’.

Another huge delight of this concert was the opportunity to hear Julian Bliss, who has got to be one of the greatest clarinetists in the world today. His interpretation of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto was quite simply sublime. The slow movement – effectively a wordless aria; a love song – seemed to come from the very depths of Bliss’s soul, and, given that Mozart died just three weeks after the first performance of this radiant work by his friend Anton Stadler, Bliss truly captured the poignancy & profound beauty of this perfect little love song.

Next came Beethoven’s Symphony No 3, the Eroica. We sometimes forget how very new this work must have sounded to Viennese concertgoers of the day (1805). Here is a work of a new length, of larger forces, and of a wholly new – and Romantic – conception of harmony and symphonic form. And, of course, with so many players – and with so very much going on(!) – the Eroica kind of set the new notion of having – and needing - an independent conductor standing in front of an orchestra. And our conductor did a fantastic job of taming this often wild and occasionally abandoned music into a coherent whole.

Indeed, Maestro Sousa pushed his players hard – especially in the final movement - where there was a terrific sense that everything could totally fall apart at any given moment. But it did not, and there was a wonderful sense of completion; of overcoming the perils of a precarious journey. Great stuff, and most very worthy of an exceptionally well-deserved Five Stars *****

Royal Northern Sinfonia with Principal Conductor, Dinis Sousa

Solo Clarinetist, Julian Bliss