The Music Makers, CBSO & CBSO Choruses, Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 20 November 2024, 4☆☆☆☆. Review: David Gray & Paul Gray.
The Music Makers, CBSO & CBSO Choruses, Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 20 November 2024,
4☆☆☆☆. Review: David Gray & Paul Gray.
“Some lovely music for young people, and still great fun for the rest of us!”
Judith Weir – Music, Untangled
Nico Muhly – Friday Afternoons
Britten – The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
Elgar – The Music Makers
A charming concept for the first half of a concert: music written for young people. The opening item, Judith Weir’s ‘Music, Untangled’, was written for Tanglewood, an American festival for young musicians. It is a short, but, given its title, surprisingly knotty piece that constructs itself from fragmentary - or ‘motivic’ - opening ideas. Difficult to get into, perhaps, for players and audience alike.
In contrast, Nico Muhly’s ‘Friday Afternoons’ is characterised by simplicity and a lack of affectation. The composer presents the source material with directness and authenticity. A large orchestra is used sparingly to illustrate, point and underscore. This was a perfect work for the CBSO Children’s and Youth Choruses providing just the right amount of challenge.
Singing without music - and this was quite a long piece - the Children’s Chorus observed a remarkable degree of detail and communicated the text perfectly. Diction was flawless. The Youth Chorus took the more involved passages singing with freshness and fullness of tone. One of the most beguiling movements was ‘The Bird Song’, where the verses were alternated between younger and more developed voices to add depth and piquancy to the narrative. This is a work with ‘legs’ which, I am sure, will be seized on by youth and children’s choirs everywhere.
Britten never condescended to youth. He accommodated their lack of experience, but had no truck with the idea there might be lack of intelligence. The title of ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’ says it all. Not a ‘The Children’s Guide’! This is a complex and demanding piece for persons who happen to be young. It’s a hoot for the rest of us as well.
The composer gives fourteen hugely imaginative variations and an extended fugue which climaxes in an explosion of sheer joy. Conductor, Sofi Jeannin, controlled the build up of anticipation wonderfully well. The players all made the most of the way Britten writes to the characteristic strengths of their instruments.
While the first half of the concert was characterised by a delightful and playful naïveté, Elgar’s ‘The Music Makers’ succeeds despite O’Shaughnessy’s text, which is naïve in the worst way. CBSO Chorus’s remarkable clarity of diction became a bit of a liability. One would rather have just listened to Elgar’s really rather gorgeous music and ignored the poet’s grandiose ‘artist as superman’ musings.
Indeed, it is astonishing these words inspired the Sir Edward to write such a luscious score. And this was a really fine performance of that score. Jeannin and the orchestra perfectly captured the surging, yearning quality of the introduction. The opening bars from the chorus were delivered in a breathless pianissimo which caressed the text with much more tenderness that it deserved. From there, things just got better.
Soloist, Dame Sarah Connolly belongs to an illustrious line of exceptionally rich British Mezzos that runs back, through Baker and Ferrier, to Butt and beyond. Elgar could have written this for Dame Sarah. Her contribution was the icing on a well-mixed and beautifully textured cake.
Sofi Jeannin – Conductor
Dame Sarah Connolly – Mezzo Soprano
CBSO Chorus
CBSO Youth Chorus
CBSO Children’s Chorus
Simon Halsey CBE – Chorus Master of the CBSO Chorus
Julian Wilkins – Chorus Master, CBSO Youth and Children’s Choruses