…he was head-hunted in 1982 to be the chief executive of Birmingham, then a city in decline.
He persuaded the council to embark on a substantial capital building programme, the centrepiece of which was a convention centre and concert hall for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) and Simon Rattle, its new young conductor. Although the hall did not qualify for European funding, Caulcott found an original way to unlock cash from Brussels by billing it as dual use. He was similarly imaginative in securing funding from his contacts in central government, now under Margaret Thatcher, although the invitation to Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, to lay the foundation stone ruffled feathers in Whitehall.
Half a century ago, in January 1970, the young Riccardo Muti gave this symphony its western Europe premiere in Rome with the RAI orchestra and the wondeful bass Ruggiero Raimondi. The performance was semi-samizdat. A score had been smuggled out of Russia…
Hours before curtain-up, the Opéra national de Paris posted this:
The performance of Il Barbiere di Siviglia scheduled for today, Saturday January 11, has been cancelled.
It was a new production with Lisette Oropesa and Florian Sempey.
The second performance, on Tuesday, has not been cancelled yet.
But there seems to be little progress in resolving the national strike over pensions.
Campaigners for victims of sexual abuse at music schools have assembled a dossier of oral evidence on Christopher Ling, the influential violin teacher at Chethams who was facing 77 charges of student abuse at the time of his suicide in 2015.
The victim, known here as ‘Laura’, reflects with great calm and clarity on the ways that Ling tried to destroy her mind and her life.
Those in charge at Chet’s have never faced any court, or any disavowal by the music edication industry.
This remains a seeping wound at the heart of the music process.
‘I was a violinist and I was supposed to be sexy and attractive, that was my goal.’
Zinfonia claims to be the world’s #1 source for renting copyright scores.
It’s top ten in 2019 were:
1 Arturo Márquez Danzon No. 2 (Peermusic Classical)
2 Modest Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition; arr. [Ravel] (Boosey & Hawkes)
3 Carl Orff Carmina Burana (Schott Music)
4 Aaron Copland Appalachian Spring. Suite [Orchestral Version] (Boosey & Hawkes)
5 Aaron Copland Appalachian Spring. Suite [Chamber Version] (Boosey & Hawkes)
6 Leonard Bernstein West Side Story. Symphonic Dances (Boosey & Hawkes)
7 Béla Bartók Concerto for Orchestra (Boosey & Hawkes)
8 Florence Price Symphony No. 1 in e minor (G. Schirmer)
9 Samuel Barber Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (G. Schirmer)
10 John Rutter Requiem [ensemble version] (Oxford University Press)
Zinfonia’s most performed composers in 2019 were:#
1 John Rutter
2 Leonard Bernstein
3 Aaron Copland
4 George Gershwin
5 Ralph Vaughan Williams
6 Mack Wilberg
7 Benjamin Britten
8 Igor Stravinsky
9 Dmitri Shostakovich
10 Richard Strauss
The prodigious pop star has put her flute at the service of a massive Dolby Atmos campaign.
2nd symphony, opus 36 (1802)
If a second novel seldom lives up to the promise of the first, how much more so with a symphony? In some ways this is the most problematic of Beethoven’s symphonies. Coming after the explosive promise of the first symphony, the work seems to go neither forward nor back. After a ruminative opening passage, there’s a lot of bombast in the first movement, some gentle relief in an unusually long Larghetto and two snappy allegros to end, but nothing much to whistle at the bus stop. Was Beethoven’s mind elsewhere? He wrote the symphony while suffering the first symptoms of encroaching deafness. Maybe he keeps writing forte to see if he can hear himself think. One US musicologist has ventured a theory that the belched opening of the finale is a reference to the composer’s stomach problems (give it a rest, doc).
One of the most scintillating performances is delivered by Sir Thomas Beecham, who generally disparaged Beethoven’s bombast, preferring the lightness of Haydn and Mozart. His ultra-classical 1957 interpretation is delightful.
Herbert von Karajan, in a contemplative 1953 recording in London, takes his time with the introduction to draw out anticipations of later symphonies, including the Ninth. For Karajan this, far more than the first symphony, is the gateway to Big Beethoven.
At the polar opposite, this is the symphony with the most to offer period-instrument performers. My friend Stephen Pollard, musically aware editor of the Jewish Chronicle, swears by a 1986 recording from Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players: ‘I remember the visceral excitement of hearing this when it came out – it was, to use that hackneyed phrase, like hearing the piece for the first time. But time hasn’t diluted the sensation. It remains as fresh, vibrant and compelling a recording of anything as I’ve ever heard. And the climax of the first movement still brings goosebumps!’
My memory of Norrington in the 1980s is how, during coffee breaks, he would take at least half the players into the control room to listen and democratically discuss how they were fulfilling what Beethoven wanted. This performance is pretty captivating.
John Eliot Gardiner with his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique piles on plenty of pressure to no great interpretative purpose and with frequently unpleasant wind noises.
Among the big beasts, avoid Toscanini: too hectic and terrible sound.
Not Furtwangler’s finest half-hour, either, in a 1948 London session with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Simon Rattle with the Vienna Philharmonic (2002) and Adam Fischer with the Danish National Orchestra (2019) find middle ground where historical fidelity coexists with agreeable modern sound to deliver a portrait of Beethoven in excruciatingly painful transition.
NB: By way of a wild card, a Philadelphia reader Michael Carasik calls my attention to a 2014 performance by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia conducted by Ignat Solzhenitsyn, son of the Nobel-winning Russian novelist. Since pretty much everything is on Idagio, I had to give it a listen and agree – the tempi are simply organic.
