Introduction

Rapsodies, lazy afternoons – and a wild night of dreams. This spectacular programme is bookended by two revolutionary works. Debussy’s Prélude sounds gorgeously melodic and completely uncontroversial today, but caused quite the stir at the 1899 premiere, with its sensual evocation of an afternoon in the sun. His later Rapsodie was originally scored for saxophone, but here celebrates the distinctive, melancholy sound of the English horn, performed by renowned soloist François Leleux (who also conducts). Gipps’ lush and lyrical Sinfonietta is a further tribute to the beauty of the wind section. Berlioz’ Symphonie was composed decades before any of these, but is one of the most outrageous, genre-busting works in the repertoire. Expect to have a simply fantastique time.

Programme notes

Prélude à “L’après-midi d’un faune”

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

I desire to perpetuate these nymphs. /
So bright their light rosy flesh that it hovers
in the air drowsy with tufted slumbers. /
Did I love a dream?...

Mallarmé’s poem L’Après-midi d’un faune isn’t about clarity or even about making perfect sense; it’s an exquisite attempt to capture a mood through the rhythms, textures and colours of language. Debussy, smitten with the poem, sought to do no less in his music. From its languorous opening, on the solo flute’s sultry lower notes, to its final disappearance (so delicate that you mightn’t realise till it’s gone), Debussy’s Prélude after Mallarmé’s poem is one of the most purely sensual experiences in all music. Classical rules about harmony, orchestration and form all come second to the creation of an intoxicating, wholly new atmosphere - warm, dreamlike, tender and unmistakably sexy.

Mallarmé was delighted: “I never expected anything like it. The music extends the emotion of my poem and paints its scenery more passionately than colours ever could!” And so seductive is its half-tone world of whispering flutes, dreaming horns, hazy string chords and swirling harps that it’s easy to forget that nothing like this piece had ever been heard before its première in Paris in December 1894.

Rhapsody for cor anglais and orchestra

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Elise Hall, of Boston USA, had great faith in the power of music: so much so that she believed that a long-term respiratory condition from which she suffered might be cured (or at least soothed) if she took up the saxophone. This was 1903. Jazz had yet to be invented and in the absence of anything much worth playing, she commissioned a series of French composers to write her something new. Claude Debussy was always willing to take a commission fee, but less diligent about fulfilling the commission.

“Considering that this piece was ordered, and paid for […] and (its proceeds) eaten more than a year ago, I realise that I am behind with it” he confessed to a friend. “The saxophone is a reed instrument with whose habits I am not very well acquainted. Does it indulge in romantic tenderness like the clarinet?” It would be 1911 before he sent his completed “Rapsodie Mauresque” to Ms Hall - a bare manuscript for sax and piano, inspired by the exotic swirls and sultry harmonies of an imagined North Africa. His friend Jean Roger-Ducasse created a sumptuous orchestral accompaniment in 1919 – from which it’s but a short leap to playing this short, gorgeous oriental sketch on an instrument with which Debussy felt altogether more at home: the
cor anglais.

Wind Sinfonietta

Ruth Gipps (1921-1999)

Ruth Gipps trained as a pianist before taking up the oboe in 1937, and she always followed her own path. Dissatisfied with the standard of teaching at the Royal College of Music, her outlook was transformed when, in 1940, she entered the 67-year old Vaughan Williams’s composition class. Around the same time, she was growing close to a clarinet student, Robert Baker. They married in March 1942. Both would later play in the City of Birmingham Orchestra (as the CBSO was then known), and their son Lance would become a professional horn player. In short, wind music was woven into the fabric of Gipps’s personal and creative life, from beginning to end.

Gipps’s Wind Sinfonietta dates from the later years of her compositional career, after the premiere of her fifth and final symphony in March 1983. Together with Robert, she’d moved back to her childhood home of Sussex, where (in Uckfield) she conducted the Rondel Wind Ensemble in the world premiere of the Sinfonietta in November 1991. The Rondels had commissioned the work, but Gipps needed no encouragement to write for winds, though (in a typically individual touch) she added an optional tam-tam. The four movements embrace the pastoral (naturally, her beloved cor anglais gets the opening theme); an atmospheric Adagio, a bristling scherzo (with energetic horn parts) and a finale that Gipps marks doloroso (melancholy) but which ends – Gipps being Gipps – in irrepressible optimism.

Symphonie Fantastique

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

“Fantastic Symphony: Episode in the life of an Artist.

A young artist of an unusually sensitive nature and a vivid imagination has taken opium in the depths of lovesick despair. The drug has thrown him into a deep sleep, accompanied by the most extraordinary visions. In this state, his feelings and his memories take on the form of musical ideas. Even his Beloved One takes the form of a melody in his mind – an idée fixe [an obsessive idea], which returns constantly, and which he sees everywhere.”

That’s the story that Hector Berlioz claimed to tell in his Symphonie Fantastique – and at least one part of it was entirely true. He really was “a young artist of an unusually sensitive nature and a vivid imagination”, and in the spring of 1830, he was studying in Paris in the grip of not one, but three overpowering passions.

The first was Shakespeare. In September 1827, an English theatre company had performed Hamlet in Paris: it “struck me like a thunderbolt”, he recalled. The second was Beethoven’s Eroica symphony: “Beethoven opened before me a new world of music”. And the third was love: crazy, unrequited love. Harriet Smithson was an Irish actress in the Shakespeare company; Berlioz had never even spoken to her, but he was smitten all the same. Meanwhile Camille Moke, a 21-year old pianist, took that as a challenge: “She set my senses on fire till all the devils of hell danced in my veins”.

So those were the ingredients. Mixed together in the mind of a young composer in love with the gothic and the Romantic, the result was the Symphonie Fantastique, written early in 1830 and first performed on 9th December 1832. Harriet was in the audience. Amazed by its programme, she made enquiries about the composer – “That poor young man…I hope he’s forgotten me”. Instead she learned, to her astonishment, that the piece was actually inspired by her. They were married within the year.

Berlioz insisted that his music should speak without words and the Symphonie Fantastique is definitely graphic enough to speak for itself! The one idea to bear in mind is the idée fixe – the tune representing the Beloved, which recurs throughout the Symphony. It’s the long, lilting melody played by the violins immediately after the start of the fast Passions section of the first movement – coming after the long, wandering Rêveries.

Un bal is just that – an elegant Parisian valse, with harps glittering like diamonds. The Beloved appears, on oboe, in the centre of the movement – and our hero’s heart is still skipping beats. In the peaceful Scène aux champs a lonely shepherd (cor anglais) pipes to his offstage sweetheart (oboe). By the end of the movement, his only reply is a distant rumble of thunder.

In the Marche au supplice the drugs have kicked in: our artist hallucinates that he’s being executed, and the idée fixe makes a final appearance on clarinet before the guillotine blade falls and the head bounces into the basket. But it’s not over: the scene darkens for a hellish supernatural fantasy of witches rejoicing in his doom. There are orchestral bells as midnight strikes, and the tuba belts out the Dies Irae funeral plainchant. As the dance spirals into madness, Berlioz unleashes everything he has left in a riotous orgy of sound.

Programme notes by Richard Bratby.

Meet the CBSO

Violin I
Cellerina Park
Alexandra Caldon
Djumash Poulsen
Jane Wright*#
Colette Overdijk*#
Julia Aberg*#
Richard Thomas*
Nathan Bomans*
Mark Robinson#
Victoria Farrell-Reed*
Bethan Allmand*
Vera Beumer
Iryna Glyebova
Kath Gittings
Ricardo Brown

Violin 2
Lowri Porter*
Moritz Pfister#
Amy Jones#
Charlotte Skinner#
Bryony Morrison*#
Gabriel Dyker*#
Maria Reinon
Tim Birchall*#
Yuriko Matsuda*
Adam Hill
Zhivko Georgiev
Anais Boyadjieva

Viola
Chris Yates*#
David BaMaung*#
Michael Jenkinson#
Jessica Tickle*#
Amy Thomas*#
Sarah Malcolm*
Helen Roberts
Matt Johnstone
Amy Swain
Mark Braithwaite

Cello
Steffan Morris
Arthur Boutillier
Kate Setterfield*#
Miguel Fernandes*#
Catherine Ardagh-Walter*#
Jacqueline Tyler*#
Helen Edgar*#
Philippa Schofield

Double Bass
Anthony Alcock*#
Julian Atkinson*#
Jeremy Watt*#
Daniel Vassallo*
Julian Walters*#
Maitiú Gaffney

Flute
Marie-Christine Zupancic*#
Elizabeth May

Piccolo
Helen Benson

Oboe
Hyun Jung Song*
Vanessa Howells
Emmet Byrne*#

Cor Anglais
Rachael Pankhurst*#

Clarinets
Oliver Janes*#
Joanna Patton*#

Bass Clarinet
Mark O’Brien#

Bassoon
Nikolaj Henriques*#
Tony Liu
Benjamin Hudson

Contrabassoon
Margaret Cookhorn*#

Horn
Elspeth Dutch*#
Alex Pereira
Neil Shewan
Mark Phillips*#
Jeremy Bushell*#
Martin Wright#

Trumpet
Niall Keatley
Gideon Brooks

Cornet
Tom Watts
Imogen Timmins

Trombone
Richard Watkin#
Ryan Hume

Bass Trombone
David Vines*#

Tuba
Daniel Trodden*
Oren Marshall

Timpani
Matthew Hardy*#
Ewan Millar

Percussion
Andrew Herbert#
Toby Kearney*#
Jordan Ashman
Alex Henshaw–van den Bos

Harp
Katherine Thomas*#
Aisha Palmer

# Recipient of the CBSO Long Service Award / * Supported player

Biographies

François Leleux, Conductor/Cor Anglais

Conductor François Leleux is Artistic Director of Kammerakademie Potsdam and Principal Guest Artist of the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra. Celebrated for his irrepressible energy, musical clarity, and collaborative approach, he is increasingly recognised as one of the most distinctive conductors of his generation, his work on the podium developing naturally from a distinguished career as one of the world’s leading oboists and chamber musicians.

Leleux’s 2026/27 season features conducting and play-directing engagements with Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, Bruckner Orchester Linz, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic, Sinfonia Lahti, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and Singapore Symphony. With Kammerakademie Potsdam, he undertakes tours across Europe and South America, as well as an appearance at the Salzburg Mozartwoche with Rolando Villazón. These follow recent debuts and return invitations with Bamberger Symphoniker, Dresdner Philharmonie, Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, Japan Philharmonic, Gothenburg Symphony, Stavanger Symphony, and Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal.

Recently appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, François Leleux is Professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München.

Get closer to the music with a CBSO membership

As a CBSO Member, you’ll enjoy unforgettable experiences while helping us continue to make music that truly matters.

From as little as £5.50 a month, you can join our thriving community of music lovers, enjoy great benefits, and play your part in securing a vibrant future for orchestral music here in Birmingham.

All members have the chance to sit in on rehearsals, to meet musicians at our afternoon teas and other special events, and to receive behind-the-scenes news, as well as priority booking before concerts go on sale to the general public. Additionally, you can now opt-in a second member, from any address in the UK, entitling them to enjoy benefits with you.

For more information on how to join as a member or to support our work by making a donation, visit cbso.co.uk/support-us or call us on 0121 616 6510.

You might also like...

If you enjoyed today’s performance, why not continue the journey? Here are three concerts we think you’ll love, chosen for their connection to the music, themes or composers featured in today’s programme.

CBSO Choral Christmas

Friday 18 December 2026, 7:30pm
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
What could be more festive than a stage packed with musicians and choirs at Christmas? Sit back and enjoy glorious music with the CBSO Chorus, Youth Chorus, Children’s Chorus and CBSO SO Vocal.

Kazuki conducts Beethoven’s Eroica

Wednesday 17 February 2027, 2:15pm
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
An unmissable opportunity to hear one of music’s most fearless and inventive composers through a complete cycle of his symphonies. Kazuki Yamada and the CBSO begin at the very beginning with the first three.

Centre Stage: Kazuki Yamada & Alice Sara Ott

Sunday 30 May 2027, 1pm
CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Pianist Alice Sara Ott stars in a celebration of the wit, the wonder and the boundless imagination of Maurice Ravel.