Musgrave’s Trumpet Concerto was written specially for Alison Balsom, Cheltenham’s artistic director, whose sole instruction was that she loved to sing with her instrument. Also inspired by paintings of trees by Victoria Crowe, Musgrave seized on the idea of energy reaching up from the tree’s deepest roots and high into the air as a metaphor for life, a notion all the more striking for coming from a composer who, at 91, still brims with her own life force.

The Guardian

Jörg Widmann’s song-cycle Das heiße Herz (2013), here in its 2018 orchestration co-commissioned by the CBSO, which focusses on affairs of the heart from a frequently youthful, even childlike perspective. Such is evident in the sing-song jejunity of the vocal writing, akin to a cantus firmus that leads a path through some diverse and often dislocated textures.

Classical Source

Every time I’ve listened to SPIRA I’m entranced by the way Chin resolves its polarised nature, managing to arrive at a point where energy and stillness, somehow, seem to be articulated simultaneously, as if they had assimilated each other into a complex tremulous quietude.

5 Against 4

Gary Carpenter’s Ghost Songs, a CBSO Centenary Commission, was the perfect showcase for the CBSO’s Youth Chorus and Children’s Chorus. The six songs, based on poems by Marion Angus, Robert Louis Stevenson and the prolific Anon., explored aspects of dream, nightmare and the uncanny. This was a sparkling performance with Carpenter skilfully balancing a large orchestra with scintillating dabs of colour from the percussion and galumphing humour from the tuba. The chorus gave a whooping “be off!” to Stevenson’s ogres and had great fun with the comic Wee,Wee Man, ending with the delicate shimmer of All Souls’ Eve.

Slipped Disc

Unscheduled drama at Symphony Hall! “Oh no,” cried Julian Anderson, sitting just in front of me, as his new cello concerto, Litanies, came to a shuddering halt minutes after it had begun. The soloist Alban Gerhardt had snapped his A-string. Anderson’s writing for the cello sounds ferocious enough for four strings, let alone three.

The Times

this extended and ingeniously organized sequence of fragments from across the opera undeniably evokes a notable precedent in terms of its inexorable motion toward ultimate catastrophe, the animation and sheer panache of the CBSO’s playing brought about a suitably emphatic close.

Arcana FM

The two soloists — a brooding Simon Keenlyside and an eloquent Raphael Wallfisch — reveal different aspects of the narrator: outer and inner voices; thoughts and feelings; intellect and instinct.

The Times

The concerto itself seems to hide a free-floating melancholy beneath an exterior of refined and sometimes brilliant colour.

The Arts Desk

Each new section grows inevitably from what precedes it, with her technique of building upon long-held bass pedal notes producing strikingly varied results – dense string clusters, woodwind ripples or shreds of consoling melody, and, about two-thirds of the way through, a repeated falling figure that is utterly simple, yet inexpressibly sad.

The Guardian

Brett Dean’s new work is quite a mind-blowing affair: an evolution cantata, viewed from the perspective of this present brief moment in time

The Guardian

The work is both an evocation of the exhilaration of life in the mountains (Larcher was born in Innsbruck, in the Austrian Tyrol) and a memorial to [Tom] Ballard – the first movement a tumultuous, multi-faceted celebration, the second more introspective funeral music.

The Guardian

We all have our demons, hidden away, lurking in darkness, ready to pounce. Freya Waley-Cohen sets them free in a new ten-minute orchestral work blending restless energy, incantatory magic and distorted jaunty folk influences.

The Times

Seam-like streaks, like thin slivers of light, occasionally being marshalled into pulsing waves

5 Against 4

Songs celebrating the ups-and-down, loves and losses of peasant life performed with vibrancy, spirit and exuberance by these talented youngsters. I especially enjoyed ‘Too Many Daughters’ where the line about the Lord of Manor drawing his sword had the singers unsheathing imaginary weapons. They got a thumbs up from Associate Chorus Director Julian Wilkins, showers of blown kisses from the composer and huge hurrahs from the audience.

Midlands Classic Music Reviews