Page 59 - Final_CBSO's 100th Birthday Celebration

the arts desk

08 September 2020

CBSO 100th Birthday Celebration online

review - top musicians let down by sound

and visuals

***

An ambitious centenary presentation firing on too many cylinders
by David NiceTuesday, 08 September 2020

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Presenter Adrian Lester, CBSO General Manager Stephen Maddock, Simon Rattle, the CBSO and that logo

Let’s start by echoing Simon Rattle’s sense of “how lucky we are”, in our case to be able to share
with a 75-piece City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra its centenary to the very day, and
celebrate the programme, the performers, the front man too (that superlative actor Adrian Lester,
born in Birmingham to Jamaican immigrants). The overall presentation, alas, not so much. The
welcome presence of Midlander Sheku Kanneh-Mason as soloist in Saint-Saëns' First Cello
Concerto (pictured below) only reminded some of us how he was filmed playing the same work
(don’t orchestras compare notes?), just as brilliantly, but in much better sound and vision, courtesy
of the Philharmonia’s first Summer Session with conductor John Wilson.
What went so wrong here? The acoustic clearly wasn’t good, and why the CBSO couldn’t play in its home, the
best concert hall in the country – constructed in 1991 with a promise that the auditorium would be played down
as only part of a conference centre – isn’t at all clear. It might have felt as disquieting as the livestreamed Proms
to see no audience in such a vast space; but there certainly wasn’t any atmosphere about the Longbridge