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bursts of extraversion, peppering the work with metric irregularities, and building climaxes through the
accumulated effect of repeating phrases, became an emphatic assertion that articulations of religious
faith ought to embrace the possibility of simply having fun. In such a context, its more inward sequences
maintained their oddness while also conveying a clear authenticity, Yamada not wallowing in them but
keeping them light and breezy, Carolyn Sampson’s exquisite solos sounding more angelic than ardent.

The sharpest mix of light and serious came in Fauré’s brief Messe basse. A slim but sincere work, it
received a slim but sincere performance by the CBSO Youth Chorus directed by Julian Wilkins. The
deliberate simplicity of its ideas felt exacerbated in such a rich programme of music as this, to the extent
that it ended up serving as a kind of innocuous second-half palette cleanser.

Kazuki Yamada and the CBSO, Chorus and Youth Chorus in Symphony Hall

© Hannah Fathers

Thus cleansed, the CBSO delivered the kind of performance of Saint-Saëns’ Symphony no. 3 in C
minor that indicated what’s to come when Yamada’s tenure begins in 2023. Here was an orchestra
evidently giving it their all – and then some – for their next maestro, throwing themselves into the filigree
and the fire of the music with such delicacy and force that it became practically Mahlerian. For his part,
Yamada elicited remarkable power from the orchestra with the slightest of minimal gestures, in the
process making the work’s structure cohere so strongly that it sounded like a single 40-minute span of
convoluted musical evolution. The CBSO’s full-throttle approach was nonetheless highly malleable,
Yamada pulling them back to create a tone of stately grandeur during the first movement’s soft episode,
pushing them on in the second movement’s Presto sequences, making the rising piano scales almost
impossibly fleet.