You can tell a lot about what might follow from the way an orchestra and conductor approach a Rossini overture at the start of a concert. A sombre introduction, some perky wind solos and the sugar-rush of the familiar Rossini crescendo: many performances offer something like that as if on auto-pilot. That we were definitely in for rather more was clear only moments into the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s reading under the expressive, almost balletic direction of young Brazilian Eduardo Strausser. He shaped repetitive phrases into something much more dynamic, highlighting the tension and release in the Overture to La Cenerentola, as though freshly created in the heat of the moment – even though this was the third consecutive night playing most of this programme for both orchestra and conductor.
Jess Gillam swelled the audience numbers to considerably more than the usual rather thin crowd for concerts in Sheffield’s City Hall. Her fans were rewarded with performances of two short works that, if relatively unfamiliar, provided vehicles for not just the expected virtuosity but also a kind of smouldering eloquence in moodier passages. Villa-Lobos’ Fantasia for soprano saxophone and chamber orchestra took a while to hold the audience’s attention, but the aching nocturnal tenderness of the slow movement, saxophone joined by a breathy solo viola, and then the vibrant 7/4 dance of the finale ensured a warm response. After the interval, in Escapades, John Williams’ brief three-movement work extracted from his incidental music to the Spielberg film Catch Me if You Can, Gillam proved she can do 60s lounge bar swing too. In a trio backed by vibes and double bass, she excelled particularly in the melancholic mood of the central Reflections section.
Pairing the 1919 Suite from Stravinsky’s The Firebird on the same programme as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Suite from The Golden Cockerel was an inspired piece of scheduling, and not just because of the thematic links provided by two fairy tale narratives involving magical birds. It’s a commonplace observation that Stravinsky’s first ballet score owes an immense debt to the work of his teacher Rimsky, but it’s another thing entirely to hear those sound worlds juxtaposed, and to grasp how Stravinsky takes the older composer’s techniques and forges from them something pointing to the new musical world to come. Unlike The Firebird, The Golden Cockerel is a rare visitor to the concert hall, and listening to it live really emphasised what a deeply, unnervingly weird score it is, full of haunted fanfares and eerie melodies. Even when one might expect the full range of Rimsky’s colourful orchestration to be deployed, in the wedding scene of Tsar Dodon and the Queen of Shemakha, the whole passage is scored as though gripped by a queasy sense of unease, and both here and throughout the rest of the suite the CBSO were on superb form, the trumpet call that represented the cockerel sounding troublingly sinister to the very end.
The Firebird in its 1919 form is lush and deeply sensual. Strausser clearly revelled in this music. It would be churlish to say that occasionally it felt like a series of beautiful moments rather than anything more ‘joined up’. In the end the audience was swept along by playing of flexibility and grace in the Dance of the Princesses and the Berceuse and by the sheer power and rhythmic drive of the Infernal Dance, before Elspeth Dutch’s exquisite playing of the principal horn part ushered in the jubilant Finale. One hopes the CBSO’s next visit to Sheffield will come soon enough, but for now this one will live long in the memory.
