NICOLA BENEDETTI AND THE CITY OF BIRMINGHAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Sitting in the balcony of the Corn Exchange, I had a strange feeling of ‘am I really here?’ I was watching a world-class orchestra and a global superstar of the violin. But this is in a very small city with a population around 120,000, the same as Simi Valley, California. Now, the aforesaid Simi Valley may host great orchestras every few weeks and I don’t want to seem smug, but this little town of ours certainly batters above its puny weight.
These strange thoughts came to me watching Nicola Benedetti totally inhabiting the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. The famous Scot may have been the reason why the audience packed the venue. She certainly deserved the boisterous accolade she received at the end of the glorious concerto. Taken at a furious F1 pace, it was a wonder that Benedetti’s fiddle didn’t burst into friction induced flame. She is a demon of the violin but quite brilliant at teasing out the many changes of mood and temperament often within the same bar of music. Hers is a superbly nuanced reading of this famous work and she has the ability to bring out the deeper questions Tchaikovsky asks behind the gorgeous tunes.
The second half of the evening was a showcase for the CBSO which is not for nothing in the premier league of world bands. The work was the Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. First performed in Paris in 1830, the huge piece is still a dazzling and astonishingly cheeky tour de force. Berlioz ripped up every rulebook on the structure of classical symphonies: five movements not four, four timpani not one, two harps when a single instrument was de rigueur, offstage instruments and rasping brass. The orchestra clearly loved every minute; the atmosphere was electric, the tension often at breaking point, the drama of the programmatic symphony with its chilling dances, macabre marches to the scaffold, haunting love calls and bittersweet melodies filled every one of 50 minutes with pure pleasure. Unrequited love which tore at the young man’s soul is the backdrop to Berlioz’s symphony. Like a child with a free hand over a box of toys, he constantly plays with the orchestra to explore new and exciting sounds creating a unique audial landscape which still challenges the listener today.
As the piece came to a blazing end, we could at last catch our breath and ask that persistent question: ‘am I really in Wheeler Street, Cambridge?’
