Birmingham
Guy Oddy
When those cold winter nights start closing in, there is really only two choices for facing up to the unpleasantness that this brings. Stay at home, batten down the hatches, whack up the heating and blow the expense. Or go out and immerse yourself in some hot and sweaty rock’n’roll.Clearly, the majority of us at theartsdesk.com favour the second option. So, when the raucous Pigsx7 finally made it to Birmingham to support their Viscerals album of 18 months ago, there really was no choice about what to do.It may have been cold and wet outside, but Pigsx7 weren’t going to be guided by that with Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
With its themes of racism, violence, oppression and climate change, Marvin Gaye's 1971 album, What's Going On, is as pertinent today as it was when it was released 50 years ago. Presented by Tomorrow’s Warriors, Nu Civilisation Orchestra played this seminal body of work with all the soul and spirit the record merits, in a performance that was both inherently faithful to the album, but still unique.Musical Director Peter Edwards – who had expertly arranged Gaye’s music for the group – described their goal as wanting the audience to feel like they were "inside the record". The music was paired Read more ...
Richard Bratby
"Nature is healing," declared the social media meme, back in the early days of lockdown when humanity had temporarily retreated to focus on its banana bread. There were pictures to prove it, apparently. Dolphins sported in the canals of Venice; city gardens filled with newly emboldened songbirds. Didn’t a herd of goats colonise Llandudno at one point? Something like that, anyway.What’s certain is that the aftermath has seen a boom in the population of operatic foxes. Vixens were sighted this summer in Longborough and Holland Park; there’s one due at ENO in February. They’re less common in the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Having been founded only in 2017 by singer/songwriter Eric Burton and guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada, Black Pumas have been rapidly rising to fame, with a Grammy award nomination in 2020 and the majority of their current European tour dates sold out. Though Tuesday’s Birmingham show, in Digbeth’s O2 Institute, was not among that number, the venue was still teaming with an eager and enthusiastic crowd. An impressive frontman, Burton displayed larger than life stage presence from the get go, oozing an infectious energy with punchy dance moves and full fat, no holds barred soulful vocals. Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Kicking off a brand new partnership between the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Hockley Social Club, this first ever Symphonic Session saw a string quartet from the CBSO take centre stage at Birmingham’s latest street-food venue, Hockley Social Club, on Thursday evening. Hockley Social Club is the new, permanent Brum-based home for street-food stalwarts Digbeth Dining Club. Founded almost a decade ago, Digbeth Dining Club has brought its signature street food events to myriad Midlands venues, including the ruins at Coventry Cathedral and the stunning grounds of Warwick Castle. Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
With a few extra dates to her rescheduled UK tour, Scottish folk legend Karine Polwart returned to Birmingham Town Hall with some tunes from her latest album – Still as You’re Sleeping, an album of just voice and piano recording with jazz pianist Dave Milligan – plus a mix of earlier material, covers and traditional songs given her own signature twist. On stage with Polwart for this tour is her brother, guitarist Steven Polwart, and her neighbour and friend, multi-instrumentalist Inge Thomson. Opening with “Ophelia”, from the trio’s 2018 album Laws of Motion, the group at once performed with Read more ...
David Nice
Is there any composer alive who writes more luminously bittersweet elegies than Mark-Anthony Turnage? Taking key lines from memorialising poets through the ages as inspiration, he knows that instrumental phrases must sing, sometimes to invisible words, as well as dance if they’re to pierce the heart.What more inspired choices could there be, then, to frame thornier works than This Silence of 1992/3 for mixed octet and a new Concertino for phenomenal, more-than-just-mellifluous clarinettist Jon Carnac, a musician Turnage loves and admires (he can’t compose unless such affinities pertain). It Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Incredibly it’s now 40 years since the release of Duran Duran’s debut album. To mark this event, the remaining members of the band’s classic line-up decided to return to Birmingham. Not to the NIA or any similar-sized venue, but for a couple of intimate gigs at the city’s O2 Institute. Fortunately, “intimate” didn’t mean getting out the acoustic guitars for rounds of their greatest hits but it was nevertheless quite a shock to see these megastars playing a room that holds 1,500 on a good day and must be little more than 30 metres from the stage to the back wall.In keeping with the premise of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Five weeks have passed since the death of opera director Graham Vick from complications due to Covid-19, shocking even to those of us (un)prepared for the worst, and yet so many of us think about him every day. For the musicians, actors, dancers and stage crew he worked with, he's still among us, and he lives on in the hearts and minds of the ensemble he forged over years of developing his Birmingham Opera Company.A personal note on why I'm so stricken before I hand over to those who had far more creative experience of his vision. I first saw his productions when I was a student at Edinburgh Read more ...
David Nice
Nominally, this was a programme of three symphonies. The first, though, sounded like music re-cut and pasted from a very British film and the second was a suite, albeit impressively reworked, from an opera. The real deal, Brahms’s Third, is a very personal masterpiece, more inward than outward looking, and that, too, may have been why Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s latest Prom with her City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was less electrifying than its predecessors.Would “the Gipps Second Symphony” have made a reappearance had its composer been called Ralph and not Ruth? She is remarkable for her Read more ...
David Nice
The love of power corrupts, the power of love falters or fails. The essence of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung is also what Graham Vick communicated so stunningly in many of his unforgettable productions with his Birmingham Opera Company (Khovanskygate in a big top and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in a disused nightclub were perhaps the most revelatory experiences of my opera-going life to date).This spring he embarked on RhineGold, unusual venue then to be confirmed, but fell ill with Covid and died, aged only 67, on 17 July – the biggest personal shock of the time for many of us. Richard Willacy, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra believes that its current post-lockdown summer series features the largest orchestra currently performing live in the UK. It’s not an easy claim to verify, and the full string section certainly wasn’t on stage for this matinee performance under the orchestra’s associate conductor Michael Seal. What’s clear though, is that the platform at Symphony Hall, stripped of risers and choirstalls, offers ample space for a large orchestra that’s socially distanced but doesn’t sound like it. The Hall’s pristine acoustic isn’t suited to every kind of music, but Read more ...