Date: Thursday 2 February 2023
Location: Birmingham Symphony Hall
Details: The Planets CBSO conducted by Kazuki Yamada
Yesterday’s trip to Symphony Hall, Birmingham, to see the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) with conductor, Kazuki Yamada perform Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’, was fabulous day out.
We arrived just after 11am which gave us all time to explore the area and have a relaxing lunch before the concert at 2.15pm. It was my first visit to Symphony Hall and what a hall it is. The acoustics are great and it was nearly full for this second performance here of the CBSO’s programme, the previous one being the evening before. The first half of the concert was a performance of Tchaikovsky’s second piano concerto. A lesser-known work than his first piano concerto, it was performed to great acclaim by the 25-year-old French pianist, Alexandre Kantorow who, not surprisingly, won the first prize, gold medal and Grand Prix at the 16th International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019. After much applause we were treated to a solo encore.
After the interval, the almost 100-strong orchestra were on stage for the main event: The Planets. It was the first time I’d heard all seven movements live in a concert hall. The first movement – Mars – was truly thunderous in places, but in other movements, despite being a huge orchestra, there were pianissimo moments where you could have heard a pin drop. The CBSO is a superb orchestra. Their conductor, Kazuki Yamada, was a lively performer, too, dancing and swaying along to the music and even – during the penultimate movement ‘Uranus, the Magician’ – stepping off the podium and walking between the cellos and violas; his conducting flourishes getting more flamboyant as the movement progressed. The Planets finished with the ethereal ‘Neptune, the Mystic’, with an off-stage choir of sopranos that faded into the distance to give what must be one of the quietest finishes to any grand work.
Straight onto the bus after the concert finished and, despite Birmingham’s rush-hour traffic’s best attempts to hold us up, we were still back in Shrewsbury at just after 6.30pm. It was a grand day out. Thank you to Bridget and the Cultural and Current Affairs team, I’ll certainly be looking forward to the next concert.