Kazuki Yamada led the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in a concert at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on Friday night, with John Adams' 1980 work Harmonium as the centrepiece. The programme also featured Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man and Lincoln Portrait, Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, and Florence Price's The Heart of A Woman in its European premiere.
Elegant Framing of American Works
Yamada conceived the concert as two facing musical panels. The first paired Copland's craggy Fanfare for the Common Man with Lincoln Portrait, where soprano Janai Brugger delivered President Lincoln's own words with poised emphasis against a misty backdrop of strings and woodwind solos. The performance was beautifully balanced and paced, stirring the audience to borrowed patriotism.
The second panel prefaced Price's song-cycle with Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1987), a noisier, unapologetic feminist statement that refuses to apologise for taking up space in the classical concert hall. Stylistically, it provided a judder from boisterous modernity to the parlour sentimentality of Price's cycle, which features texts by Langston Hughes among others.
Florence Price's The Heart of A Woman
Price's cycle, newly orchestrated by Lior Rosner, tips over almost entirely into Broadway in the flirtatious, up-beat 'Don't you tell me no', offering full glorious Technicolor in the rhapsodic 'My dream' and gleaming fantasy 'To my little son'. It was richly sung by Brugger, but the additional orchestral scale puts pressure on these miniatures, whose slight substance cannot fully support it.
John Adams' Harmonium
Adams' Harmonium is essentially a concerto for choir and orchestra, a not-so-short ride in a machine that bends time: freeze-framing in 'Because I could not stop for Death' and fast-forwarding dizzily in 'Wild Nights'. Yamada's incisive energy is a good fit, but the CBSO Chorus felt timid, on the back of the beat. The work will travel to the Proms with the CBSO later this month, where the full sonic juggernaut is anticipated.
