A rare spotlight fell on the trombone at Birmingham's Symphony Hall as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kazuki Yamada, presented the UK premiere of a major new work for the instrument.
A Champion for the Trombone: Peter Moore Takes the Stage
The soloist was Peter Moore, a musician whose career has been pivotal in raising the profile of his instrument. The Belfast-born artist, now a decade into his role with the London Symphony Orchestra, first made headlines as the youngest ever winner of BBC Young Musician in 2008 at just 12 years old. He later became the first solo trombonist at the Proms in nearly two decades in 2022. His advocacy is directly responsible for expanding the concerto repertoire available to trombonists today.
For this concert, Moore tackled the elusive sounds of Dai Fujikura's Vast Ocean II (2023), a reworking of the composer's 2005 trombone concerto. Inspired by Stanisław Lem's sci-fi novel Solaris, the piece casts the orchestra as a teeming, sentient ocean, with the trombone representing a human explorer navigating its depths. Fujikura himself quipped in the pre-concert talk that Moore was the "George Clooney" of this aquatic adventure.
A Pointillist Seascape of Sound
The musical result, however, leaned more towards the atmospheric ambiguity of Andrei Tarkovsky's film adaptation than Hollywood gloss. Fujikura paints a pointillist canvas of glinting textures, where sounds rarely develop in a conventional sense. Instead, they circle, echo, dissolve, and re-form in waves. Moore excelled in this environment, making his instrument sing with remarkable vocal expression. He found shifting colours within the score's insistent repeated notes, transforming slides into sighs and howls, while Yamada and the CBSO conjured a rich, elusive sonic backdrop. The piece remains a musical enigma—a sequence of gorgeous episodes that leaves the listener with more questions than answers, a specialty of its composer.
From Cosmic Oceans to Earthy Landscapes: Mahler's First Symphony
After the interval, the programme shifted from otherworldly seas to the familiar, earthy landscapes of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1. This is a work that suits Yamada's heart-on-sleeve and instinctive conducting style, allowing for broad, sweeping gestures.
The performance was overwhelmingly sunny and persuasive. The second movement's Ländler swayed with a deliciously woozy, schnapps-infused warmth, thanks to the string portamenti. The finale was thrilling, with thunderclaps of timpani building to a blinding, triumphant climax, the brass section rising to its feet. Yet, in the third movement's sinister, funereal parody of Frère Jacques, some crucial depth was missed. While the klezmer-esque themes hinted at sleazy horror and grotesquery, the performance lacked the bleak, nihilistic counterweight essential to balance the symphony's overwhelming optimism and vitality.
This concert by the CBSO served as a powerful showcase for both an emerging modern masterpiece and a homegrown virtuoso, reaffirming Birmingham's place at the forefront of the UK's classical music scene.
