review: Pure gold for all romantics; CULTURE CBSO Symphony Hall Birmingham ****.

Byline: Norman Stinchcombe

As a wunderkind Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the toast of musical Vienna but he eventually fled to Hollywood to escape Nazi anti-Semitism.

His tuneful film scores for Errol Flynn swashbucklers made him rich but lost him the musical establishment's respect.

The orchestral suite from his incidental music to a production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing reveals the 20-year-old composer's musical wit, and received an exuberant and sparkling performance from the CBSO under Michael Seal.

They delighted in Korngold's ear for piquant musical textures and instrumental combinations, his sense of fun and delight in musical pastiche. The comic march that recalls Mahler's seventh symphony, a later brief cameo for Strauss's Don Quixote and the presiding spirit of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream were lovingly captured.

The luscious romanticism of the 1947 violin concerto, based on themes from Korngold's 1930s movie scores, is his most popular concert hall work. Anthony Marwood was restrained in a work that doesn't require any excess from the soloist - the music is ripe enough. In the central Romance, the soloist soared rapturously over the orchestra, and only the wilfully glum listener could fail to smile at the finale's catch-me-if-you-can per petuum mobile, despatched brilliantly by Marwood.

Brahms's first symphony received an energetic but rather broad brush-stroke performance.

It was best in the exuberan touter movements, but the central two - despite fine work by the first violin and oboe - remained generalized musically and emotionally.

CAPTION(S):

Conductor Michael Seal