Birmingham Classical Season
B:Music announces its 2024/25 Birmingham (UK) Classical Season at Symphony Hall
B:Music - a music charity based in Birmingham, UK, with a mission to inspire a love of live music through performance, participation and learning - announces its 2024/25 Birmingham Classical Series at Symphony Hall.
The new season will showcase some of the pinnacles of orchestral music as well as newer discoveries. Many soloists, orchestras and conductors will appear on the Symphony Hall stage and, as always, B:Music continues its mission to reach new audiences across the West Midlands and beyond by offering tickets at GBP 15 per concert, and extending its GBP 5 ticket offer to include mature students in addition to the many offers for children, families and others. Sunday morning concerts with coffee and cake will also continue to bring fresh young talent to the Jennifer Blackwell Performance Space.
American conductor Ryan Bancroft conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales on 29 May 2025. Photo © 2018 Per Morton
Nick Reed, Chief Executive said:
Our new Birmingham Classical season brings a world tour of the finest orchestras - from South America, across Europe and to Japan - along with stellar soloists and exciting Rising Stars, right here to Birmingham. It has been over twenty-five years since any Japanese orchestra played in Symphony Hall, so the visit by the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo will be a particularly special one. There are orchestral ambassadors, too, from Buenos Aries, Prague and Hungary, all offering a rare chance to hear truly authentic performances of music from their own countries.
The electric partnership between Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has been making waves, and we look forward to the return of ever-popular musicians Gabriela Montero, James Ehnes, and Wayne Marshall, as well as much anticipated newcomers including Jeneba Kanneh-Mason and Federico Colli. There's nothing like the experience of live music and with some of the great names in classical music performing in Birmingham this season, the B:Music team looks forward to welcoming audiences to Symphony Hall soon.
Vasily Petrenko conducting the
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Photo © 2021 Ben Wright
A wide array of soloists will perform in the new season including Czech cellist and Brahms expert, Jiří Bárta, who will perform with the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine on 8 October 2024. Established in 1902, the orchestra makes its first visit to Birmingham with the American conductor Theodore Kuchar, whose own roots lie in Ukraine. As Chief Conductor since 2022, Kuchar has been flying the flag for Ukrainian music-making with international tours and important collaborative projects in Poland and Germany.
Benjamin Kruithof - appearing on 6 October 2024 - hails from Luxembourg and, with major victories including the 2022 George Enescu International competition and many concerto appearances with European orchestras, he has been selected as a Rising Star by ECHO - the European Concert Hall Organisation. He will play in the Jennifer Blackwell Performance Space in the first of six ECHO Rising Stars concerts. His programme is themed around musical influences and friendships and starts with Stravinsky's Suite Italienne, a spin-off from his ballet music Pulcinella which gives Baroque music a new lease of life.
The six ECHO Rising Stars Sunday recitals feature outstanding artists handpicked by the directors of Europe's most prestigious venues. Each musician or group embarks on an international concert tour of halls in the ECHO network, and B:Music venues Symphony Hall and Town Hall have been there since the series began in 1995. The other musicians and groups featuring in the series are Quatuor Agate on 26 January 2025, Sào Soulez Larivière on 9 February, Matilda Lloyd on 2 March, Carlos Ferreira on 6 April and Lukas Sternath on 4 May 2025.
Portuguese clarinettist Carlos Ferreira. Photo © 2021 Ana Mar
A Symphony Hall season highlight on 29 March 2025 will be the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Vasily Petrenko in Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet and Prokofiev's blistering Fifth Symphony. Completing the line up is violinist Esther Yoo, who plays Bruch's romantic Violin Concerto, one of the most popular in the repertoire.
American violinist Esther Yoo.
Photo © 2021 Je Won Kim
The Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo makes a welcome return to Symphony Hall on 23 October 2024 after more than thirty years with a programme including Beethoven's Violin Concerto and Rachmaninov's Symphony No 2. With principal conductor Sebastian Weigle, this concert of blockbusters begins with music from the 1948 ballet Salome by pre-eminent Japanese composer Akira Ifukube, who is best known for his film scores for the Godzilla series.
On 17 November 2024, Italian pianist Federico Colli joins the Nuremburg Symphony Orchestra to perform Beethoven's pivotal Emperor concerto, the work which won Colli first prize in the Leeds Piano Competition.
On 30 November 2024 Symphony Hall welcomes the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra which celebrated its eightieth anniversary in 2023 and appointed Riccardo Frizza as chief conductor in the same season. Frizza leads the orchestra on tour with pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason from the Nottingham-based musical family, following in the footsteps of elder siblings Isata and Sheku.
Jeneba Kanneh-Mason.
Photo © 2020 John Davis
Wayne Marshall conducts the German National Orchestra - the official partner of the Berlin Philharmonic - on 16 January 2025. Their concert of showstoppers includes Holst's ever popular suite The Planets and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, with Marshall as piano soloist.
Other highlights of the 2024/25 season include a performance by the Prague Symphony Orchestra on 7 February 2025 with Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero. The programme opens with Smetana's overture to The Bartered Bride and closes with Dvořák's moody and dramatic Seventh Symphony - for many his greatest symphony.
Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero.
Photo © 2018 Anders Brogaard
Every two weeks, from 23 September 2024 until 16 June 2025, Birmingham city organist Thomas Trotter gives a recital of about an hour's music on the organ of either Birmingham Town Hall or Symphony Hall.
Tickets and further information: bmusic.co.uk/bclassical
Posted 13 May 2024 by Keith Bramich
