Jeremy Patterson has been a major figure on the local musical scene for well over half a century, whether as head of music at Westbourne Road College of Education, player in and then conductor of the Bromsgrove String Orchestra, and as a spectacularly successful longtime conductor of the Birmingham Festival Choral Society.
But perhaps what remains dearest to his heart are the 60 years with which he has been associated with the Birmingham School of Music, now Birmingham Conservatoire. For the past 33 years he has served on the Birmingham Conservatoire Association, 25 of those as chairman, a charity which aims to support the work of students and alumni, and which does so with generosity.
And it was with such personal generosity that Patterson promoted Sunday's concert on his 80th birthday in aid of the BCA. He enlisted the formidable CBSO strings, no less, and conducted them in an absorbing programme of favourites -- and one welcome stranger, White Fire and Moonlight, pastorally confiding like Finzi, genuinely "stringy" and muscular like Tippett, by Elis Pehkonen, an emotionally approachable composer whose work Patterson championed so often with BFCS.
For the rest, we heard Grieg's enchanting Holberg Suite, alternately crisp and tender, a well-balanced, shapely and flowing Elgar Serenade for Strings, and finally the heartbreaking Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss.
This sorrowful lament for the destruction of all culture and decency at the end of World War II was heartfelt in its delivery, the CBSO principal soloists a huge presence, and so much in tune with this period of commemoration of the carnage perpetrated by politicians on every side.
