Christopher Morley looks back at the highs – and lows – of 2011

Having a wonderful team of colleague reviewers, I’ve probably missed many of the noteworthy musical events which have happened in our region over the past year, so here are just a few of my own personal highlights.

Opera figured very large, beginning with revivals of two of Welsh National Opera’s best-loved productions at Birmingham Hippodrome, the company making full use of the facilities offered by that wonderful stage.

Christopher Alden’s strikingly compassionate directing of Puccini’s Turandot was conducted probingly by music director Lothar Koenigs, and Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Giles Havergal directing the original 25-year-old production, Simon Phillippo conducting, simply fizzed with intrigue and irony.

WNO’s superb orchestra found an equal with that of Opera North, who climbed out of the theatre pit back home in Leeds to grace Symphony Hall with a tremendous account of Wagner’s Rheingold.

Richard Farnes was the conductor of this semi-staged performance, the first in a complete Ring cycle which will unfold over the next three years. Watch out for Walkure in the summer.

Another Ring is unfolding at Longborough, the little (but professionally-equipped, and with a full orchestra-sized pit) country-house Festival theatre nestling cosily in the Cotswolds.

This remarkable enterprise is nearing the fulfilment of its complete Ring cycle, and this year’s offering was an astonishingly resourceful Siegfried.

We’ll stick out of town for other memorable presentations during this musical year, beginning at the Cheltenham International Festival of Music for the well-received premiere of Worcester-based composer Ian Venables’ 30-minute setting for soprano, tenor, string quartet and piano of Andrew Motion’s elegy on the death of the Queen Mother, Remember This.

George Vass’s Presteigne Festival, such a well-established annual attraction in the beautiful Welsh Marches as summer comes to its end, was especially distinguished this year by an emotionally powerful account of James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross, with Vass conducting the Choir of Royal Holloway and the remarkably adept Presteigne Festival Orchestra.

There was a similar aura to a memorable evening at the Bromsgrove Festival last spring, the choral group Tenebrae bringing crepuscular devotional Russian Orthodox religious music to the town’s ancient parish church as the sun set outside. Not only was this expertly sung, there was also well co-ordinated choral movement around the nave.

Another historic church nearby, the parish church at Tardebigge, is the perfect venue for the “Celebrating English Song” series which has graced the last seven summers in this peaceful corner of north Worcestershire.

This year there was something of a jinx on the three-recital series, with the first having to use an electronic piano (the pre-ordered “proper” one having failed to arrive) and the third, with two hours to go, bereft of a soloist, the announced soprano incapacitated with a throat infection.

But the much-loved baritone Roderick Williams came to the rescue, and he and accompanist Christopher Glynn presented an absorbing and delightful programme, saving the day.

Still out of town, in fact as far out of town as you can get, at the other end of Europe, it was my privilege to be invited to Bucharest for the biennial Festival devoted to Romania’s greatest composer, Georges Enescu.

I heard two orchestras while I was there: the world-renowned Vienna Philharmonic under Franz Welser-Most boring me to tears with its smug playing, devoid of any personality; and, having come even further than I had, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra performing with masses of personality and enthusiasm under its inspirational young principal conductor Vassily Petrenko.

From the RLPO’s two concerts I particularly treasured vibrant readings of Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony, Prokofiev’s Seventh, and the latter’s Piano Concerto no.3, Alexei Volodin the scintillating soloist.

But it’s about time we returned to Birmingham, and concentrated on the CBSO, which shares a friendly rivalry with the RLPO. These two, together with the Halle, make up a trio of the most followable orchestras in the country; and all of them miles from London.

Andris Nelsons continues to astonish the musical world with the depth of his musicianship, his ability to communicate his enthusiasm to both players and audience, and the fascination of his programming, and this year the spell he casts has remained undiminished.

It would take a feature much longer than this already lengthy one to enumerate all his triumphs with the CBSO during 2011, but here are just a few: an appropriately testosterone-fuelled Strauss Ein Heldenleben, concertmaster Laurence Jackson’s solo violin bringing a mollifying influence; a profound Mahler Ninth Symphony in a concert where he also directed the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s perennial Kai, Ulrich Heinen (who premiered this gripping piece so many years ago) the cello soloist; a powerful Prokofiev Alexander Nevsky, the CBSO Chorus singing so convincingly in Russian and Latin, in a programme which also included an equally powerful Beethoven Eroica Symphony; a glowing, lovingly-shaped Brahms St Antoni Variations which was almost my highlight of the year; and introducing us to Rolf Wallin’s Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra with the unobtrusively virtuosic Hakan Hardenberger as soloist, in a concert which ended with an interpretation of Shostakovich’s epic Leningrad Symphony which almost persuaded me that this sprawling piece can actually come off.

Nelsons and the CBSO took Alexander Nevsky to the Proms, where the CBSO Chorus succeeded in projecting communicatively through the dire acoustic. Soloist Midori wasn’t quite so lucky, her beautifully shaped Walton Violin Concerto swallowed up in this cavernous auditorium.

Famous CBSO/Nelsons Strauss showpieces – Don Juan and Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils had more success, framing what many listeners thought was the best Prom of the season.

The CBSO delivered the goods for other conductors, too. Its chorus director Simon Halsey presided over Jonathan Dove’s co-commissioned There was a Child, all concerned – orchestra, CBSO Chorus, Youth Chorus and Children’s Chorus, soloists Joan Rodgers and Toby Spence – creating an experience which will not quickly be forgotten by all who heard it (another candidate for highlight of the year).

Ex-music director Sir Simon Rattle completed the CBSO/Symphony Hall Mahler cycle with a throat-grabbing, ultimately heartbreaking account of Das Lied von der Erde, Jane Irwin and Michael Schade the soloists, and Jac van Steen was on the podium for a well-structured, utterly compelling reading of Mahler’s doom-laden Sixth Symphony, Peter Hill and Cliff Pick the implacable timpanists in the terrifying motto-rhythm.

There was also an amazing performance of the same symphony from the amateur Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra under the versatile and musicianly Michael Lloyd.

Earlier in the season the same ensemble had given a rare hearing to Schumann’s Konzertstuck for Four Horns and Orchestra, and how brilliant that account was.

Mahler’s Seventh Symphony received a reading appropriately combining the macabre and the visionary from the London Symphony Orchestra under the inexhaustible Valery Gergiev (who loves Symphony Hall – who wouldn’t?), and, to return to the CBSO, after a busy, colourful Petrushka from Andris Nelsons earlier in the season, they turned their attention to another Stravinsky ballet, The Rite of Spring, this time conducted by Ilan Volkov, and with a dancer, Julia Mach, the subject of fascinating visual creativity as a rcomputer transmuted her movements onto a huge screen.

Jac van Steen returned to the CBSO, this time its astounding Youth Orchestra, to conduct a strong, awe-inspiring performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances plus the premiere of Ben Foskett’s Feeney Trust commission Leckey, and youth was also to the fore in Birmingham Town Hall when Birmingham Conservatoire forces presented a highly moving Britten War Requiem, Michael Seal the safe pair of hands at short notice (as this most efficient musician is often required to be).

Also in the Town Hall the pianist Andras Schiff, master of such persuasively quiet concentration, presented a programme of variations which culminated in an utterly enthralling unfolding of Beethoven’s mammoth Diabelli Variations. His encore was an entire late Beethoven sonata, Op.109.

But as I conclude this whistle-stop survey, we leave the city and head out west again, to the pretty little village of Leintwardine, where the Arcadia festival moved away from its base in Bromfield, near Ludlow, to present a chamber concert in the Church of St Mary Magdalene.

Co-director Tom Bowes led a gifted ensemble in the string sextet version of Schoenberg’s harrowing, ultimately gorgeously consoling tone-poem Verklarte Nacht, and the audience, freezing in the church at the onset of autumn, was stunned into eventually vociferous admiration.

Schoenberg going down a storm in the Marches? You bet. And this was certainly my highlight of the year.