CBSO/Nelsons – review

With Symphony Hall currently hors de combat for summer maintenance, the City of Birmingham Symphony went back to its former home in the town hall to preview the concert it was taking to the Proms with its music director Andris Nelsons two days later. With a Dvořák symphony and Johann Strauss II framing arias by Verdi and Tchaikovsky, it was very obviously a programme designed for a Saturday afternoon at the Albert Hall, but Nelsons ensured there was absolutely nothing routine or lightweight about it – quite the opposite.

Apparently, Nelsons is still recovering from the concussion he suffered three weeks ago in Bayreuth, where he was conducting Lohengrin, but no one would have guessed it from the way he launched into things here. The Eighth is usually regarded as Dvořák's most genial symphony, but Nelsons' account of it was thrilling – not a word I usually associate with the Czech composer. Fiercely dramatic in the opening movement, mysteriously veiled and remote in the second, and increasingly unbuttoned in the final two, it was teeming with vivid detail and distinctive ideas, such as the trumpet counter-melody underpinning the flute solo in the finale.

With Nelsons' wife, the soprano Kristine Opolais, as the soloist, the second half wasn't just a sequence of lollipops either. Her treatment of Willow Song and Ave Maria from the last act of Verdi's Otello – slightly cool, contained and limpidly beautiful – was the perfect foil for a passionate account of the Letter Scene from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, which was more than enough to show how compelling Opolais's Tatyana would be on stage, especially with Nelsons conjuring ever more colours and inflections from the orchestra. Even the Johann Strauss was revealing – the sound world of the Emperor Waltz far closer to early Mahler than one would suspect, the Thunder and Lightning Polka a fierce, almost vicious coda.