A remarkable gift for the pastoral Birmingham Post 20-Jan-07 by John Gough An attentive and enthusiastic audience packed Symphony Hall for this afternoon concert. In the first programme, to mark this' year's centenary of the death of Edvard Grieg, his young compatriot, Eivind Gullberg Jensen, conducted the ever-popular music for Ibsen's Peer Gynt. There were some excellent things here; it is rare to hear these pastoral miniatures given with such care for phrasing and colour. Between an effortless, surging Morning Mood and the frightening accelerando which ended In the Hall of the Mountain King, Ase's Death had a rich string sound and a remarkable range of dynamics tapering towards the very threshold of audibility at the close. The orchestra was joined by Alan Thomas, brilliant young co-leader of the CBSO's trumpet section for Haydn's Trumpet concerto. Haydn never showed his full powers in the concerto form, but this attractive concerto is, by common consent, the best he did in the genre. Thomas's sense of line was wonderfully lyrical and his articulation sprightly, especially in the irresistibly cheerful last movement. In Dvorak's Symphony No 7 the attention to detail that Jensen had shown in the Grieg was allied to an inexorable sense of momentum, as the striding first theme was unfolded in great broad paragraphs, the tragic and pastoral elements of the work caught to perfection. The CBSO wind section sounded particularly fine, beautifully blended as an ensemble, as the woodwind chorale that opens the Poco adagio set a tone of dignified lyricism for the movement's length. After the glorious drive and vitality of the scherzo the dark finale gave the impression of a hard fought struggle before emerging into the resounding splendour of its exhilarating end. [back to reviews]