A thrilling start from the CBSO’s new star
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has enjoyed a winning streak in its choice of chief conductor. Simon Rattle launched it, then came Sakari Oramo and Andris Nelsons, all now major figures. Now comes Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a woman just 30 years old.
If “Mirga”, as everyone calls her, is feeling the pressure of those illustrious forebears, she doesn’t show it. At this concert, her first as music director on her home turf, she put her stamp on things in her own special way. If there’s any conductor who shows that grace and ease are more powerful than mere forcefulness, it’s this blonde Lithuanian with the tiny frame and the difficult name. She moulds phrases with balletic precision, sometimes with a gesture that springs from her entire body, sometimes with a mere flick of the finger.
Another of her gifts is a sensitivity to the way tiny gradations of colour can take on a huge expressive charge. That was an asset in the opening piece, Fires, a musical metaphor for combustion and incandescence from 2010 by Gražinytė-Tyla’s compatriot Raminta Šerkšnytė. It launched with glistening held sounds, not so far from the opening of Mahler’s 1st Symphony that was to come later. As the fire took hold, the shifting misty soundscape became threatening, bursting out in sudden minor chords. In truth, it sounded like many other recent pieces that blend a modernist sound-world with familiar harmonies, but Gražinytė-Tyla and the orchestra made it seem startlingly vivid.
Mahler’s 1st Symphony is a challenge of a different order. The moments of lyrical grace and shifting uncanny colours ought to be subservient to the overall drama, but here they seemed to take over. Mahler’s epic spans and over-wrought emotionalism may not be Gražinytė-Tyla’s natural territory, but she’s a conductor of searching intelligence who in time will surely make it her own.