The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) is a British orchestra based in Birmingham, England. It is the resident orchestra at Symphony Hall, Birmingham in Birmingham, which has been its principal performance venue since 1991. Its administrative and rehearsal base is at the nearby CBSO Centre, where it also presents chamber concerts by members of the orchestra and guest performers.
Each year, the CBSO performs more than 150 concerts in Birmingham, the UK and around the world. The CBSO has four choirs – the CBSO Chorus, Youth Chorus, Children's Chorus and SO Vocal (its un-auditioned community choir). The CBSO Choruses are directed by Simon Halsey, Chorus Director, who celebrated his 40-year anniversary with the CBSO in the 2023 season. The Children's and Youth Chorus are led by Julian Wilkins, Associate Chorus Director. SO Vocal is conducted by Lucy Hollins.
The current music director of the CBSO is Kazuki Yamada, who became chief conductor and artistic adviser in April 2023, and music director in May 2024.
History Background and foundation
The earliest orchestral concerts known to have taken place in Birmingham were those organized by Barnabas Gunn at the Moor Street Theatre in 1740, and more than 20 separate orchestras are recorded as having existed in the city between that date and the foundation of what is now the CBSO in 1920. These orchestras often owed their origins to Birmingham's internationally significant tradition of choral music, that give birth to works such as Mendelsohn's Elijah and Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, and in 1834 saw the building Birmingham Town Hall, one of Europe's earliest large-scale concert halls. Birmingham's most notable early orchestra was the Birmingham Festival Orchestra, which formed as a group of 25 musicians in 1768 but by 1834 had grown into an orchestra of 147. Under Michael Costa and Hans Richter between 1849 and 1909 it included some of the leading instrumentalists of its day from across Britain and Europe, but remained an ad hoc grouping that assembled to play only at the three-yearly festivals. The town's first permanently established orchestra of locally based professional musicians was William Stockley's Orchestra, which was founded in 1856 and held annual concert seasons between 1873 and 1897. This was eclipsed as the city's leading orchestra at the end of the 19th century by George Halford's Orchestra, which put on similar series of concerts between 1897 and 1909.
Stockley and Halford established regular orchestral concerts as an expected feature of life in Birmingham which by the late 19th century supported a substantial pool of high quality locally based professional musicians. Between 1905 and 1920 this demand was met by a number of competing enterprises. Halford's players reformed in 1906 as the self-governing Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which continued to perform until 1918 under notable conductors including Henry Wood, Hans Richter and Halford himself. Landon Ronald presented an annual season of promenade concerts at the Theatre Royal in New Street from 1905 to 1914 with a 70-strong orchestra made up largely of Birmingham-based musicians. Appleby Matthews and Richard Wassell both ran separate orchestras in their own names presenting annual series of concerts between 1916 and 1920; and Thomas Beecham conducted and promoted his own New Birmingham Orchestra between 1917 and 1919.
From 1916 onwards, a group of influential local figures began to pursue the idea of a single, permanent, municipally funded orchestra, in keeping with the Civic Gospel tradition established in Birmingham under Joseph Chamberlain, that envisaged cities as having responsibility as a body for their citizens' civic, social and cultural welfare. Leading members of this campaign included Neville Chamberlain, who was Lord Mayor of Birmingham from 1916 to 1918; Granville Bantock, composer and Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham; and Ernest Newman, a leading Birmingham-based music critic, who had written as early as 1913 that the system of financial guarantees from wealthy patrons that had supported Birmingham's orchestras through the 19th century had become discredited. The group's first plan was to support Beecham's New Birmingham Orchestra, but this enterprise was wound up after the government requisitioned the Town Hall for the issue of First World War ration books, depriving it of its primary concert venue. A few weeks after the end of the war Bantock revived the idea and on 17 March 1919 he submitted a proposal to Birmingham City Council for an orchestra of 70 musicians to be engaged annually from October to May, at an estimated annual cost of £8,500 and with projected annual revenue of £6,000. The city council agreed to support the proposal with an annual grant of £1,250 for an experimental period of five years, the first time that public funds had been used to support an orchestra anywhere in Great Britain.
Early years under Matthews
The new orchestra's management committee met for the first time on 19 June 1919 and named itself the City of Birmingham Orchestra or CBO, probably to emphasise its civic status, though it also made clear that the CBO would be a self-governing musical body, not a municipal orchestra along the lines of those commonly found in seaside resorts. During its early years the orchestra was sometimes referred to as the Birmingham City Orchestra, or commonly just the "City Orchestra". Thomas Beecham was considered to be the most suitable candidate for the Principal Conductor role, but he was pre-occupied with his own acute financial problems and had not forgiven the city for its failure to support his earlier New Birmingham Orchestra. As a result, a shortlist of four candidates was drawn up from the numerous applications for the post, though the initial one-year contract came to limit the choice to local applicants. The eventual appointee was Appleby Matthews, who had been running his own orchestra in the city since 1916 and had strong support from local music critics on the selection panel. Richard Wassell was appointed as Assistant Conductor.
Matthews' plan was to hold eight Saturday concerts and six Wednesday concerts each year at Birmingham Town Hall, with a series of 38 concerts of more popular programmes at cheaper venues on Sundays, continuing the tradition of Sunday popular classics established by his own orchestra over the previous five years. The orchestra first rehearsed at 9.30am on 4 September 1920, in the band room at the Birmingham City Police's Steelhouse Lane station. The CBO's first concert was given under Matthews' baton as part of the Sunday series at the Theatre Royal on 5 September 1920, with the first piece of music performed being Granville Bantock's Saul. After two months of preparing the orchestra with the popular concerts, the inaugural concert of the Symphony Concerts series was given at the Town Hall on 10 November 1920, with Edward Elgar conducting a concert of his own works, including his Cello Concerto with Felix Salmond as the soloist. The first season continued with a remarkable series of programmes, including Ralph Vaughan Williams conducting his own London Symphony, Hamilton Harty conducting Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Adrian Boult conducting Rachmaninov's Second Symphony, Landon Ronald conducting Brahms' Second Symphony and Jean Sibelius conducting his own Third Symphony. Two features that would become longstanding traditions for the orchestra were also established during this first year: performances of then-recent works by Holst, Vaughan Williams and Bax saw a strong representation of new music in the orchestra's programmes; and from February 1921 the orchestra's commitment to musical education was underlined with a series of concerts for city schoolchildren held in the Town Hall on Saturday afternoons.
Matthews had originally been appointed to be conductor with a fee of £450 for 30 concerts, but had persuaded the committee to give him instead the combined role of conductor, secretary and manager for a fee of £1,000 per year. He had only limited experience in any of these roles, however, and developed a difficult relationship with the politicians and businessmen who made up the CBO committee. His plan to supplement the playing strength of the orchestra with members of the Birmingham City Police band almost caused the orchestra to strike before it had even played a concert, and resulted in questions being asked in the House of Commons in December 1920. Matthews' conducting and his management were both poorly reviewed by Birmingham-based critics, though reviews from outside the city were more positive, with The Daily Telegraph being highly complimentary and the Manchester Guardian concluding "Manchester may well envy Birmingham its municipal music". Matthews' Symphony Series programmes were highly ambitious and enterprising, and he was able to claim that "the amount subscribed for Symphony Concerts constituted a record for any similar series of concerts in this city" but the Sunday concerts were loss-making, with the expensive seats often unsold. In 1922 Matthews was relieved of any involvement in the financial administration of the orchestra, popular concerts were increasingly moved to suburban and out-of-town venues, and development and marketing plans were drawn up to stem a deficit which by May 1923 grown to £3,000. In July the orchestra and Matthews both engaged solicitors and in October Matthews was informed his contract was to be terminated, His final CBO concert was on 30 March 1924, and the relationship dissolved in acrimonious and expensive litigation.
Boult and the first "golden period"
The CBO committee had two candidates in mind to replace Matthews: Eugene Goossens and Adrian Boult. For a while the committee explored the possibility of appointing both as joint conductors, but were convinced by Ernest de Sélincourt that this idea was unworkable. Boult had recently replaced Henry Wood as the conductor of the Birmingham Festival Choral Society – possibly calculating that there might shortly be a vacancy with the City Orchestra – and in March 1924 he was announced in the press as the CBO's new Director and Conductor. At the age of 35 he already had a substantial international musical reputation, having studied at the Leipzig Conservatory under Arthur Nikisch, conducted the world premier of Holst's The Planets at the age of 25, and worked for a period as chief conductor of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The urbane, Oxford-educated Boult was also comfortable dealing with influential local citizens, ensuring the orchestra retained the financial support it needed to continue. His tenure at the CBO would mark the start of a "golden period" for the orchestra that would see it rise to national prominence, outshining the struggling London orchestras and establishing Boult himself as a major figure of British musical life.