The pandemic played havoc with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s celebrations of its centenary in 2020. The orchestra is still making its way through the 20 works it commissioned for the anniversary and the UK premiere of the latest of them, Thomas Larcher’s Third Symphony, was the centrepiece of Gergely Madaras’s programme.
The symphony has a subtitle, A Line Above the Sky, which Larcher borrowed from the name given to a spectacular and very difficult climbing route in the Dolomites established by the British mountaineer Tom Ballard in 2016. Three years later Ballard died climbing a peak in the Himalayas, and the work is both an evocation of the exhilaration of life in the mountains (Larcher was born in Innsbruck, in the Austrian Tyrol) and a memorial to Ballard – the first movement a tumultuous, multi-faceted celebration, the second more introspective funeral music.
