The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra wasted no time in lining up a successor to Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Last autumn it revealed that Kazuki Yamada would take over as chief conductor from April 2023, and in his first appearance at Symphony Hall since the announcement, the warmth of the reception from both the orchestra and the rather meagre audience suggested that he is already set to be a favourite there.
From the alert playing that Yamada drew from the players it was clear, too, that they respond well to his ideas. The performances of Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Juan and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony were unfailingly spirited, even brash at times – the Strauss especially – but there was real panache about both of them. Yamada certainly doesn’t hold back at the big moments; some of the fortissimos tested even Symphony Hall’s exceptional acoustic, though at the other extreme, there was an absence of genuinely quiet playing.
