Conductor Yamada honoured as awards leave London behind

AS such events are usually mired in metrocentricity, readers will forgive me for rejoicing that the Royal Philharmonic Society, coming out of London for its annual Awards Ceremony for only the second time in the Society’s 200-year history, (last year was Manchester) should honour its Birmingham hosts with such an acknowledgement of the proud musical achievements of the West Midlands.

- CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

Hosted by BBC Radio 3's Jess Gillam and Tom McKinney for a programme to be broadcast the subsequent evening, the evening began with a performance of “Sometime I Sing” composed by a composer long associated with Ex Cathedra, Alec Roth, and performed by Ex Cathedra Student Scholars under the directorship of Jeffrey Skidmore.

Other local organisations featured were the Wolverhampton Symphony Orchestra, nominated in the Inspiration category for its reach-out to the disabled; Ex Cathedra’s Singing Medicine brightening the lives of patients at Birmingham Children’s Hospital each week in the Impact category; in the Opera and Music Theatre category Birmingham Opera Company's landmark production of Michael Tippett’s idiosyncratic New Year, involving hundreds of citizens (part of its mission-statement) lost out to Welsh National Opera's production of Death in Venice, complete with acrobats from the gorgeously-named No Fit State Circus: the CBSO Chorus as runners-up in the evening’s crowning category Ensemble, deservedly won by the remarkable Paraorchestra.