STORM in Munich

This rather beautiful interior was the venue for a performance of STORM given last weekend by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and a choir of 500 amateur singers from all over Bavaria, conducted by Simon Rattle. It's a permanent circus building, the Circus Krone-Bau in Munich, but with a high wooden roof above a lowly raked circular auditorium, giving a clear, warm acoustic.

I wrote STORM thirty years ago for the newly-founded CBSO youth choirs, so it was wonderful, and kind of a homecoming to have Simon Rattle once more presiding. It's scored for "upper" everything; voices, flutes, cello ensemble, tingling percussion. I felt pleased by how it contrasted quite absolutely with the afternoon's concluding work Carmina Burana (also a fabulous performance) written by local guy Carl Orff to texts discovered in an Abbey just an hour away.

If you're fortunate enough to be in Lower Franconia this weekend, you can catch a reprise of this concert on Sunday evening at the Turnierplatz, Bad Kissingen: the venue this time seems to be, even more incredibly, a horse show enclosure. BR Fernsehen are going to televise this (27 July 22.45) and excerpts from the Munich performance can be sampled on radio BR Klassik (25 July 13.05).