Kazuki Yamada & CBSO launch 2026/27 season with Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony celebrating the CBSO Chorus’s 1000th performance

CBSO Chorus (Photo: Andrew Fox)

Tonight (17 September 2026), the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by music director Kazuki Yamada launches their 2026/2027 season at Symphony Hall in Birmingham with a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’ with soprano Anna Patalong. The performance is part of Yamada and the orchestra’s ongoing Mahler cycle which continues with Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in June 2027 [see my article on the CBSO’s 2026/27 season]

Tonight is notable also for it being the CBSO Chorus’s 1000th performance. Founded in 1973, the 180-strong choir made up of singers from Birmingham and the Midlands, 18 years and above, whose day-jobs range from students to nurses, teachers and pilots. The choir has been led by chorus director Simon Halsey since 1983. They performed Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 at the opening of the Sydney Olympic Arts Festival in 2000. Later the year they celebrated the centenary of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius which premiered at the Birmingham Music Festival on 3 October 1900 in Birmingham Town Hall. In June 2007 the chorus took part in the 150th Anniversary of Edward Elgar’s birth by performing The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles and The Kingdom over three days with Sakari Oramo and the CBSO, going on to perform The Apostles at the BBC Proms that year.

To mark Britten’s centenary in 2013, the CBSO and CBSO Chorus performed The War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral. On Remembrance Day 2026, Remembrance Day, Kazuki Yamada conducts Britten’s War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral where the work premiered in 1952. The soloists are tenor Andrew Staples, soprano Irina Lungu and baritone Christian Gerhaher with the CBSO Chorus, CBSO Youth Chorus and Trinity Boys Choir in a performance that also marks 50 years since Britten’s death

Further details from the CBSO website.