Review written for Manchester Evening News 8 May 2015

HALLE ORCHESTRA  Bridgewater Hall 

MARKUS STENZ is always an inspiration when he conducts the Hallé – which, as principal guest conductor, he does regularly.  

His Thursday programme began with The Unanswered Question, by Charles Ives, performed in near-total darkness to mesmeric effect, with the string players sounding ethereally from high points around the auditorium.  

Ives is an old friend in concert halls now, but it’s amazing to think he wrote this essay in ambience and unfulfilled expectation over 100 years ago. The playing was masterly. 

The world premiere of Helen Grime’s Double Concerto For Clarinet And Trumpet followed. Its two movements explore many kinds of small-versus-large instrumental combinations – the ‘concertante’ concept, to use an old-fashioned term – and the composer’s fastidious sense of texture was apparent from the start. 

The first movement sets slow-moving lines against mercurial interjections and jabbing rhythms, demanding much of its soloists – the Hallé’s own Lynsey Marsh (clarinet) and Gareth Small (trumpet), who were well able to deal with its challenges. The second likewise follows a fundamentally slow pulse, despite the detail of what’s going on over it. It finishes with a sense of something hanging in the air, in its way akin to the impression created by the Ives piece. 

The trumpet is muted, in different ways, much of the time, and yet there is still a fundamental inequality between the power output of the two solo instruments which, it seemed to me, was neither fully exploited to emphasize contrast nor compensated for in the balance of solo lines against corporate sound. Maybe in another acoustic, or a recording set-up, it would be different. 

Markus Stenz’s first visible appearance – taking his bow after the Ives – had immediately revealed him as energetic and enthusiastic as ever, and those two qualities combined to produce a completely masterly account of Walton’s first symphony, the highspot of the concert. 

His twin stamps of liveliness and intensity were incisively etched on the opening movement – passion, too, in the central section’s cries of anguish – and it reached a huge peak of emotion and a mighty culmination at the close. 

The ‘with malice’ fast movement that follows was almost an anti-climax in comparison (though accurate and furious), but the slow movement came as a moving respite and was very finely handled. 

The grand, ceremonial-style finale showed the Hallé at peak performance level – precise, confident and viscerally thrilling. Stenze kept the whole varied epic under emphatic and telling control. 

**** 

Robert Beale