Article in Manchester Evening News 25 September 2015

VERDI’S Requiem has a special place in Sir Mark Elder’s musical life. He’s performing it with the Hallé Orchestra and Choir and a hand-picked team of soloists at the Bridgewater Hall on October 3 – but his love for it stems from when he was 10.

“I remember finding a score of it, at a time when I’d never heard music of that kind,” he says (he was a choirboy at Canterbury Cathedral, so knew his church music … but not this work).

He tried it out on the piano, and began a love of the Requiem – and Verdi’s music generally – that has lasted his life long.

Verdi wrote it for the concert hall rather than the church, but Sir Mark does not go along with calling it the composer’s ‘best opera’.

“He was said to be an atheist, but I think in reality was agnostic,” he says. “And I suspect he was a deeply spiritual man. The sense of fear and desperation you hear at the end is very strong and moving evidence of that.

“One thing that makes it so beautiful is that it sits in the Catholic tradition in which he was brought up, but his genius of writing truly dramatic music is not at odds with it.”

He’s proud that this Hallé performance features three Italian soloists – soprano Maria Agresta, tenor Giorgio Berrugi and bass Gianluca Burrato (who takes the place of Alexander Vinogradov). With them is mezzo-soprano Alice Coote – many will remember her in the Hallé of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in 2008, among other outstanding performances.

And the Hallé bass drum player has a starring role in the Dies Irae music of the Requiem. “I always tell them to hit it as hard as they can,” says Sir Mark. “And I’ll buy them a new drum head if they go right through.”

Two days after the Requiem, he and the Hallé have the leading part in a concert at the Royal Northern College of Music to commemorate Manchester journalist and music writer Michael Kennedy, who died at the end of last year.

It includes a formidable catalogue of world-class British opera singers, donating their services (including bass Sir John Tomlinson, flying in from Frankfurt), and Sir Andrew Davis is coming from Chicago to share the rostrum with Sir Mark. Proceeds go to the Michael Kennedy Memorial Fund, which will support RNCM students of the future.