Manchester Evening News review 10 October 2015

HALLE ORCHESTRA  Bridgewater Hall and Radio 3

 

SIR Mark Elder opened the Hallé Thursday concert series with Mozart and Mahler – one in A major and the other A minor, as it happens.

Poles apart in content, you might think, but the music represented two poles of the evolving Viennese tradition and cross-illuminated each other as a result.

Soloist in Mozart’s piano concerto in A, K414 – one of the first he wrote to make his name in Vienna as a freelance composer-performer – was Christian Zacharias, a master of the genre if ever there was one. The Hallé was reduced to classical size for this performance, though the piano was of course a full-size concert grand, which made for a slightly uneven quality in the textures, but there was great sensitivity on all sides throughout and the music sounded utterly captivating.

The soloist added his own interesting embellishments of the written part just here and there, and chose the composer’s interlocking cadenza for the final movement, delightfully handled.

Mahler’s sixth symphony is a huge and ultimately tragic work. Sir Mark wanted it to make its full impact and secured two celestas, four harps and a special resonator for the finale’s giant hammer. In terms of sound effects, the sound of mountain cowbells always seems to be a little problematical in this and other Mahler works – those offstage were virtually inaudible from my seat (they are meant to be ‘distant’, but the real thing carries for miles in still air), and orchestras often collect a set made mainly of the bigger ones you hardly ever find on real Alpine cows.

Never mind. The music itself came over with immense energy and emotional power, from the relentless tramp of the opening, with the brass in splendid voice, through to the tension-screwing finale. There was a vivid sense of foreboding even in the middle of the first movement, and the unstable pulse of the scherzo was finely calculated and effectively realized, taking the mood from the ominous to the macabre.

But Sir Mark also found heart-warming beauty and eloquence in the unfurling melody of the slow movement (which he placed second), and in the tender sections of the others. They used to knock Barbirolli for lingering over the purple passages in scores like this. In this case there was no infidelity to the composer’s markings at all, but fulfilling his vision so fully produced an opulence in the Hallé sound that was worth the wallow in itself.

****

Robert Beale