Manchester Evening News review 5 October 2015

HALLE ORCHESTRA AND CHOIR  Bridgewater Hall

 

THIS was the first really big event of the new Hallé season. Sir Mark Elder conducted the Hallé Orchestra and Choir (trained by guest choral conductor Robert Dean) in Verdi’s Requiem.

It’s one of the most popular choral works in the repertory now, and has been ever since Verdi himself took a picked team of soloists and musicians on tour with it in 1875 (giving the first UK performances in the Royal Albert Hall). But the earliest British conductor to put it on with British forces was Charles Hallé, in March 1876 in Manchester, so we have something of a special claim to it.

It’s often called an opera in the guise of a sacred work, and there’s no doubt that several passages sound like the soundtrack to a great spectacle. It’s certainly true that you need soloists with an operatic sense of drama and passion to hear it at its best, and even better if at least some of them are Italian. We had Maria Agresta, Giorgio Berrugi and Gianlucca Buratto, top-flight opera performers all, with the peerless, Manchester-trained Alice Coote as mezzo soprano.

And of course Sir Mark Elder can hardly prevent himself from presenting the Requiem as a drama, with a few blatant touches of theatre such as the Bridgewater Hall makes easy. We had two big bass drums for the thunderclaps of the Dies Irae, and the four off-stage trumpets made their own entrance in apocalyptic style.

But the music was also invested with tenderness and some of the most magical moments of quiet I’ve ever heard. The prayers of the text sounded like real prayers (the agonized Kyrie eleison and devout Hostias et preces wonderfully sung by the soloists), and there were beautifully interwoven lines of melody in the Agnus dei.

Sir Mark always finds the spring in rhythmic figures, and had his chorus with him in the Rex tremendae and a lovely cradle song in the Recordare.

The soloists made individual contributions of great distinction and character, Gianlucca Buratto awe-struck in rendering Mors stupebit, Giorgio Berrugi pure and eloquent throughout, Alice Coote vividly alert in Liber scriptus and unsurpassable in ensemble, and Maria Agresta simply angelic in the Offertory and lovely to hear in the Libera me.

And the choir were on very good form indeed, the soprano voices clear and accurate. The fugal Sanctus is always their highspot in this piece, and I was thrilled to hear them romp through it at a tremendous lick and reach the climactic cadence with a glorious surge of sound.

 

*****

Robert Beale