Manchester Evening News review 7 October 2015

MICHAEL KENNEDY MEMORIAL CONCERT   Royal Northern College of Music

 

MANCHESTER has seen nothing like it, and probably never will again. Three knights of the realm, one dame, and nearly 20 more of the world’s top opera singers on the same platform to celebrate the memory of a great writer, Mancunian and, as they would all have said, friend.

Michael Kennedy was a journalist, author and critic who loved this city and loved music. The extent to which musicians loved him was apparent from a night of extraordinary music, involving the Hallé Orchestra, Royal Northern College of Music Orchestra, and other musicians, all giving their services in aid of the Michael Kennedy Memorial Fund, which will help RNCM students in the future.

Sir Mark Elder conducted the Hallé, and Sir Andrew Davis conducted both the Hallé and RNCM orchestras, and among the singers were winners of the award for Strauss singing endowed by Michael Kennedy and his wife, Joyce, herself as much loved as him and there to hear it all. Sir John Tomlinson and Dame Felicity Lott were among the singers.

I don’t intend to dwell on details of each item in the programme, but its breadth of sympathy was evident from the inclusion of Verdi, Bizet, Mozart, Britten, Elgar and even Haydn Wood’s Roses Of Picardy and the Britten version of The Last Rose Of Summer, lovingly sung by Kathryn Rudge.

Among the most magical moments were Susan Bickley’s singing of Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, by Mahler, and Sir John Tomlinson’s vivid delivery of the Sachs monologue from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. That, in its rueful rejection of the madness of the world and dedication to achievement and work, was as true a reflection of Michael Kennedy’s character as any.

There were contributions, too, from Harish Shankar, conducting the RNCM Orchestra with soloist Lawrence Perkins of Manchester Camerata in Elgar’s Romance for bassoon.

But the most glorious music was that to end each part of the concert: first Vaughan Williams’ Serenade To Music, for 16 soloists, in a roll-call maybe unequalled since it was first sung in honour of Sir Henry Wood in 1938: including Rebecca Evans, Joan Rodgers, Susan Bullock, Lee Bisset, Susan Bickley, Marie McLaughlin, Kathleen Smales, Wendy Dawn Thompson, Christopher Turner, Paul Nilon, Richard Berkeley Steele, Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts, Roderick Williams, Philip Smith and Sir John Tomlinson.

And lastly the final trio from Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss, sung by Dame Felicity Lott, Rebecca Evans and Alice Coote – music of unsurpassable beauty and expressing the greatness of spirit with which few are blessed.

Michael was almost certainly the last of a 150-year succession of music critics originating from the north west – Henry Chorley, Ernest Newman and Neville Cardus before him, autodidacts and all connected with Hallé or his orchestra – who became nationally influential figures.

No one ever erected a statue to a music critic, said Sibelius in one of his grumpier moods. Well, we have a bust of Cardus in Manchester … and in Kennedy we have the memory of a man whom, uniquely, all musicians loved.

 

Robert Beale