Saturday 9 April 2016

Manchester Evening News review 8 April 2016


HALLE ORCHESTRA  Bridgewater Hall

IN one of the outstanding concerts of the Hallé season, Sir Mark Elder conducted a stunning performance of Vaughan Williams’ fourth symphony, and a fascinating one of a rare Elgar work, both of them recorded live for future CD issue.

There was almost a First World War theme running through the programme: I say almost, because although John Casken’s Apollinaire’s Bird (an oboe concerto) and Elgar’s A Voice In The Wilderness are both definitely inspired by it, the most you can say about the VW symphony’s references is that they catch a 1930s mood of foreboding which was no doubt inspired by the 1914-18 war and fearful of another one.

First off was Ravel’s Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte, dating from 1910 in its orchestral version – a foil for the ‘war’ music, perhaps. It served to show off the exceptional solo talents of Hallé principal horn Laurence Rogers and oboist Hugh McKenna, and the warmth of the strings’ playing under Lyn Fletcher’s leadership.

Apollinaire’s Bird was written two years ago for the Hallé and its principal oboe, Stéphane Rancourt. I said then it was both a serious and demanding concerto and grimly evocative of the noise and horror of trench warfare, and I would say the same again. The fact that it has been given a second performance by the orchestra so soon after its premiere is an indication of the esteem in which both it and its soloist are held.

Elgar’s A Voice In The Wilderness, written during the Great War itself, was a theatre piece originally and was given with its narrator and soprano soloist in costume. It sets words by the Belgian poet Emile Cammaerts (newly translated by Geoffrey Owen) describing the experience of soldiers at the front who hear a girl’s voice singing, from a lonely cottage, of her hopes for peace and restoration.

Elgar gives it a near-pastoral setting of desperately moving innocence – an epitome of British understatement, if you like. The speaker, Joshua Ellicott (Evangelist in the Easter performances of The Passion at Upper Campfield Market) was eloquent in his native Mancunian voice, and Jennifer France sang the role of the girl with the purity and strength tone heard before in her Royal Northern College and Opera North appearances.

Then it was the symphony. Sir Mark had the violas front-of-stage and massed violins on the left: the sound was rich and he found lyricism and sweetness in the grittiest of music (and there’s a lot of that).

The solemn tread of the bass line was emphasized in the slow movement, with lamenting, tender melodies above, and tension screwed up expertly in the scherzo. Then the finale’s marching pace and rhythms – I can hardly resist hearing this music as ironic distortions of Tchaikovskian hysteria and Germanic B-A-C-H precision – were superbly realized.

The audience reaction at first was shock and awe (and then fulsome applause). But sometimes shock and awe say more than anything else.

*****

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