Manchester Evening News article 13th May 2016

THE Hallé’s celebration of Dvořák and his music comes to its conclusion in the next eight days with performances of some of his most popular and some of his least well-known works.

The popular comes in the form of the cello concerto – Gary Hoffman will be playing this for the second time here in a week on Sunday, and for the third time on Wednesday afternoon – and the eighth and ninth symphonies, which figure in the same two concerts, along with some of the Slavonic Dances. So far, so much-loved, tuneful and familiar.

On Wednesday evening, however, there’s a special outing for the symphonic poem The Golden Spinning Wheel, which is a late Dvořák work, based on a folktale, that caused a critic at the time to suggest he was ‘on the slippery slope to … Richard Strauss’ – a point that might today endear it to us rather than put us off. It will be preceded by an illustrated talk presented by Sir Mark Elder.

Then on Saturday May 21 there is the 1886 oratorio St Ludmila, written for the Leeds Festival and in the tradition of the time of stirring Handelian choruses and historical narrative. Manchester heard it, too, soon after Leeds and thanks to the Hallé, but it’s taken 130 years to get a repeat performance here.

Sir Mark Elder conducts these, as he does all the concerts in the ‘Nature, Life and Love’ festival. He’s said he wants it to be a chance to hear the familiar alongside the unfamiliar, and that has been a feature of this festival from the outset.

The first concert began with Dvořák’s Moravian Duets, sung delightfully by the Hallé Youth Choir, conducted by Richard Wilberforce. But the real serendipity came with Francesco Piemontesi’s playing of the piano concerto. I’ve heard it before, but this was something special.

It’s a long work, packed with melodic ideas and needing a clear sense of its harmonic and structural shape to be really satisfying. Sir Mark brings that awareness in abundance.

For the finale, he put back together the three overtures Dvořák originally called Nature, Life and Love – though today we know the middle one as the Carnival overture – and played them, as he put it, ‘as one work’.

The Hallé played all three with great distinction, and Sir Mark’s dramatic instincts brought the last – linked to the Othello story – to an operatic-style climax.