Review of Halle concert with Ryan Wigglesworth

There’s nothing like a concert mainly on the theme of death to brighten a cold, wet February evening in Manchester.

But principal guest conductor Ryan Wigglesworth’s programme with the Hallé was worth braving the elements for – and the musical reflections on departure and its obsequies proved rewarding, too. Perhaps I’m being overly lugubrious to characterize Stravinsky’s Petrushka ballet score as being about death, but the eponymous sad little puppet in the fairground show does end as a victim of murder by another puppet, and (as you’ll know if you’ve seen the ballet performed) the ending – included in most concert performances now – shows a very corporeal appearance of his cheeky spirit ascending to find its heavenly reward.

It’s a gloriously colourful piece of writing, and Ryan Wigglesworth expounded the score from the outset with meticulous care and vivid and exhilarating sounds. It wasn’t a romp through a standard repertoire piece with no subtlety, either – Katherine Baker’s solo flute playing was quite magical, and the solo trumpet of Gareth Small later on was quite enchanting. Some of the melody lines occasionally were hidden in the richness of the instrumentation we were urged to enjoy, but that was only on a few occasions.

Another kind of after-death experience was described in the piece before, Oliver Knussen’s The Way to Castle Yonder – about a heaven for animals as described in the opera it’s taken from. It was notable mainly for the virtuosity of the percussion used to set its various celestial scenes.

The highspot of the concert came after the interval, when bass singer Brindley Sherratt was soloist for Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, in Shostakovich’s orchestral version. Brindley Sherratt has a wonderfully rich timbre for Russian music, varying from the finely-judged morendo at the close of the first song (Lullaby) to the shock of death’s final greedy clutch of a poor girl in the second (Serenade), and with much more in imaginative presentation besides. Ryan Wigglesworth realized the vivid scoring and swinging rhythms here and in Trepak and The Field Marshal with great skill.

And they followed that with Mahler’s Totenfeier – or the first draft of his ‘Resurrection’ symphony’s first movement, if you prefer to think of it that way. This is the funeral march, though. No heaven-storming paean of choral confidence in an after-life is heard … though the gently rising major theme that way well signify at least a hope of consolation is repeatedly present, and all the more significant for being the only positive expression to pierce the grimness. The full 50-strings Hallé sound was particularly opulent by this time and proved a benediction in itself.