Friday 13 April 2018

Review of Halle concert with Nicholas Collon, conductor, and Boris Giltburg, soloist


The combined talents of Nicholas Collon as conductor and Boris Giltburg as soloist made their shared concert one of the outstanding events of the Hallé season.

Giltburg is a pianist whose reputation goes before him, especially in Rachmaninov, and you could hear why. From the very opening there was a tenderness and thoughtfulness in his playing, both wistful and limpid, modest and heartfelt, which pervaded much of the opening movement of the composer’s Piano concerto no. 3.

But that wasn’t all. In the first solo episode we heard flashes of the drama that was later to come, and there was no shortage of steel in Giltburg’s playing either. Nicholas Collon was an excellent partner for him, drawing a big, Romantic sound from the orchestra – beautifully rich in the strings at the beginning of the second movement and gorgeously blending in the wind at its end.

Boris Giltburg played that Intermezzo in a swaying, lullaby-like style; but when it came to the finale he was transformed again: mercurial, exciting and still forming his phrases and melodies with elegance. The orchestral solos were nicely characterized, too, to match him.

Collon’s programme continued with Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales. It’s a strange series of wisps and flashes, with vigour and dreaminess – proof of the remarkable ability of this conductor to obtain the best from an orchestra. His visits are becoming ‘don’t miss’ events (and he’s conducting the Opus One set of concerts this time, too).

He finished by putting the Hallé Choir in the spotlight in John Adams’ Harmonium. Written in 1980, it’s an essay in writing (to use Adams’ own words) for ‘human voices – many of them – riding upon waves of rippling sound’. So the Hallé Choir were very much the team to tackle it, along with the orchestra. The piece sets words by John Donne and Emily Dickinson, but you would hardly know it had they not been printed in the programme booklet.

That’s not the singers’ fault, as far as I can see, as it’s more about waves of sound and multi-layered textures than anything else, with the voices sustaining high and demanding lines over a myriad of orchestral figures and complicated rhythms. The Hallé Choir (trained by Matthew Hamilton) achieved that, and it was quite an achievement.



Nicholas Collon


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