Review of Hallé concert conducted by Anja Bihlmaier with soloist Maxim Rysanov

  

Anja Bihlmaier  cr Nikolaj Lund

It was Beethoven’s Fourth with zip at the Hallé last night, as Anja Bihlmaier showed her credentials as a conductor of the present day, taking the tempo markings very much at face value and, with the orchestra in fine fettle almost from the first bar, creating a performance of neatness and beauty.

She had 40 strings for the entire programme, which also began with Beethoven, in the form of the tone-poem-like Leonora no. 3 overture. I’ve heard it done with more operatic atmosphere – there were only the briefest of pauses, for instance, in this performance to follow the off-stage trumpet calls – but I think she wanted it to be as coherent as possible as a musical structure. It certainly had a fiery presto to finish.

In between the Beethoven pieces there was Maxim Rysanov with Bartók’s Viola Concerto (as completed by Tibór Sérly) – played with artistry and assurance and gathering a fair old head of steam in the gypsy-style passages of its finale – and followed by an encore for the soloist, himself Ukrainian-born, and the Hallé strings led by Roberto Ruisi: Myroslav Skoryk’s Melody, a piece which has become a symbol of lament and horror at the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

After the break came Unsuk Chin’s subito con forza, a short series of shocks and surprises apparently inspired by Beethoven’s music, in which a notable feature was versatility of Erika Öhman on various percussion instruments (which, in addition to her role as timpanist for the rest of the programme, makes her worthy of the woman-of-the-match award for this show).

The Beethoven symphony began in what could have been Haydn style and went on to a pretty perky Adagio and a lively work-out in the Scherzo, with only slight let-up in the tempo for the trios. The last movement danced away from the very first note and ended with a fine effect of contrast – one of Beethoven’s own surprises. I was impressed by the playing, shown in a number of points in the evening but supremely in that finale, of the guest principal bassoon, Todd Gibson-Cornish.

Maxim Rysanov

Review of Hallé concert with Antje Weithaas conducted by Christian Reif

                                                                           Christian Reif  (cr. Simon Pauly)            

The extended platform was in use again at the Bridgewater Hall to accommodate the full forces of the Hallé Orchestra in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (which was the main marketing label for this concert). It was a worthy reading under conductor Christian Reif, who has the ability to inject a near-theatrical magic into everything he touches.

There was particular gravity and feeling in the slower dances of the first part of The Rite, a real sense of mystery as the second part began, and excitingly realized tension in the conclusions to both segments. The piece has attained the sanctity of set-text authority as an archetype of modernism these days (and modernism is now a matter for history books), but even if it shocks less than it did 110 years ago it can still pack a punch.

But the greater interest for me personally was to encounter another work by Dobrinka Tabakova, the Hallé’s artist-in-residence this season – in this case Pacific, from her Earth Suite, a set of pieces begun when she held a similar job recently with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and apparently still in progress as an open-ended set. Giving music eco-titles is a useful strategy today (it helps arts organisations tick boxes for their funders), but her description of this piece, written as the Covid pandemic began, as permeated by “some of the anxiety and uncertainty of that time” made more connections with the sounds we heard.

It begins with spooky tapping, silence and low hums, before a kind of chorale for muted trombones and then the sound of the strings: followed by a sequence of melodic lines for differing combinations of wind instruments, some highly extended, against a plodding choral accompaniment, which builds to a broad climax before dying away quite rapidly. It’s an easy structure to follow and has a quality of confidence and restfulness that outweighs any others.

The earlier elements in the programme were Falla’s Interlude and Dance from La Vida Breve, piloted by Christian Reif with a sure hand, casting enchantment in the former from the simple ingredients of unison strings, solo clarinet, and so on, and keeping a steady but perfectly danceable pulse, without over-emphasis of its “Spanishness”, in the latter.

And a wonderful solo for Bartók’s Violin Concerto no. 2 came from Antje Weithaas. She had no problem with the full strings strength (nearly 50) of the Hallé, as Reif kept the orchestral sound under precise control, and amid all the virtuosity and fireworks there was tenderness, eloquence and poise.

Antje Weithaas (cr. Kaupo Kikkas)

Review of Hallé concert with Boris Giltburg and conducted by Alexandre Bloch

Boris Giltburg cr Sasha Gusov

The Hallé like to bill each concert with a title these days: what good luck that this one was given that of the music played in its second half, Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, as the conductor, soloist and piano concerto originally advertised had all changed by the time it happened.

So we had the chance to witness Alexandre Bloch’s debut with the orchestra. He’s no stranger to Manchester, though, having been a junior conducting fellow at the Royal Northern College of Music, after the Paris Conservatoire. He won the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition in 2012, and I remember his part in the 2013 Chester Festival, appearing with Manchester Camerata, which was followed by a move to the London Symphony Orchestra as assistant conductor.

He too the Hallé through Debussy’s Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune first, with the opening magically played by Amy Yule, starting from a very gentle piano but highly varied in dynamic as it proceeded. With the orchestra limited to 40 strings (as it was also for the concerto that followed) and the rich tones of Marie Leenhardt’s harp, the textures of this music were beautiful, and its phrasing was delicate while rhythmically quite brisk and always precise.

Boris Giltburg – a welcome guest in the past – appeared to play Chopin’s Piano concerto no. 2. He’s played a lot of Rachmaninov in his time (including here with the Hallé) and did not hesitate to use the power of the piano at times in this one, but he, too, can produce wonderful delicacy and dramatize the changes in sound the score requires. The Hallé wind were on exceptionally fine form for their solos in this piece. And we got an encore from Giltburg in a gorgeously sweet version of Chopin’s E minor Étude.

Overall it was still a short-ish programme, but Alexandre Bloch compensated for that with a brief lecture, illustrated by his own singing voice, on the Lutosławski before it was played. In performance – now with 60 strings, six percussionists and all the other resources the score prescribes – it was intensely colourful and brilliantly delivered, with the kind of instrumental virtuosity that conceals the height of the skills on display, and rhythmic energy constantly to the fore. The long, final Passacaglia, Toccata e Corale was passionately built to its climax, with brassy splendour and a near-devotional intensity from the strings.

Review of Hallé concert with Ian Bostridge and conducted by Kahchun Wong

Kahchun Wong (cr. Angie Kremer)

Kahchun Wong’s concert with the Hallé was a really interesting one – in the end, not so much for what it had appeared to offer on paper, but for what it gave in practice.

The paper interest was a UK premiere: Sofia Gubaidulina’s The Wrath of God, written in 2019, an 18-minute piece for very large orchestra (four Wagner tubas as well as four horns, two bass trombones, two tubas and a lot of percussion). It’s about the day of judgment, and suitably scary. It’s very loud a lot of the time, though there are beautiful and delicately mysterious softer passages too, one for strings and gong, one for strings and solo horn, followed by clarinet, piccolo and glockenspiel, then solo violin. Those I appreciated: but the predominant impression was that this somewhat episodic piece keeps making you think it’s all over, then showing you that it’s not.

The remaining ingredients in the programme were mainstream 20^th century music. Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings featured the peerless and extraordinary voice of Ian Bostridge, alongside the Hallé’s principal horn, Laurence Rogers. Between them (and Kahchun Wong) they gave the lovely song cycle about evening and night with many a dramatic twist. Bostridge frequently uses his voice in a quasi-instrumental way, with intensive emphasis on some notes and lines: in the Elegy (Blake’s “O Rose, though art sick!” and Dirge (the anonymous “Lyke-Wake Dirge”), particularly (the latter has its own evocation of the day of judgment, so that made plenty of sense). Rogers matched him for expression and played the virtuosic part with consummate skill. And in the final Sonnet (Jonson’s “Hymn”, to the Moon) we heard more of a kind of portamento in the Bostridge voice on rising phrases that seems to carry a frisson of dread, even in the most re-assuring music. Never a dull moment with these artists.

Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 is probably the favourite among his entire set and very much a repertoire work for symphony orchestras now. The challenge for any conductor, I think, is to catch some sense of ambiguity in it, to set against the clearly tuneful, attractive and agony-to-ectasy journey that it appears to be on the surface. Kahchun Wong did that very effectively: in one sense he dramatized it a bit more than others might (in the first and last movements), but the main characteristics of his interpretation were an assured and idiomatic approach to its rhythms, a peak of intensity which made the impassioned Largo, the third of its four movements, the unforgettable emotional heart of the piece, and a highly strategic change of tempo in the finale (beginning with the horn solo) that brought a huge weight of sadness into the midst of the triumphalism and ensured that stolidity persisted to its end, sound and clamour notwithstanding. It’s a way of conducting that would have been second nature to the great maestros of the first half of the 20th century – the time this music was born – and gives a sense of proportion and shape that are impossible to replicate by any other means.