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.