Manchester Evening News review 7 October 2015

MICHAEL KENNEDY MEMORIAL CONCERT   Royal Northern College of Music

 

MANCHESTER has seen nothing like it, and probably never will again. Three knights of the realm, one dame, and nearly 20 more of the world’s top opera singers on the same platform to celebrate the memory of a great writer, Mancunian and, as they would all have said, friend.

Michael Kennedy was a journalist, author and critic who loved this city and loved music. The extent to which musicians loved him was apparent from a night of extraordinary music, involving the Hallé Orchestra, Royal Northern College of Music Orchestra, and other musicians, all giving their services in aid of the Michael Kennedy Memorial Fund, which will help RNCM students in the future.

Sir Mark Elder conducted the Hallé, and Sir Andrew Davis conducted both the Hallé and RNCM orchestras, and among the singers were winners of the award for Strauss singing endowed by Michael Kennedy and his wife, Joyce, herself as much loved as him and there to hear it all. Sir John Tomlinson and Dame Felicity Lott were among the singers.

I don’t intend to dwell on details of each item in the programme, but its breadth of sympathy was evident from the inclusion of Verdi, Bizet, Mozart, Britten, Elgar and even Haydn Wood’s Roses Of Picardy and the Britten version of The Last Rose Of Summer, lovingly sung by Kathryn Rudge.

Among the most magical moments were Susan Bickley’s singing of Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, by Mahler, and Sir John Tomlinson’s vivid delivery of the Sachs monologue from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. That, in its rueful rejection of the madness of the world and dedication to achievement and work, was as true a reflection of Michael Kennedy’s character as any.

There were contributions, too, from Harish Shankar, conducting the RNCM Orchestra with soloist Lawrence Perkins of Manchester Camerata in Elgar’s Romance for bassoon.

But the most glorious music was that to end each part of the concert: first Vaughan Williams’ Serenade To Music, for 16 soloists, in a roll-call maybe unequalled since it was first sung in honour of Sir Henry Wood in 1938: including Rebecca Evans, Joan Rodgers, Susan Bullock, Lee Bisset, Susan Bickley, Marie McLaughlin, Kathleen Smales, Wendy Dawn Thompson, Christopher Turner, Paul Nilon, Richard Berkeley Steele, Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts, Roderick Williams, Philip Smith and Sir John Tomlinson.

And lastly the final trio from Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss, sung by Dame Felicity Lott, Rebecca Evans and Alice Coote – music of unsurpassable beauty and expressing the greatness of spirit with which few are blessed.

Michael was almost certainly the last of a 150-year succession of music critics originating from the north west – Henry Chorley, Ernest Newman and Neville Cardus before him, autodidacts and all connected with Hallé or his orchestra – who became nationally influential figures.

No one ever erected a statue to a music critic, said Sibelius in one of his grumpier moods. Well, we have a bust of Cardus in Manchester … and in Kennedy we have the memory of a man whom, uniquely, all musicians loved.

 

Robert Beale

Manchester Evening News review 5 October 2015

HALLE ORCHESTRA AND CHOIR  Bridgewater Hall

 

THIS was the first really big event of the new Hallé season. Sir Mark Elder conducted the Hallé Orchestra and Choir (trained by guest choral conductor Robert Dean) in Verdi’s Requiem.

It’s one of the most popular choral works in the repertory now, and has been ever since Verdi himself took a picked team of soloists and musicians on tour with it in 1875 (giving the first UK performances in the Royal Albert Hall). But the earliest British conductor to put it on with British forces was Charles Hallé, in March 1876 in Manchester, so we have something of a special claim to it.

It’s often called an opera in the guise of a sacred work, and there’s no doubt that several passages sound like the soundtrack to a great spectacle. It’s certainly true that you need soloists with an operatic sense of drama and passion to hear it at its best, and even better if at least some of them are Italian. We had Maria Agresta, Giorgio Berrugi and Gianlucca Buratto, top-flight opera performers all, with the peerless, Manchester-trained Alice Coote as mezzo soprano.

And of course Sir Mark Elder can hardly prevent himself from presenting the Requiem as a drama, with a few blatant touches of theatre such as the Bridgewater Hall makes easy. We had two big bass drums for the thunderclaps of the Dies Irae, and the four off-stage trumpets made their own entrance in apocalyptic style.

But the music was also invested with tenderness and some of the most magical moments of quiet I’ve ever heard. The prayers of the text sounded like real prayers (the agonized Kyrie eleison and devout Hostias et preces wonderfully sung by the soloists), and there were beautifully interwoven lines of melody in the Agnus dei.

Sir Mark always finds the spring in rhythmic figures, and had his chorus with him in the Rex tremendae and a lovely cradle song in the Recordare.

The soloists made individual contributions of great distinction and character, Gianlucca Buratto awe-struck in rendering Mors stupebit, Giorgio Berrugi pure and eloquent throughout, Alice Coote vividly alert in Liber scriptus and unsurpassable in ensemble, and Maria Agresta simply angelic in the Offertory and lovely to hear in the Libera me.

And the choir were on very good form indeed, the soprano voices clear and accurate. The fugal Sanctus is always their highspot in this piece, and I was thrilled to hear them romp through it at a tremendous lick and reach the climactic cadence with a glorious surge of sound.

 

*****

Robert Beale

Article published in Manchester Evening News 2 October 2015

ON October 8 Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé in Mahler’s sixth symphony.

It’s a massive work (80 minutes long) and spans joy, tragedy and every emotion in between. It’s part of the series of concerts in the Hallé series with ‘Fate’ as their connecting theme.

It will be the first time Sir Mark has conducted the work with the Hallé, though he’s done it elsewhere (including a performance with the young musicians of Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester recently).

“I really admire it for its idea of a symphonic journey,” he told me. “It’s so different from his fifth symphony, which is a progress from darkness to light.

“It’s disturbing and agitated and it has high drama – but I treasure the moments when he uses his vast orchestra to create delicate, but entirely different passages.

“We will have four harps and three celestas: when they are heard with everyone else playing very quietly there’s a colour there that no other Romantic composer achieved.”

He knows very well that the symphony poses its problems. One is the order in which to play the inner movements. Mahler originally wrote his scherzo (in faster tempo) as the second movement, but in practice performed it third, after the slow movement.

“There’s no question that you can do it either way,” says Sir Mark, “but to me, after the optimism of the end of the first movement, and the ecstasy and romance of the slow movement, to return to this breathless, pounding music, which then sinks and collapses is a wonderful bridge to the drama of the fourth movement.

Another question surrounds the fatalistic hammer blows of the last movement – each written at a point of climax, and thought to represent for the composer crushing blows in his life – the end of his marriage, the collapse of his health and the death of his daughter. “Mahler later took the third one out because he couldn’t bear to hear it, but the music that follows it is so much an elegy, an expression of mourning, that it doesn’t make sense without it.”

For the hammer, which the score says should sound like an axe felling a tree, the Hallé will use a specially made box first used by their colleagues in Liverpool. “It will be raised up so everyone can see it … that’s the drama of the piece,” says Sir Mark.

 

Manchester Evening News review 28 Sep 2015

MANCHESTER CAMERATA  Bridgewater Hall

 

BY the time Manchester Camerata’s season-opening concert took place on Saturday, its title had expanded from just ‘España’ to ‘España, Beethoven and the Beatles’. The reason for the third part of that trilogy only became apparent during the evening, but the capacity to hit multiple targets simultaneously is a Camerata feature these days, and they do it very well.

So the Bridgewater Hall audience was introduced to their community work with a pre-show performance, and to their ground-breaking work with dementia patients through a short film in the hall itself.

The music-making began with Rossini, whose overture to The Barber Of Seville, ostensibly Spanish in location, is really about as Italian as you can get (as music director Gábor Takács-Nagy explained in his introductory chat). It was lively and transparently-textured, a factor that rubbed off in all the subsequent orchestral playing.

España itself followed – the overture by Chabrier, re-arranged by Simon Parkin for chamber orchestra in a way that brought birdsong to the range of colourful effects and kept the percussion players (all two of them) extremely busy switching from one piece of kit to another (and sometimes deploying two at once). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a maraca used to hit a kettle drum before.

Manchester’s favourite guitarist, Craig Ogden, was the soloist in Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra (replacing the injured Miloš Karadaglić).

He needed two chairs on stage – one for himself and one for his little amplifier, which certainly helped to make every note of the solo audible over the orchestra, though I’m not sure how much Rodrigo would even have expected that.

Still, it was a lovely and lively interpretation of the piece (extremely so in the case of the oboe part in the first movement), with the orchestra producing some delicately tiny pianissimi, and Craig Ogden’s playing superb as ever.

Then the first explanation of where the Beatles were to figure in the concert: his encore was Takemitsu’s solo guitar version of Yesterday, which is just a little different from the original but equally enchanting.

Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ symphony (no. 6) followed, played by Takács-Nagy and the Camerata with all the imagination and dramatic effect they could muster: it’s exciting to hear how thunderous the storm can sound even with limited numbers in the orchestra (as would have been the case originally), and never was the sense of devout communing with nature quite so well evoked as at the end of this reading – Beethoven as a musical Wordsworth.

Then the second Beatles number, as the strings of the orchestra played Eleanor Rigby as their encore to the whole programme. It certainly sent everyone home happy.

 

****

Robert Beale

Article in Manchester Evening News 25 September 2015

VERDI’S Requiem has a special place in Sir Mark Elder’s musical life. He’s performing it with the Hallé Orchestra and Choir and a hand-picked team of soloists at the Bridgewater Hall on October 3 – but his love for it stems from when he was 10.

“I remember finding a score of it, at a time when I’d never heard music of that kind,” he says (he was a choirboy at Canterbury Cathedral, so knew his church music … but not this work).

He tried it out on the piano, and began a love of the Requiem – and Verdi’s music generally – that has lasted his life long.

Verdi wrote it for the concert hall rather than the church, but Sir Mark does not go along with calling it the composer’s ‘best opera’.

“He was said to be an atheist, but I think in reality was agnostic,” he says. “And I suspect he was a deeply spiritual man. The sense of fear and desperation you hear at the end is very strong and moving evidence of that.

“One thing that makes it so beautiful is that it sits in the Catholic tradition in which he was brought up, but his genius of writing truly dramatic music is not at odds with it.”

He’s proud that this Hallé performance features three Italian soloists – soprano Maria Agresta, tenor Giorgio Berrugi and bass Gianluca Burrato (who takes the place of Alexander Vinogradov). With them is mezzo-soprano Alice Coote – many will remember her in the Hallé of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in 2008, among other outstanding performances.

And the Hallé bass drum player has a starring role in the Dies Irae music of the Requiem. “I always tell them to hit it as hard as they can,” says Sir Mark. “And I’ll buy them a new drum head if they go right through.”

Two days after the Requiem, he and the Hallé have the leading part in a concert at the Royal Northern College of Music to commemorate Manchester journalist and music writer Michael Kennedy, who died at the end of last year.

It includes a formidable catalogue of world-class British opera singers, donating their services (including bass Sir John Tomlinson, flying in from Frankfurt), and Sir Andrew Davis is coming from Chicago to share the rostrum with Sir Mark. Proceeds go to the Michael Kennedy Memorial Fund, which will support RNCM students of the future.

Manchester Evening News review 23 September 2015

NICOLA BENEDETTI  Bridgewater Hall

 

NICOLA Benedetti last played The Four Seasons in the Bridgewater Hall just a year ago, guesting with Manchester Camerata in a performance which I found very rewarding. This time she was with her own little group – her cellist partner Leonard Elschenbroich among them – on a tour called Italy And The Four Seasons.

Vivaldi’s scene-painting music was as charming as ever: stylistically in tune with the latest ideas and highly imaginative. Birds chirruped, dogs barked, teeth chattered … and though it didn’t beat the best concert version of the music I’ve ever heard (by the Academy of Ancient Music, here five years ago), it was very good.

This was a chamber music concert, really, with just 11 musicians at the most on stage alongside Nicola and Leonard, and the hall is good for that. Their softest playing was a mere whisper, their imitative effects completely free and sometimes surprising, their fastest music simply furious.

It was interesting to hear the solo cello line coming out more strongly than you often do – but then, why not? There’s almost a duo piece to be heard in The Four Seasons if you listen for it.

Dropping the other listed Vivaldi concerto from the programme, Nicola Benedetti then introduced a superb little ensemble of National Children’s Orchestra string players from around the region, who shone like real stars in a movement from the Vivaldi G major concerto.

The second part of the concert included some really new music – Duetti D’Amore, by Mark-Anthony Turnage, written for Benedetti and Elschenbroich and getting its first performances on this tour, which began a week ago. This was its world cinquieme, if you want to be precise about it.

For violin and cello alone, its five brief sections are captivating, easy on the ear and at times hugely effective and haunting. I wondered just how it might work for a duo who weren’t committed to each other in a love relationship … but that’s a question for another day. This playing, especially in the tender dialogue of the fourth movement, was very beautiful. And the ‘Blues’ finale, wittily bringing audible discord to the forefront, was exciting and, in the end, completely unified.

The concert finished with four string players back on stage with Benedetti and Elschenbroich to play the original sextet version of Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir De Florence. If there had been any doubts as to the scope of these musicians’ sympathies in successfully turning from baroque to high Romantic style, they disappeared in seconds. It was glorious to hear, superbly balanced and voiced, passionate and thrilling and finally pure eloquence and fun.

****

Robert Beale

Manchester Evening News review 23 September 2015

MANCHESTER CHAMBER CONCERTS SOCIETY  Royal Northern College of Music

 

THERE’S nothing quite like the autumnal glow of Brahms’s late chamber works to warm the heart, and they were a timely part of the opening concert in Manchester Chamber Concerts Society’s 79^th annual season.

It was a delight, too, to have the society’s artistic director, Martin Roscoe, himself appearing on the opening bill, in a piano trio with clarinettist James Campbell and cellist Ralph Kirshbaum.

Brahms was balanced with Beethoven in their programme, opening with the latter’s Clarinet Trio in B flat op. 11. It began with perfect manners on all sides, self-effacement almost the order of the day, which is probably Martin Roscoe’s trademark as a musician as much as anyone’s (and to be admired).

But that didn’t detract from the music’s impact, and when it came to the slow movement both clarinet and cello brought pure magic to the restful melody that leads it. Canadian James Campbell is an amazing player – poised, unaffected and eloquent, and Ralph Kirshbaum is still a favourite with Manchester music-lovers after his long association with the RNCM here in the past.

His singing tone in the upper register of the cello is something you don’t easily forget: we heard it to best advantage in the other Beethoven piece, his Cello Sonata in A major op. 69. That had a touch of manic quality in its scherzo and wonderfully positive ending.

The Brahms works were the second Clarinet Sonata of op. 120, tender and captivatingly lyrical in James Campbell’s rendering, with a finely judged shade of passion at the highpoint of its finale, and the Trio in A minor for clarinet, cello and piano, which ended the evening.

It’s a little gem of nostalgic writing (one of the last things he created), and this interpretation captured its atmosphere to the full, with gracefulness and mellow expression sustained through to the end.

The MCCS’s programmes continue this autumn with the Escher String Quartet (October 12) and a recital by tenor James Gilchrist (November 9), before Nicholas Daniel and the Britten Oboe Quartet appear on December 9.

****

Robert Beale