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.

 

Review of Hallé performance of Verdi's Requiem, conducted by Sir Mark Elder

Sir Mark Elder conducting the Hallé

Verdi’s Requiem has often been described as an “operatic” setting of a sacred text.

There’s no doubting that Sir Mark Elder sees it that way. It makes fairly frequent appearances in concert programmes, but of all the versions I’ve heard I don’t think there’s been any quite as determined to make it into a drama as this.

Each of the soloists is known for their prowess in Italian opera, and it seems each had been encouraged to see their role in this performance as a character study of some sort, whether pronouncing judgment, pleading for mercy, or floating to the heights of beatification.

When it came to the big choral and orchestral highspots, all was spectacle – the Dies Irae with not one but two big bass drums, and especially the Tuba mirum, with Aida-style stage trumpeters appearing on high, to properly put the fear of God into us.

The opening of the whole work was so minimalist as to be almost inaudible (pity so many of the audience decided to show their appreciation with paroxysms of coughing at that precise moment),so much so that the stentorian sound of the men leading off with Te decet hymnus was quite rough by comparison.

It was all much appreciated for its showmanship, and the contribution of the soloists. Natalya Romaniw was a heavenly prima donna, wonderfully sustaining her purity of tone and accuracy to the very end of the Libera me. If the Romantic notion that anyone can be saved through the love of a good woman was what Verdi had in mind there, her voice exemplified it.

Alice Coote, too, so imperious in her depiction of the Last Judgment in the Sequence, was the perfect Secunda Donna when it came to the Agnus Dei, which was one of the most beautiful parts of the whole performance. Thomas Atkins shone as every Italian tenor at prayer should do, in Ingemisco, and James Platt caught something of the pleading tone of Germont father in his singing of Confutatis maledictis (though in ensemble his foundation of the harmony didn’t always seem quite precise enough).

Whatever Verdi did or didn’t believe about the hereafter, he got something right with his setting of the Sanctus in this work: the dwelling place of God must be a scene of supreme rejoicing, which is what he caught in that wonderful fugue for double chorus. For me, it’s the climax of the whole work, though Sir Mark took it quite gently, with rhythmic life – unusually – somewhat lost in the part-singing for some of the time … until the last glorious cadence.

This work should always be something special for the Hallé: its founder, not known for operatic ventures into the Verdi canon particularly, was quick off the mark in appreciating it when it first appeared: he gave it here in Manchester in spring 1876, only about a year after Verdi, with his hand-picked Italian troupe, had toured it to London (and thus performed the British premiere). But Hallé was almost certainly the first to do it with all-British forces.

Review of BBC Philharmonic 'centennial' concert

Eva Ollikainen conducting the BBC Philharmonic

Calculating the age of an orchestra is a funny business. You might think that continuous existence as a group who played together under the same name, with slow membership changes over time, would be definitive.

By that standard the BBC Philharmonic is still quite young. Even allowing for changes of name (via the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra and the preceding BBC Northern Orchestra), but looking for its existence as a body of players on full-time contracts, you can’t go before 1942, or, allowing for almost universal freelance orchestra membership in earlier times, only back to 1934, when its players were basically those of the Hallé anyway (and also appeared as the Liverpool Philharmonic). Before that there was a BBC Nonette – the “Northern Studio Orchestra” – although attempts had been made in 1930 to establish something bigger.

So how do we get the idea that the orchestra’s lifetime stems from the 2ZY radio station in Manchester of May 1922, which started even before the BBC existed? (It’s not too long since Margaret Wyatt wrote a little book for the BBC called BBC Philharmonic: A celebration 1934-1994, so even by that count the Phil is 88 years old now).

Only on the basis that a body that employs musicians can “own” an orchestra, even if it’s simply paying for one-off concerts, and using various names from time to time (“2ZY Orchestra” and “Northern Wireless Orchestra”, from 1926).

It’s been considered thus before – Charles Hallé employed his band from 1857 to 1895 either from gig to gig or on six-month contracts (though for many years he paid some a weekly wage for that winter season), and it was most often known as “the Manchester Orchestra” then.

Never mind: the BBC in the North West is celebrating 100 years of paying musicians to perform for it, which is a good thing whether you call that having an orchestra or not. The Philharmonic marked this with a great performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Bridgewater Hall, conducted by Eva Ollikainen. It was full-bodied Beethoven, with 60 strings and effectively triple woodwind, and the vocal line-up of Tuuli Takala, Kitty Whately, Steve Davislim and Simon Shibambu, abetted by the CBSO Chorus, made a strong body indeed.

Big bodies can still be light on their toes. Ollikainen brought energetic tempi to the first two movements, resulting in playing of incisiveness, vehemence even, and the timps pounded by Paul Turner were emphatically prominent in both. The Adagio was all suavity and songfulness, and the finale eloquent, full of gloriously realized counterpoint and surging and bounding in rhythmic energy to its climax.

Before it there were just two short orchestral pieces; the first the overture, Chanticleer, by Ruth Gipps, which the orchestra has recently recorded. Written in 1944, it’s a bit of a stop-start piece, but with plenty of instrumental colour. Oddly enough, its fairly conventional mid-century harmonies end on a strange cadence – as if it was meant to lead straight into the opera it was originally written for.

Present-day composer Erland Cooper wrote his Window over Rackwick to a BBC commission, and it had its world premiere in this concert. It’s a kind of tribute to Peter Maxwell Davies, the son of Salford who was associated with the Philharmonic for many years, inspired by the Orkney spot where he had his home, and setting a poem by his friend and collaborator, George Mackay Brown. The soprano soloist was pure-toned Héloïse Werner.

It’s like a simple, oft-repeated song refrain, beautiful to hear in its string chamber ensemble garb, and, like Max himself, very pleasant to encounter, but leaving you in no doubt of his being amply content with his own company.

Review of Hallé concert with Tami Pohjola, conducted by Taavi Oramo

Violinist Tami Pohjola and conductor Taavi Oramo pictured with the Hallé (credit Tom Stephens)

This week’s repeated Hallé programme (I heard it on Wednesday afternoon) was an intriguing one. Not so much for the headline works – Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony and Sibelius’ Violin Concerto – but for the two overtures by women composers added to those, and the two guest artists.

They were both Finnish and young, and going places. The conductor was Taavi Oramo and the soloist Tami Pohjola.

She is a wonderful player. She has both a gorgeously lyrical sound and some very big tone, allied with formidable technique. Standing against around 50 strings in the tutti orchestra was no problem, and the first movement cadenza was not just confidently negotiated but heartfelt in style. That makes a difference: the slow movement, too, was soulful in spades, and the finale much more than a mere fireworks display.

Oramo ensured that the orchestral role in the concerto had plenty of emphasis, energy and expression, and the Hallé wind players lightened the atmosphere with their usual expertise.

The two overtures were Fanny Mendelssohn’s in C major and Louise Farrenc’s no. 1 in E minor. They were near-contemporaries in life, and the overtures are near-contemporary in date – but, for me, there was a world of difference. Fanny Mendelssohn, for all her technical accomplishments, seems to borrow effects from others (Mozart, and maybe even Beethoven at some points) but has a tendency to repeat herself in shortish phrases, and her harmonic progressions are not always too adroit. Taavi Oramo made sure her writing was pushed along to create real tension, but even he could not make this overture into more than a curiosity.

Louise Farrenc, on the other hand, was a composer of imagination and originality, as well as technical accomplishment. Her harmonic changes are sure-footed and she writes remarkable counterpoint almost throughout, so that her themes intertwine to great effect. What a pity she doesn’t seem to have written very much more for orchestra than this and one other overture.

Felix Mendelssohn, the Italian’s composer, gave us a masterepiece and it’s now a familiar one. I specially liked the charm Taavi Oramo and the musicians drew from the Con moto third movement (a Goldilocks tempo there, with some very individual touches from the horns), and the finale was definitely fast and furious – perhaps a tad too much ...

Review of Hallé concert with Guy Johnston, conducted by Delyana Lazarova

 

Delyana Lazarova conducts the Hallé 

There could have been few orchestral works more appropriate to reflect our thoughts after the death of a sovereign than two we heard played by the Hallé yesterday.

Neither was planned with such an event in mind, but Dobrinka Tabakova’s Cello Concerto has a central movement that ends in so still and elegiac an atmosphere as to seem as if written as a meditation on profound loss, and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony is itself a journey into finality and silence.

Delyana Lazarova, the assistant conductor to Sir Mark Elder, conducted this opening concert of the 2022-23 season, beginning it, and others, by playing the National Anthem. It wasn’t the stirring version, begun with a side-drum call to arms, that older audience members remember from the years last century when war was still a keen memory, but Britten's, with a quiet beginning, as befits the prayer it really is.

We were soon into the whirl of Ravel’s La Valse, begun under Lazarova’s baton in a manner as rhythmically numinous as it was in other ways, but soon full of impetus and precision, the richness of its textures fully realized and the tensions effectively rising to its shattering close.

Dobrinka Tabakova, now the Hallé’s artist in residence, was present to hear Guy Johnston play the solo in her concerto of 2008. It’s a readily appreciable piece: three movements, clear themes and motifs, harmonious chording and real tunes. What a refreshment to hear new music like that! It’s also very hard for the soloist, who’s frequently up in violin register in the early part of the piece, by Guy Johnston was unabashed by those demands and brought eloquence and sweetness to the melodies – especially the lovely dialogue with solo viola in the central movement.

The Tchaikovsky symphony is one most listeners and all players will have been familiar with for years. I’m a child of the 1960s, when conductors (including John Barbirolli) were more inclined to use tempo flexibility as a vehicle for expounding structure, and Lazarova’s safe and steady tempo for the third movement (Allegro molto vivace, it says) ensured crisp and accurate articulation but lost out a bit in the hysteria department, which can be an important part of the symphony’s emotional journey (the finale has even been “diagnosed” by the learned as exhibiting clinical evidence of hysteria in the way those chromatic upward rushes are shared from first to second violin parts in the score).

The first movement was magisterially presented, careful baton beating bringing springy rhythms throughout and brightness and brilliance characterising the development part of its structure. The last pages were beautifully intense and tragic.

The orchestra was led by Magnus Johnston (Guy’s brother, as it happens), and though several of the regular section leaders (noticeably in the strings) weren’t present, the guest principal bassoon, Daniel Handsworth, made an eloquent contribution to his solos in the Tchaikovsky symphony.

Guy Johnston and Dobrinka Tabakova acknowledge

applause after the performance of her cello concerto

Reviews of the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company at Buxton

Emily Vine (Mabel) and chorus in the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company's

production of The Pirates Of Penzance at Buxton Opera House 2022

The Pirates of Penzance

The Gilbert & Sullivan Festival is back at Buxton – hurrah! A full week of performances at the Opera House there precedes two weeks of continued festival in Harrogate, so there’s the best of both worlds for G&S lovers.

The shows diary is very much the same as it used to be in the days when Buxton had the festival to itself: a different title almost every day, with the festival’s own National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company leading the way (they’re also doing Iolanthe and Utopia Ltd, a relative rarity), plus the pick of the crop of other specialists in the Savoyard repertoire – this week that’s The Gondoliers (Forbear! Theatre), The Mikado (Peak Opera), HMS Pinafore (Opera della Luna), and Charles Court Opera with their own concoction called Express G&S plus Patience.

The Pirates of Penzance was done with the familiar painted sets but re-costumed for director Sarah Helsby Hughes’ fresh take on the piece. She kept all the original script and music, but sent us on a kind of time-warp to the 1930s, where, even if professional pirates still looked the same, Major-General Stanley’s daughters were beach belles in Act One and appeared in fluffy nighties for Act Two, and lovers Mabel and Frederic at one point transformed into Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. There was plenty of dancing by a gifted cast and chorus (choreographer Eleanor Strutt), and just a few knowing tweaks of the familiar lines and situations. I loved it, and the Opera House audience hardly ever stopped laughing.

The music was in the expert hands of John Andrews (of Red Squirrel Opera fame) and the playing by the festival’s own National Festival Orchestra was unimpeachable – a small but well balanced ensemble, under a conductor who knew that getting the words across was the thing that mattered most.

The principals line-up was, as ever before, a mix of new talent and experience. Stalwarts from the old days included Bruce Graham as Sergeant of Police, Louise Crane as Ruth and James Cleverton as the Pirate King – all needing no introduction to the faithful and completely on top of their jobs. Matthew Siveter, as the Major-General (in a kind of Boy Scout uniform, to suit the time-warp), has already made his reputation in the G&S field and proved just how with a superbly rapid “I am the very model …” patter song.

RNCM-trained Aidan Edwards was an extremely strong and clear Samuel, and the three lead daughters, Catrine Kirkman, Kate Lowe and Alexandra Hazard, vamped things up delightfully. And for Frederic and Mabel we had two classy singers: David Webb’s tenor never less than noble and Emily Vine’s soprano hitting the high notes with panache.

 

Iolanthe

Iolanthe was the first of this year’s shows performed by the Gilbert & Sullivan Festival at Buxton and in John Savournin’s production very much follows the formula of tradition-with-tweaks.

Nothing to frighten the horses or the purists (no re-wording of “Oh, Captain Shaw …”, for instance), despite the fact that of all the G&S canon its references today seem furthest removed from the present-day world: we don’t even have a proper Lord Chancellor now, and our House of Lords is far from being made of blue-bloods alone.

But a visit to the festival at Buxton or Harrogate is almost like travelling back to Victorian/Edwardian times anyway, and no one seems to worry about a storyline whose point is all to do with a long-gone legislative and judicial establishment, with a Lord Chancellor in charge of wards of court and membership of the house of peers requiring nothing other than breeding – add to that the romantic Victorian fascination with fairies and you are soon into an innocent fantasy world with its own rules entirely.

There’s just the occasional sharp-eyed reflection on the nonsense (I liked Phyllis’s response to Strephon’s revelation that he was half-fairy and only half-man, as Emily Vine snapped out her line: “Which half?”), and today you can hardly avoid a titter over the line “She’d meet him after dark, inside St James’s Park, and give him one …”, but that’s as far as the double-entendres go.

Merry Holden is the choreographer, and the ever hard-working cast and chorus have moves that require some co-ordination and sometimes recall the much-loved skipping around of the old D’Oyly Carte routines (in “If you go in, you’re sure to win”, for instance – which got its equally traditional encore). The music was again in the expert hands of John Andrews, with the National Festival Orchestra providing flexible and sympathetic accompaniments.

And stand-outs among the principals, for me, were Matthew Palmer (Strephon), an excellent young tenor still at the outset of what should be a very successful career, and Meriel Cunningham (Iolanthe), who has a rich mezzo-soprano tone and real clarity. Matthew Kellett enjoys rattling off the patter as the Lord Chancellor; Matthew Siveter has his spot of glory as Private Willis; Emily Vine is a winsome Phyllis and Amy J Payne an imperious Queen of the Fairies; and Ben McAteer and Hal Cazalet enjoy prancing their way through as Earls Mountararat and Tolloller.

Utopia Limited

One of the orchestra members was using the audience loos (which are few anyway) before the show at Buxton on Friday night, so I asked him whether they didn’t provide enough of them backstage.

“Yes,” he said, “but they’re all full of the turns, warming up their voices.”

A tangential illustration of one facet of producing Gilbert & Sullivan’s next-to-last operetta, Utopia Ltd – there are an awful lot of “turns”, i.e. people in the cast.  That’s probably one reason why it’s not done very often.

So credit where it’s due: the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival, this year beginning at Buxton and moving on to Harrogate, did us all a good turn by offering the first fully staged professional revival of it (apart from the D’Oyly Carte’s one attempt) back in 2011, and here it is again.

Jeff Clarke, of Opera della Luna fame, is the director, with Jenny Arnold his inventive choreographer, and John Andrews conducts the G&S Festival’s own National Symphony Orchestra.

The piece may, when written in the early 1890s, have been a bit derivative of past Gilbert-Sullivan glories: Gilbert’s plot is about a distant island that decides to improve itself by adopting all the benefits of Victorian English society – the rulers (and some members) of the Army and Navy, a lawyer, a county councillor, a Lord Chamberlain, and a crafty businessman on the make, and of course there’s much flouncing around in posh costumes and drinking of cups of tea. Cue jokes at the expense of all of that, and there are references in the script (and in the score for the latter of them) to both The Mikado and HMS Pinafore.

Clarke has removed the locale from the “luxuriant and tropical landscape” of the original book to a generally Middle Eastern one, with palms and porticoes. He leaves it to the expertise of performers such as Robert Gildon and Giles Davies (as the Wise Men of pre-reform Utopian society) and Ben McAteer to get the story over in Act One, which they do with excellent diction, and there is a delightful character study from Monica McGhee (as Princess Zara, the daughter of the kingdom who returns from Girton College, Cambridge, to share all she’s learned of enlightened society) – she’s absorbed the Queen’s English so much as to sound like the Queen herself.

Meriel Cunningham and Rachel Speirs (the latter stepping up from chorus duties to take the role on 5 August) portray her sisters, the young princesses Nekaya and Kalyba as feisty young ladies with their own ideas … an aspect of Gilbert’s young heroines that’s increasingly drawn on these days.

Where Clarke really gets into his stride is the early part of Act Two, with nice touches from lighting designer Matt Cater for a night-time setting, and Anthony Flaum, as Captain Fitzbattleaxe of the First Life Guards (who we soon learn is Princess Zara’s love interest as well as security detail), is very funny as the romantic tenor singer who’s never quite able to deliver when he’s not in the mood. That’s soon followed by a song for the British gentlemen who represent the “Flowers of Progress” – complete with visual props, a mock encore and present-day references to the NHS and fuel prices in its final verse.

Of these Britishers I admired Tim Walton’s highly theatrical Lord Chamberlain and the cockney wide-boy given by Paul Featherstone as businessman Mr Goldbury, and Katharine Taylor-Jones also impressed as The Lady Sophy – the nearest Utopia Ltd gets to an elderly bossy-woman role. Cameron Mitchell, Aidan Edwards, Stephen Godward and Ciarán Walker all make strong contributions.