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.

 

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 ...