CDs of my year: a personal selection

Here’s a personal set of CD reviews for Christmas – maybe these could help solve your present problems …

Wagner: Parsifal (soloists, Hallé Orchestra, Royal Opera Chorus, Hallé Youth Choir, Trinity Boys Choir, conducted by Sir Mark Elder: Hallé HLD 7539 , 2CDs)

This is a BBC recording of the complete Parsifal given by Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé at the London Proms last year, issued on the Hallé label as a 70^th birthday present for Sir Mark in June this year. It sounds remarkably well, considering the Royal Albert Hall was the ‘studio’, and the performance itself is superb in every respect. Personally I find the work something of an acquired taste, but it’s clear that Si Mark has acquired it, and he sustains the atmosphere of rapt contemplation throughout (he calls it a ‘one-shirt work’ in contrast to the other Wagner music dramas for which at least two shirts’ worth of perspiration is needed). If you can handle hearing all those Dresden Amens (a Lead-Kindly-Leitmotif, if ever there was one), then this is for you, too.

Vaughan Williams: Symphonies nos. 4 and 6 (Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Mark Elder: Hallé HLL 7547)

Sir Mark and the Halle have already recorded VW’s symphonies 1, 2, 5 and 8 to considerable acclaim, and this is an equally notable document. The works are each in their own way ‘war’ symphonies, the fourth dissonantly angry and full of foreboding (though with beautiful melody, too), the sixth seen by many as post-war reaction to the horror of Hiroshima, with its long, almost featureless and eery finale. Sir Mark always brings freshness and clarity to his music, and this is no exception.

Scriabin: Symphony no. 2; Piano concerto (Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Kirill Gerstein, conducted by Vasily Petrenko: LAWO Classics  LWC1139)

Scriabin’s earlier works are being championed by Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic, and offer a few surprises to the listener who (like most of us) does not know them as regular concert repertoire. They’re closer in style to the high Romantic vein of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov than Scriabin’s most visionary, later music, which makes them a rewarding experience in the hands of such a great-sounding orchestra as this and its highly gifted conductor – also music director of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. On the other hand, they’re somewhat uneven, the major example of this being the finale of the second symphony, where after a seriously discursive first two movements (like a vast slow introduction and allegro), a beautiful Andante and a lively scherzo, descends into mere vainglorious posturing where something much weightier is needed. But well worth hearing for the beauties along the way. 

‘Suites and Fantasies’, various composers (Joo Yeon Sir, violin, Irina Andrievsky, piano: Rubicon RCD1003)

As debut discs by solo violinists go, this is an exceptionally rewarding and entertaining one. Joo Yeon Sir’s technique is fabulous, and she is recorded by Andrew Keener and produced by Matthew Cosgrove – both signs of superb quality. She and Irina Andrievsky play the charming pastiche (or is it?) Suite in Old Style by Schnittke, Falla’s Suite Popular Española, Britten’s youthfully spiky Suite for Violin and Piano op. 3, Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and Frolov’s Concert Fantasy on themes from ‘Porgy and Bess’ – what’s not to like? Highly recommended.

‘The Silver Stars at Play’, contemporary Christmas carols (Kantos Chamber Choir, directed by Elspeth Slorach: Prima Facie PFCD075)

A great idea to fill a CD with new, or mainly new, settings of Christmas music, sung by Kantos, the choir of emerging professional singers of the north west, conducted by their director Elspeth Slorach. There are many little gems here (though, as with any collection of such a kind, the quality of the material varies), among them Paul Ayres’ Hodie Christus natus est, Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s This Time is born a Child, Andrew Cusworth’s Of a Rose, Peter Maxwell Davies’ Child of the Manger, Andrew Mayes’ Christmas Music and Mark Hewitt’s Silent Night setting – and the title piece, by Colin Hand.

Adam Gorb: Dancing in the Ghetto and other works (Royal Liverpool Philharmonic 10/10 Ensemble, conducted by Clark Rundell; Royal Northern College of Music Wind Ensemble, conducted by Mark Heron and Timothy Reynish; Manchester Camerata, conducted by Mark Heron: Prima Facie PFCD047)

This collection of recent works for large ensembles by the Royal Northern College of Music’s head of the school of composition – whose highly crafted writing I always find stimulating and usually very enjoyable – has two pieces with the kind of over-the-top, klezmer-influenced, knees-up dance rhythms he’s so good at (Dancing in the Ghetto and Weimar), along with his Symphony no. 1 in C, which is light-hearted, a little bit referential and enormous fun, and Serenade for Spring, which does exactly what it says on the tin. The last piece, Love Transforming, is a long, slow, deeply felt single movement written for Timothy Reynish’s 75^th birthday concert and a very different kind of music, but equally intense. I was there for the concert when it was unveiled, and though the recording cannot capture the spatial effects it creates alongside exploring fascinating timbres, I’ll stick to my verdict then that it is ‘both evocative and a model of how to write clearly and imaginatively for unusual textures’.

Anthony Gilbert: ‘Travelling with Time’, recent music on historical themes (various performers: Prima Facie PFCD041)

A collection of pieces written over the past 30 years by Adam Gorb’s predecessor at the RNCM, Anthony Gilbert, this links them together by imagining a journey through history from the 9^th century to the 20^th, with music for voice, instruments, cello, piano, string quartet and string orchestra. The stand-out for me is Another Dream Carousel, an evocation of Viennese life prior to the Nazis’ horrors – I admired the Northern Chamber Orchestra’s playing of this when it was new in 2000 and it’s good to have it on this disc.

The Hallé’s Messiah: review

The Hallé’s annual performance of Messiah has a venerable tradition. Begun by Charles Hallé in December 1858, it’s been the subject of interpretations by some of its great permanent conductors and for many years an exercise in the grand effects of massed choral singing beloved of our forebears. Barbirolli, theatrically, used to have his choir shout the last ‘Hallelujah!’ of the allegro tempo as loud as they could – that certainly made you jump!

This year’s conductor, John Butt, is from a different stable. His award-winning recordings of great choral works of the baroque period, Messiah among them, are usually made with very small forces and represent, as closely as scholarship can define, the original details of a particular performance.

Someone once said that if you want to imitate the performance conditions Handel faced, you should stage the smallest orchestra you think you can get away with, and then make sure that they outnumber the chorus. But there’s no chance of that in a Hallé performance in the big space of the Bridgewater Hall (which was virtually sold out on Saturday) – so what we had was historically informed, rather than historically authentic.

It was a brilliant success in practice. John Butt performed the work without cuts, and brought a sense of the lively, dancing rhythms of much of Handel’s music, a near-operatic pace, as the units of the first part (in particular) unfold like scenes on a stage, and a good ear for dramatic effect, which Handel’s instincts provide and which can be leveraged well enough in an enlarged setting such as this without deserting the sound qualities of the original instrumentation (the chattering oboes duplicating the violin lines are always really effective).

He didn’t completely buy into Barbirolli’s idea that the chorus should begin ‘Glory to God’ sotto voce, to fulfil the ‘da lontano’ marking and make the angels glide into our foreground as if on the wing, but he had their accompanying trumpets up on high, sounding from the very heavens.

And for the final chorus he threw modesty to the winds and had Christopher Stokes open up the resources of the Marcussen organ (instead of a chamber instrument) for once, to accompany the choral peroration – a spine-tingling moment.

His soloists were a gifted quartet: outstanding among them the tenor Thomas Walker, who brought the arresting style of baroque opera to his recitatives and was outstanding in the Passion music, and Mhairi Lawson, who beamed like an angel, with the glow of telling the Gospel story as if we’d never heard it before. They, and mezzo Anna Stéphany and baritone Robert Davies, were perfectly on-message with baroque embellishments and shakes – although I noticed that ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ was closer to the Victorian preference for effect through simplicity, and none the worse for it.

The Hallé Choir sang with consistent precision and excellent attack, particularly in ‘O Thou that tellest’, ‘Surely He hath borne our griefs’ and, of course, ‘Hallelujah!’ – well worth standing for. Tradition has its place, and there is still a thrill in seeing an entire house acknowledge the presence of the King of Kings.

(The historical note in the printed programme needs some adjustment, particularly if it’s to be used again any time. Charles Hallé’s first Messiah in Manchester was in December 1858, when he began a ‘Manchester Choral Society’ series – with his new orchestra and alongside his other concerts – that continued until 1861. The only reason the oratorio doesn’t feature in the collected programmes of his orchestral concerts until later is that, although there was a ‘repetition’ added to the latter in March 1859, subsequently the Choral Society series included the work in December 1859 and December 1860: only when the two series were amalgamated in 1861 does the December Messiah appear as part of the ‘new look’ season. Look at the concert records and contemporary newspapers and it’s all there. And Sims Reeves, the great Victorian soloist, was a tenor.)

Review of Halle concert with Ryan Wigglesworth

Ryan Wigglesworth, principal guest conductor of the Hallé, gave a programme for this week’s ‘Opus One’ concert that would have seemed outrageously heavyweight for that audience a few years ago. But it wasn’t, and the reception for Mahler’s fourth symphony showed just how much the traditionally ‘popular’ Opus One repertoire has come closer to that of the reputedly ‘heavy’ Thursday series.

He began with Mozart, and a concert aria to boot, which certainly won friends and influenced people. Joanne Lunn, the soprano who stepped in to replace Elizabeth Watts, was a charming performer of Ch’io mi scordi di te? – a classical stylist whose voice quality betrays hidden depths and holds manifest richness. In partnership with Ryan Wigglesworth (who directed and played the piano part Mozart originally wrote for himself), the piece was poised and elegantly phrased, with a controlled burst of passion for ‘Stelle barbare …’ and a degree of agitation perceptible in the final stanza (and some fiercer wind playing in its reprise).

More Mozart followed, keeping the chamber orchestra sized team of strings for his Symphony no. 34 (K338). It’s intellectual weight is in the first movement, which was taken at a sober pace for vivace, allowing for crisply articulated lines, some moments of foreboding and a grand gesture to end with. Perhaps Ryan Wigglesworth was seeking impact and profundity in the slow movement, too, among its graceful melodic shapes and occasional harmonic surprises, but I’m not sure there was much there to be found. The finale – an overture in all but name, with an ear-worm of a main theme – produced even and efficiently busy string playing from the Hallé, led by Paul Barritt.

Then it was time for Mahler. Symphony no. 4 is considered one of his most ‘approachable’, on account of its gentle melodies and cheerful themes associated with the Des Knaben Wunderhorn song that concludes the work, and in this reading it began all grace and gradual transition, with skillfully balanced textures and contrasts of woodwind tone the most telling aspect of the playing.

But of course there is something more macabre to come, and it made itself more apparent in the playfulness of the second movement, the symphony’s scherzo. Ryan Wigglesworth followed all the score’s directions to the letter, with never any additional stroke of drama. There was warmth from the horns in chorus and silvery beauty from the strings in the long slow movement, with peace and goodwill its dominant aspect, even in the ‘surprise’ gesture at its close, which was neat if not exactly startling.

Joanne Lunn returned to sing the solo of ‘Das himmlische Leben’ in the final movement, with beautiful pianissimo and a lovely portamento for St Ursula. The movement’s last defiance was an emphatic blast at the repetition of the opening theme of the whole work – a nice touch.

    

                                     

Ryan Wigglesworth and Joann Lunn

Review of BBC Philharmonic concert (Brett Dean, Sally Beamish, Beethoven and Elgar)

The BBC Philharmonic plunged into music of the 21^st century on Saturday at the Bridgewater HalHall, with Simone Young conducting and Jonathan Biss their piano soloist.

(It was balanced with Beethoven and Elgar, but more of that later).

Brett Dean’s Testament, in its 2008 revision for orchestra, was a stimulating beginning. It’s inspired by Beethoven’s ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ – the unsent letter in which he grappled with thoughts of suicide (‘Testament’ in this context = a will, to be read after one’s death) but resolved to pursue his calling as a musician in spite of encroaching deafness.

The composer’s description itemizes a three-stage process of ‘leave-taking, an acceptance and a fresh start’, and that’s certainly mirrored in the music. It was played with care and considerable precision, Yuri Torchinsky in the leader’s chair of the Phil.

The other novelty – Sally Beamish’s Piano Concerto no. 3, ‘City Stanzas’ – was premiered in January this year and written (at Jonathan Biss’s request) explicitly to ‘partner’ Beethoven’s first piano concerto. Beamish says it was affected by the political situation in the UK and USA as she composed it last year, and that it’s ‘darkly sardonic’ in all three movements. I have the impression that its concept changed as she worked on it, and that the intention to write something about urban landscapes took on grimmer aspects without completely extinguishing the more light-hearted aspects which she may have had in mind originally.

Its structure follows that of the Beethoven concerto, with the marching rhythms of its opening turned quite militaristic and grotesque, and its ‘second subject’ making a strong and near-lyrical impression, though with heavy tread. The slow movement’s bleak sound, with gloomy chords from the piano and lugubrious woodwind solos, is a real lament for something lost. The finale catches Beethoven’s lightness and wit – a touch of dance band music included – but ends with a good deal more anger than he put in: a testament to 2016’s politics, I guess.

Jonathan Biss played the solo part with love and expertise, and the BBC Philharmonic backed him all the way. In the actual Beethoven Piano concerto no. 1 (which preceded the Beamish concerto), we had a stylistic mix, with the orchestra’s beginning in attempts to inject lightness and classical articulation to their sound but reverting more to their tried-and-tested tutti quality as time went on. Jonathan Biss was a model of classical decorum, but added telling passion and drama in the course of the first movement – almost as if a new music was being invented before our very eyes. The slow movement had a poised solo with muscular accompaniment.

The concert ended with Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Variations. The Phil, of course, can play this with their eyes shut, and the accent in some places was again on muscularity, with a big finish that brought an enthusiastic reception. It was in the quieter and gentler movements, however, that their best qualities came out.

Review of Hallé performance of Shostakovich Symphony no. 4

The most substantial of Sir Mark Elder’s three opening programmes with the Hallé for the 2017-18 season came last (after an Opus One set and a Thursday concert), on Saturday, as a ‘Hallé Collection’ evening.

Unusually, it was a ‘Beyond the Score’ night, with a single work in focus, illustrated and illuminated first by a film-plus-actors sequence, with musical extracts played by the Orchestra and Sir Mark, and then the full piece done ‘straight’, after the interval.

These presentations, devised by Gerard McBurney for the Chicago Symphony, have been used by the Hallé twice before – the ‘New World’ symphony and the Enigma Variations being the subject-matter. This was altogether weightier historical subject matter: Shostakovich’s Symphony no.4.

In fact there’s so much to be said about the fourth symphony – withdrawn from the public on the eve of its première in 1936, in the wake of the ‘muddle instead of music’ campaign against Shostakovich (most probably directly inspired by Stalin) and never heard until December 1961 – that contextualizing it fully, even with abundant clips from old Soviet newsreels and projections of contemporary posters, with excerpts from letters and speeches by key players in the drama – was bound to be an impossible task.

The printed concert programme, striving for background to the background, gave us much information but didn’t explain whose voices we were hearing or what the origins of the clips were. So it was an impressionistic glimpse of an alien and terrible time that came across: powerful if not informative, and veering towards a message that certain parts of the work were ‘about’ such things as factory output, poverty and deprivation, sport and recreation, home and family, and so on.

In fact the music spoke more clearly when it was ‘about’ nothing but itself. And that was in the second half, as Sir Mark piloted the orchestra through a performance that seized and maintained tension from the outset. The fourth is a massive, sprawling symphony that seems like Mahler’s constructions in some respects, employs an orchestra of the size he would have liked, and uses its potential for massive effects and chamber-music-like interludes in a somewhat similar way.

One challenge of performing it is to maintain a continuing musicality, particularly through the long first movement – as Günther Herbig did when he conducted it with the BBC Philharmonic for the Hallé/Phil Shostakovich cycle in 2010. As then, there were outstanding solos from the wind instruments along with bitingly satirical episodes, and Elder’s string section has a silky tenderness that fits the mood of the quieter music in both the first two movements beautifully.

And Elder found a trudgingly determined pace for the funereal (and Mahlerian, if you think of his first symphony) tune of the slow movement, fatalistic yet determined, with incredible intensity and wonderful lyricism alongside it. This was truly the emotional heart of the work.

By contrast, the finale bounced along with heady optimism and dashed into its Keystone Cops, clown-style sequence with zest. The big (mock?) peroration was powerful in the extreme – making the doom-laden epitaph to it all the more harrowing.

It was a great performance. The one question I’d have liked to have considered was this: when Shostakovich wrote the fifth symphony, as ‘a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism’, had he really undergone a change of heart musically?

Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé

Opera North's 'Little Greats'

Opera North’s season of ‘The Little Greats’ is bringing six short operas to The Lowry, in pairs, from November 15 to 18, with a Saturday matinee of one also available on the 18th. Thanks to the generosity of Opera North, I saw them all in Leeds, in slightly different combinations from the Salford ones, so this is a preview/review.

First off on this side of the Pennines are the classic pair of Italian ‘verismo’ tragedies, Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, only in this case Pagliacci comes first. On the Thursday it’s Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, followed by a rarity from Janáček - Osud (meaning Destiny). On the Friday two lighter, shorter works take the stage with Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Trial by Jury by Gilbert & Sullivan, and on the Saturday L’Enfant et les Sortilèges is repeated in the afternoon, and then Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana recur in the evening.

Pagliacci, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges and Osud were all originally slated to be conducted by Aleksandar Markovic when he was the company’s music director. He left somewhat abruptly in the summer, and Tobias Ringborg, already part of the season’s conducting team, has stepped up to the rostrum for Pagliacci (he was already down for Cavalleria Rusticana and Trouble in Tahiti) and Martin André has taken over L’Enfant and Osud. Oliver Rundell conducts Trial by Jury.

In the event, the entire enterprise is a great example of Opera North’s ensemble philosophy, with principal singers in one production popping up in support roles in another and chorus members frequently stepping into the limelight, and it seems only natural that set and lighting design for all six productions is by Charles Edwards, and there’s a common front cloth showing the assembled team – directors, performers, chorus and all – in a group photograph.

Edwards directs Pagliacci, and his reinterpretation of the ‘strolling players’ story uses the idea of an opera company in rehearsal. So the performers are themselves – concept photos of the other operas are visible on the rehearsal room walls, and the chorus are first heard sitting down practising their notes. Props that will recur in other Little Greats shows are simply lying around.

It’s not so much ‘On with the motley’ as off with it, most of the time – though Peter Auty, as Canio the tragic clown, gets to wear his face-paint and wig for the ‘final run-through’. Nedda (Elin Pritchard) is having an affair with the conductor, Silvio (Phillip Rhodes).

It all begins with Tonio (Richard Burkhard) giving the prologue, suitably adapted, in English (‘You’ll see a company rehearsing an opera’), though the story itself is sung in Italian – until in the final line Tonio reverts to English to shout that ‘The performance is over’. It’s almost a motto piece for the entire series (though I hope this verismo does not extend to real stabbings behind the scenes at Opera North).

Cavalleria Rusticana is a masterpiece that sprang full formed from its creator Mascagni’s youth and which, arguably, he never excelled. It’s been popular for excerpting from the day it was written (Charles Hallé conducted the much-loved Intermezzo in concert in his later years), and that, the Easter Hymn and the Brindisi (drinking song) pop up everywhere.

It has the reputation of being the first ‘verismo’ opera, with a degree of truth to real life that the art form had never created until then. It is true to its title of ‘melodrama’, and, if any opera deserves the reputation of being a shabby little shocker, this is surely it.

Karolina Sofulak’s production shifts it in both space and time from 19^th century Sicily to Poland in the 1970s – Catholicism is still the background, but it’s in the ‘greyness’ and scarcities of a subjugated society, as well as the treatment of young women, that she sees parallels. The only clear locale is a shop, and there is no visual equivalent of a church, just a wooden panel with a cross on it – for some reason, the scorned Santuzza’s former lover Turiddù (who is ultimately to die for his seduction of Alfio’s wife, Lola) climbs on to it with arms outstretched like a crucifix at one point, though I couldn’t see why.

The great virtue of this offering is that it has the same two outstanding women principals as does Osud: Giselle Allen is Santuzza, and Rosalind Plowright is Lucia (Turiddù’s mother). Turiddù is Jonathan Stoughton, a young British tenor with a big voice making his only contribution to The Little Greats with this role, and Phillip Rhodes is a highly convincing Alfio – we see him as a decent bloke and possessor of the only decent little car in town, driven to vengeful murder as he realizes his marriage is utterly adulterated.

Annabel Arden directs L’Enfant et les Sortilèges in a manner that, like her other best work for Opera North, is faithful to the score and the book but full of imaginative touches. The Child (Wallis Giunta) has his hand-held electronic device to engage his attention at the outset, rather than listen to his Mother (Ann Taylor): what youngster today wouldn’t? Fflur Wyn, Quirijn de Lang, Katie Bray, John Graham Hall, John Savournin, Lorna James, Kathryn Walker, Victoria Sharp and Rachel J Mosley complete the cast – the sort of team only an ensemble enterprise of this kind could provide for Ravel’s 45-minute fantasy.

It’s definitely on with the motley in the costume department, as chairs, teapot, fire, wallpaper figures, cats, squirrel, storybook princess and the rest all come to life, following Colette’s delicious libretto. The story, with its hints at adolescent awakenings alongside dawning awareness of the need to help one’s fellow-creatures as a child grows up, in Annabel Arden’s version retains an innocence that’s wholly appropriate.

Osud is an early work by Janáček but requires considerable resources: there are 26 named roles, it’s in three acts and takes an hour and a half – in short, a compact opera in its own right.

It gives a fascinating insight to its composer’s own psyche, as it’s a tale he concocted himself about a composer writing an opera in which his own life and love are the inspiration. So it’s a story within a story (almost a leitmotiv of the Little Greats season), and another aspect of the Janáček characteristic of writing about emotions he’s acutely felt already.

Annabel Arden is again director, and she presents the scenario pretty straight. She’s borrowed an idea from those who have staged this rare piece in recent years in the Czech Republic, which is to begin in the present day. She shows Živný, the composer (John Graham-Hall), supervising an exam in his music conservatory, and then runs the first Act as a 20-years-ago flashback in his mind, followed by the second Act as a 15-years-ago flashback, returning to the present for Act Three, where the exam ends and the students ask him about his opera. But she doesn’t change the order of the notes.

The opera is sung in English, but with surtitles also, which with Janáček’s orchestrations helps.

There is a particularly strong cast. John Graham-Hall brilliantly sang the title role in Opera North’s The Adventures of Mr Brouček a few years ago; Giselle Allen (who’s done wonderful work for Opera North in the past) is Míla, the object of Živný’s passions; and Rosalind Plowright is her mother. Peter Auty, Richard Burkhard, Dean Robinson and Ann Taylor are there, too, and the other roles are supplied from Opera North’s multi-talented chorus.

Trouble in Tahiti and Trial by Jury contrast with the bigger emotions of some of the other ‘Greats’. They come from different eras – Leonard Bernstein’s from his early years as a composer in the 1950s, well before West Side Story, but clearly showing some of the knacks that would go to make that later masterpiece – Gilbert & Sullivan’s first extant collaboration from the late-ish 19^th century but before the polished gems of HMS Pinafore and it successors.

Each has a claim to attention, though, not just because some of their creators’ skills were embryonic when they were written, but because some were already fully formed. (Bernstein, in particular, was already a master of the ‘ear-worm’ of a simple melodic motif that can tug at your heart-strings as it returns and is quoted from one number to another). Both works carry a degree of social satire of their times – and in these productions both get treatments which connect, albeit tangentially, to the ‘behind the scenes’ or ‘story within the story’ themes of Pagliacci in its new guise.

In Matthew Eberhardt’s production  of Trouble in Tahiti we are in a radio studio, as the Trio who act is a kind of Greek chorus in the score do it to make the links and jingles of the format. The scenes unfolded are of a husband and wife who are growing apart and a child who suffers as a result – catching the unease the fifties brought about growing post-war affluence and soullessness.

In John Savournin’s Trial by Jury it’s a more thoroughgoing modernization of the G&S original, which may not be to everyone’s taste, though the audience I was part of loved it. The period seems to be the 1930s, and the overture is obliterated by a supposed flouncy TV showbiz reporter (borrowing the idea from Singing’ in the Rain) outside the courtroom, establishing the re-interpretation of the plot as that of a jilted film star suing for her offended feelings but really just hyping up the publicity for her latest picture. Women were rare on juries in the Thirties, but Savournin has several of them, and a woman as the Plaintiff’s Counsel, rather than the baritone Sullivan wrote for, so the whole thing is even more topsy-turvy than usual.

Apart from that, it’s much as G&S wrote it, with the dotty old judge (Jeremy Peaker) the centre of most amusement. Glamorous (and RNCM-trained) Amy Freston is The Plaintiff. This showbizzy kind of style is her ideal milieu, and I’m happy to recall that I first heard her lovely voice singing another work by Sullivan, back when she was still at ballet school in London.

Pagliacci - Peter Auty as Canio and Elin Pritchard as Nedda (Credit Tristram Kenton)

Cavalleria rusticana - Katie Bray as Lola, Phillip Rhodes as Alfio and Giselle Allen as Santuzza with the Chorus of Opera North (Credit Robert Workman)

L'enfant et les sortilèges - Quirijn de Lang as Grandfather Clock and Wallis Giunta as the Child (Credit Tristram Kenton)

Trial by Jury - Amy Freston as The Plaintiff and Jeremy Peaker as The Learned Judge (Credit Robert Workman)

Review of the Basel Symphony Orchestra at the Bridgewater Hall

The Bridgewater Hall’s international orchestra series opened with a visit from the Basel Symphony Orchestra, with its Blackburn-lad (and clearly proud of it) chief conductor, Ivor Bolton.

They may not be one of those that immediately spring to mind in lists of the world’s top ten orchestras, but the Basel band have a sound of their own, based – at least on this showing – on 40 strings only, with their four double basses standing to play and digging their bows in to give a firm underpinning to a bright tutti. The strings are also capable of making a murmur of a pianissimo and everything in between, so they made the most of the hall’s acoustic properties.

I have the impression that Bolton has schooled them carefully for this tour, and the Lustspiel-Ouvertüre by Busoni, lightweight though it might be thought in some ways, was a demonstration of neat ensemble, incisive articulation, beautiful woodwind tone and a glittering climax: a very good start.

Saint-Saëns’ Cello concerto was not as pristine in every part orchestrally, but its great virtue was the playing of the soloist, Sol Gabetta. She was last here in 2015, with the Dresden Philharmonic, giving a glorious interpretation of the Elgar concerto, and she did not disappoint this time. Her tone carried through the accompanying textures with ease; she could reduce it to a perfectly controlled whisper, and is adept at letting a quiet phrase hang in the air almost to the point of extinction – in short, a delight to hear. Ivor Bolton contributed to the total effect with imaginative handling of the more cliché-like lurches of style in the writing (with Saint-Saëns you never quite know whether you’ll get Russian misery, Mendelssohnian gossamer or Schumannesque outbursts, but they’re all there).

Her encore piece, Fauré’s Élégie (for which two horns who otherwise enjoyed an easy night were brought on stage), is almost a miniature concerto and endeared her still more to her listeners.

The meat of the evening was Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7. Hardly a novelty, of course, and many of us have probably heard what we consider definitive performances of it in the past. I found Ivor Bolton’s approach overdid the portentousness and heavy drama a bit (the opening sostenuto almost lost the will to live by its end) and though well enunciated didn’t capture all the dance-like qualities that are there to be found.

The scherzo was instead vigorous, loud and proud, with some rasping horn tone to emphasize the point (but more deathly pauses). And the finale was a solid mix, with Bolton determinedly stirring the bowl. A pretty thick raclette, in fact.

But it wowed the crowd, as did their extra bit of Fauré – the Nocturne from his music to Shylock.

Sol Gabetta