Jonathan Bloxham makes his debut as conductor with the Hallé Orchestra in the third of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts on film. It’s a poetry-connected programme in several respects and features poet laureate Simon Armitage reading both his the event horizon (to introduce the whole programme) and Evening (immediately before Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite).The event horizon is engraved in steel on the Hallé St Peter’s centre (pictured below right with Simon Armitage), where the concert was filmed, and reminds us in one way of what we’re missing: do you remember when concerts used to begin “ Read more ...

The second of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts-on-film is scarcely less ground-breaking than the first. But this time we are in the orchestra’s second home, the former church now extended to be Hallé St Peter’s in the regenerated part of Manchester's city centre. The same skilful use of camera techniques to show a socially distanced ensemble, with Sir Mark Elder as conductor and, this time, Roderick Williams as vocal soloist, makes satisfying visuals to go with arresting sound. Despite limited resources in the installed lighting, there’s still effective use of washes of colour in the Read more ...

The seductively breathy Joanna Lumley supplied the voice-over for this hugely entertaining romp through the history of Coronation Street, celebrating “the Diamond Jubilee of the world’s longest-running soap.” Yet wasn’t the uber-posh Lumley, scion of the British Raj, a discordant choice for this long-running saga of Mancunian folk? But of course Lumley herself appeared in Corrie, in a brief run as “the enigmatic Elaine Perkins” in the summer of 1973.Elaine was a fleeting love interest for Ken Barlow, who would become far better known for his violently combustible marriage to Anne Kirkbride’s Read more ...

The Hallé have been slow off the mark, compared with some, in their response to the challenge of concert-giving in the Covid era. But now that they have delivered on the first of their winter season performances, it has clearly been worth the wait. They are offering not merely online musical performances but a set of newly made, highly creative films, watchable on Vimeo, built around the works they’re playing and the sight and sound of them doing so. Not less than a "live" performance, but quite a lot more.In "normal" times, you wouldn’t get as close to musicians in full flow as you do in Read more ...

“Manctopia” sounds like a blissed-out buzzword from the golden years of New Order and Happy Mondays, but in this four-part series (BBC Two) it’s used to describe the explosive redevelopment of Manchester. One of the fastest growing cities in Europe, it has been experiencing a sci-fi-like eruption of skyscrapers and upscale residential properties, and with London prices at astronomical levels, Manchester has been delighting property investors with its lucrative returns. Salford's burgeoning MediaCityUK, now the second home of the BBC, has been a further signifier of the city’s rising prestige. Read more ...

 Sir John Barbirolli – The Complete Warner Recordings (Warner Classics)This month marks the 50th anniversary of Sir John Barbirolli’s death, one of several British conductors who dominated the UK’s post-war record industry. Barbirolli made most of his recordings for EMI and Pye, so this release’s title is a little misleading, Warner Classics not coming into existence until 1991. That’s my sole niggle, as this is a marvellous box set. Superficially pricey, yes, but it contains an eye-popping 109 CDs. That’s enough to keep anyone happily exploring for months. Years, even. Barbirolli’s Read more ...

The lockdown which began in March is now noticeably easing, although in the realm of gigs and festivals things are still nowhere near operative. Nonetheless, theartsdesk is responding to the changes by ceasing our many weeks of New Music Lockdown Specials and looking forward to an increasing amount of actual live events. This week, we can only offer one, alongside plenty of streamed entertainment, but it’s early days. Here’s to the future. Dive in!Supersonic presents SofasonicBirmingham’s Supersonic is one of the only shindigs in Britain’s jammed annual summer festival calendar that truly Read more ...

Are we really past all this? From Ivo van Hove's 2019 polyphony of opinions and reflections down the centuries, so much has gone into the oven on a low heat while more Brits discover that "better together" in the European Union might be a better catchphrase than "take back control". The flames will flare up again as the government finds it has no better way of mastering the Brexit problem than it has the C-19 crisis which has so ruthlessly exposed its unpreparedness. Still, it seems like another world in which questions of European identity were the main issue. But to be honest van Hove's Read more ...

Omer Meir Wellber, who once used to do magic with music for children, pulled a whole set of rabbits out of the hat in his reading of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony on Saturday. Others may make the work's rhythms and melodies alluring through the sheer forward momentum of a steady beat. Not Wellber. The most striking thing about the first two movements, as he directed them, was that the contrast of mystery and vigour embodied in the shapes and dynamics of the music’s rhythm, melody and harmony was also represented in its speed – or rather, speeds.It's a way of conducting Beethoven symphonies that Read more ...

Paul Heaton’s career-spanning compilation The Last King of Pop depicted him crowned and enthroned like a Salford Solomon Burke, or self-aware Michael Jackson. The unique kingdom he has staked out through The Housemartins and The Beautiful South is peopled by the unglamorous and unhip, and secretes bile in bumptiously bouncing, infectious melodies. The return of latter-day South singer Jacqui Abbott for four albums now has commercially shored up his career, and helped define Heaton’s happily married, mostly sober, Greater Manchester-residing middle-age. But though he pays tribute to this Read more ...

Honouring Beethoven in Manchester is a united enterprise, at least between the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic, two symphony orchestras that have worked out a series of Beethoven specials between them. Last night’s Hallé concert even had two conductors – the Hallé’s music director Sir Mark Elder to direct Act Two of Fidelio and the vocal trio with orchestra Tremate, Empi, Tremate, and the Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor Ben Gernon in charge for the Eighth Symphony.There’s a theme here: all of them were (in their final versions) first performed in 1814 – but they come from very different Read more ...

This eight-part mystery from Netflix is based on the titular novel by American writer Harlan Coben, who has formed a production company with Rochdale’s own Nicola Schindler, the production brains behind Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax and many more. The action has been transposed from New Jersey to Manchester – the one in England, not Massachusetts – and a strong and varied British cast does the heavy lifting, but there’s something in the mix that never quite feels right. Maybe it’s that things that seem par for the course in America’s moronic inferno can look hilarious in a homely Read more ...