Manchester
Kieron Tyler
Edinburgh’s Rezillos were booked to play Middlesbrough’s Rock Garden on Wednesday 14 September 1977. “I Can’t Stand my Baby,” their debut single, had been issued in July and they were on the road subsequent to its release, positive music press reviews and regular spins from John Peel. Their humour-laced, Day-Glo art-punk was making waves.In Middlesbrough, the bill was filled out by local band Lice? – their name taken from a cautionary poster about pubic lice – and Macclesfield/Salford outfit Warsaw, who’d had a line-up change the previous month when their drummer Steve Brotherdale left. His Read more ...
Robert Beale
If ever more evidence were needed of Sir Mark Elder’s untiring zest for exploration and love of the thrill of live opera performance, it was this ground-breaking collaborative event with Opera Rara – a performance coupled to a new studio recording of the original version of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.It was probably one of the greatest triumphs of Elder’s near quarter-century as musical director of the Hallé, with a mainly youthful cast, as perfectly suited to their roles as could be hoped for, singing superbly for him, the Chorus of Opera North and the Royal Northern College of Music Opera Read more ...
Robert Beale
For the second big concert of his “residency” with the Hallé this season, Thomas Adès chose one major piece of his own, rather than a set of shorter ones. Tevot, a 21-minute one-movement work written for the Berlin Philharmonic 18 years ago, requires a huge assembly of performers, so it was probably too good a chance to miss once having taken the decision to do Tippett’s Triple Concerto, which is pretty lavish in that regard, too.Or was it the other way round? Whatever, the Bridgewater Hall’s stage extension was needed to get everyone on board – and while they were about it, Adès and the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Brazil-born conductor Simone Menezes, known for imaginative and pioneering concert presentation, presided over a striking and illuminating programme shared by Manchester’s Kantos Chamber Choir and Manchester Camerata, with the star quality of Karen Cargill the icing on the cake.The association between the youthful choir (founded and directed by Ellie Slorach) and orchestra is still relatively new but looks set to lead to great things. In this case there was an intriguing link between several of the pieces on offer and an understated but carefully realised staging: an assembly of unlit candles Read more ...
Robert Beale
The overture to Rossini’s La scala di seta is a frequent and familiar concert piece – not so the opera itself.It’s a light and frothy one-acter from 1812, just under two hours long including an interval, a farsa in Italian opera terms, and designed and presented with much and opening and closing of doors and comic business in Robert Chevara’s production (design by Jess Curtis).There are just six roles: I saw the “blue” cast of this double-cast show. It calls for talent beyond simple singing ability in every one of those roles, and it seems that with Chevara’s help the RNCM’s performers have Read more ...
Robert Beale
There was a common factor in the superficially disparate elements of this Hallé concert, and it wasn’t just the fact that both soloist and conductor were female. It was an experience of the colours of the music and a sense of enjoyment of what orchestral music offers.The conductor was Kristiina Poska, chief conductor of the Flanders Symphony Orchestra and herself Estonian, with a firm track record in concert hall and opera house. She has a reputation for her interpretations of Sibelius and brought her reading of his First Symphony to this podium, but first she offered us Brits something Read more ...
Robert Beale
Just a few days after the Hallé’s Bruckner 8, the BBC Philharmonic weighed in with his Seventh Symphony for its Manchester audience. We’re all getting a lot of Bruckner in his 200th anniversary year, and this was a wise choice, being one of his shorter creations in the genre – only about an hour and 10 minutes in playing time – and containing some of his best melodic ideas and rhythmic inventions.It also benefits from the tonal qualities of an orchestra at the top of its game to realise the richness of the textures he created, and this was amply fulfilled in the sound of the Philharmonic, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder conducted Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 for his first time in last night’s Hallé series concert, a reflection of his untiring exploration of new territory even as he nears the end of his time as the orchestra’s music director.So this was quite a ground-breaking event. And for the audience it was like seeing an old master in vivid colours after restoration.The concert began with the Hallé Youth Choir singing Bruckner’s Os Justi motet, conducted by their own director Stuart Overington – an astonishingly good bit of unaccompanied singing which stayed dead in tune and reached its own Read more ...
Robert Beale
Placing the UK premiere of Katherine Balch’s whisper concerto (for cello and orchestra) after Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 was probably an inspired idea from the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Joshua Weilerstein.In its day, the so-called “Military” Symphony was not only striking on account of its use of novel instrumental effects – the “Turkish music” sound of triangle, cymbals and big drum for one, and clarinets (heard, military-band style, alongside oboes and flute) for another – but the clever and comical way they were brought into a context that was otherwise seemingly orthodox and almost Read more ...
Robert Beale
Back on home ground, the Hallé begin 2024 in Manchester with a repeated programme. I heard the first of three performances this week. It includes one piece they played only 10 days ago on a tour in Spain with the orchestra’s new principal conductor designate, Kahchun Wong. This time, however, the conductor was Alondra de la Parra (main picture), whose experience of working with young people was immediately apparent as she struck up a relationship with the parties of youngsters in the audience, talking to them about the music before the playing began.Two of the works – Debussy’s Prélude à Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shaun Ryder is now known mostly for being Shaun Ryder, via any random TV programme that will pay him a couple of quid. In this light, his musical achievements have lost some of their shine over the decades. But, if given the chance, a couple of those Happy Mondays albums and the first Black Grape album still own the room. It’s 30 years since that first Black Grape album, It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah (they weren’t!), but the band's two albums since have both been, well, pretty good, actually. And the same can be said for their fourth.The band now consists of just Ryder and his old Read more ...
Robert Beale
John Storgårds found himself literally facing both ways for the third item on the BBC Philharmonic’s programme on Saturday: towards the audience, with one music stand in front of him, as he played the solo violin role in Sebastian Fagerlund’s Helena’s Song, and frequently turning 180 degrees, with the full score in view, to conduct at the same time.It was one of two BBC commissioned works (in this case co-commissioned with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra) receiving their UK premieres in the concert – the other was the rather longer Shades of Unbroken Dreams by James Lee III, a piano Read more ...