Manchester
Robert Beale
The Hallé Orchestra has a good track record when it comes to bringing in young talents with exciting prospects, and its 2019-20 season begins with the newly appointed Finnish chief conductor designate of the Oslo Philharmonic, Klaus Mäkelä, on the rostrum, and the young Icelander Víkungur Ólafsson as solo pianist. The bespectacled, besuited pair look almost as if they might have stepped off the set of The League of Gentlemen, but their music making was top-class and, in their shared Beethoven concerto in particular, impressive indeed.It opened with Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Manchester International Piano Competition produced three outstanding performances over the two evenings of its finals: the winner of the first prize was Ilia Lomtatidze, from Georgia, with second prize awarded jointly to the Italian and French pianists Luca Grianti and Oscar Colliar.This was the sixth event of its kind, its full name the Manchester International Concerto Competition for Young Pianists. Note the words "Concerto" and "Young" there: it’s not just another piano solo tournament. The maximum age for entrants is 22, and they all have to be capable of playing a concerto – which Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the late 1950s, a photo technician from Salford suddenly became “the most famous teenager in Britain”. Shelagh Delaney was 19 when she sent the script of A Taste of Honey to the radical director Joan Littlewood. Within a matter of weeks, in May 1958, Theatre Royal Stratford East had staged it – sensationally, to a welcome that mixed bouquets and brickbats. The fearless youngster from the cosmopolitan slum neighbourhood of Ordsall had already begun “to change the way working-class women are treated and represented in Britain”. With its two generations of single mothers, its relaxed Read more ...
David Nice
Berlioz's most intimate oratorio certainly isn't just for Christmas – but, given its scale, is it right for the Proms? Certainly in anniversary year we'd hoped for something bigger: the Requiem, turned to mush earlier this year in St Paul's Cathedral, could have been made for the Albert Hall, with brass bands placed at the four points of the compass. But this venue can do strangely moving things with the small scale, given caring interpreters, and that was equally true of the four late-night Bach cantatas from the eight voices and small ensemble of Solomon's Knot.What choirs and players we Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Ben Gernon is only 30 (and looks about ten years younger) but has been Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic since 2017. He really impressed in last night’s Prom but, after an exciting overture, things fell away a bit with an under-nourished Rachmaninov concerto and an enjoyable if not faultless second half of Tchaikovsky.The first item augured very well. Malcolm Arnold’s Overture Peterloo is an odd piece, but gripping. Written in 1967 it shows two sides to the composer at once: first an effortless melodist but also a musical experimenter. The first two minutes have a filmic, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Who would have thought that a one-narrator show, mainly about projects that never got off the ground, would turn out to be such a satisfying evening’s entertainment?Phelim McDermott, writer, co-director and performer in Tao of Glass, is undoubtedly the star. He tells us about growing up in Blackley, Manchester, and his early experiences of showbiz – some in the very place where we are sitting, the Royal Exchange Theatre. (The Norman Tebbit test of being a true Manc, incidentally, is whether you know how to say "Blackley" correctly: Phel’s the genuine article and we love him for it.)He says Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Thirty-three years ago, at Manchester's Festival of the Tenth Summer, I fumed that New Order had been given top billing over The Smiths, much to the mirth of a couple of reviewers of this very parish. History has proved me wrong, obviously. So, to Italy, and a modest-sized and relatively modern piazza (Napoleonic) in beguiling, ancient Lucca. To see two of Manchester’s most revered bands. This time I don’t have to choose sides.It couldn’t be further from Salford, Macclesfield and Bury in every sense. A balmy evening breeze rustles through the leaves and brings welcome relief from the day Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ivo van Hove’s reputation precedes his work as a rumble of thunder goes before a storm. The Manchester International Festival, intensely proud to have on board the man some see as the most original theatre director around, has presented the UK premiere of his 2014 show The Fountainhead, even as memories are fresh in the mind of Van Hove's West End All About Eve and The Damned at the Barbican and he gears up for a major new Broadway revival at the end of the year of West Side Story.First seen at Van Hove's home base on the continent just over five years ago, this is a marathon of a Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two hundred years ago next month, an assembly of around 60,000 people gathered on St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to protest about their lack of political representation. Speakers addressed the crowd, bands played and banners were carried.The local magistrates didn’t like it and gave orders for the crowd to be dispersed by the mounted yeomanry, backed up by the hussars, who drew their sabres and charged. Eighteen people were killed and hundreds injured. That was the "Peterloo Massacre", named after the Battle of Waterloo, only four years before. The centre of its site became that of the Free Read more ...
Robert Beale
As end-of-term concerts go, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is a biggie. In fact it’s hard to imagine any place of secondary education where they would even contemplate it.But for Chetham’s School of Music, the "Symphony of a Thousand" was a doable task, and for Stephen Threlfall’s last public appearance for Chetham’s as director of music it became a thrilling triumph. They’re only part of the way through celebrating 50 years of Chetham’s existence in 2019 – this was number 32 in a 50-concert series running through the year – but of those 50 it will probably be remembered the longest.Recorded for Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic have given memorable accounts of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 4 in Manchester before – notably conducted by Günther Herbig in 2010 and by John Storgårds in 2014 – but surely none as harrowingly grim as under Mark Wigglesworth this time. A welcome foil to it, then, were Mahler’s five dream-like Rückert-Lieder, forming the 20-minute first section of the concert programme, and winsomely sung by Roderick Williams.He is a master of so many vocal genres, and in these poem settings demonstrated a surprising variety of expression within the confines of their superficially simple Read more ...
Robert Beale
John Wilson conducted Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester just over a year ago with great success, in a programme of music from the 1940s. This time it was the very different, troubled Fourth, and the context was British composition.Two contrasting masterpieces from the 1930s made up the bulk of it: Walton’s Violin Concerto (premiered in 1939) and the symphony (first heard in 1935). They make a remarkable contrast. Wilson began with Arnold Bax’s November Woods – suitable enough, as VW dedicated his symphony to Bax – but it’s the product of another world, Read more ...