CityLife

Hallé: Britten, Strauss, Shostakovich

MADE FOR THE BIG OCCASION: Sir Mark

SIR Mark Elder said – a while ago – that he wanted to make every Hallé concert to feel a big occasion, and in the 10th season of his incumbency he is working to achieve that harder than ever.

This was the opener of the Thursday series, the ‘flagship’ as it is often known, and for it you get a bigger strings strength than in many others.

That didn’t apply in the first half, though, which began with Britten’s Variations On A Theme Of Frank Bridge and went on to Richard’s Strauss’s second horn concerto.

With Shostakovich’s fifth symphony to end (and that was with the big string sound) it’s clear there’s a theme hiding in that programme. Or a chain of references and comparisons.

The Britten and Shostakovich were both first played in 1937; the Strauss not all that much later. It, though, seems the most old-fashioned; the Britten a sign of things to come. The shadows of oppression and war hover behind each of these pieces.

The playing was – it’s almost a matter of routine now – bold and brilliant. The livelier movements of the Britten all had that in common, one after another. It was very much a young man’s music, in Sir Mark’s reading. Only at the very end did the latent poignancy of the music come to the fore.

Noble soloists

Richard Watkins was the noble soloist in the concerto, and you could not get a better.

His solo in the central movement was spun gold and his virtuosity in the acrobatics of the finale extraordinary.

But it’s a nostalgic piece in essence, and its mood was caught without sentimentality but with effect.

In the symphony we heard something of a revelation. The Hallé’s conductor has been delving deep into this classic, and popular, work, and has some thought-provoking things to say about it. Some he shared verbally as an introduction, but the important thing was the playing that followed.

His approach to the second movement – often seen as a brittle, sardonic scherzo – was to make it more deliberate, at times brutal, than usual.

His emphasis in the third – the slow lament that stirred people to tears on its first hearing – was on purity of tone (especially in the violin sound at the beginning, and in the lovely solos on oboe, clarinet and flute). The finale was solid and self-assertive, neither a conventional jollification nor a sly send-up of one.

In sum, it was a monumentalisation of the piece. It can take it: all great music can yield surprising facets, and since sound quality in the Bridgewater Hall can be quite overwhelming, it doesn’t take much projection to create that effect. I missed its subtler aspects.