Halle/Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
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Your support makes all the difference.With the theme of "Scattered Sparks" running like a powerful current through the Hallé Orchestra's season, there's every reason to expect some highly charged performances from its music director, Mark Elder, in the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, and beyond. The first composer to be featured under this banner – which will deal with the artistic response to the Russian Revolution and the two 20th-century world wars – was, not surprisingly, Shostakovich. And the work, even less surprisingly given the incredible, heroic background to its composition, was his Leningrad Symphony.
The pictorial images arising from the work's well-documented narrative flashed before us in Elder's deeply considered reading, combining the detail of a chronicler's pen with the zeal of, well, a prophet. But whenever the music threatened to slip into a self-conscious, epic style – especially in the sprawling first movement with its bombastic invasion section – that danger was swept away by the Hallé's urgent playing, raw expressivity seldom at the expense of polish.
As its new associate composer, Colin Matthews is another of the Hallé Orchestra's bright sparks. So let's hear more of his music instead of just the three works programmed this season. In the first performance of his exquisitely coloured scoring of three of Debussy's piano Preludes, Matthews's own voice manages to be evident in these immaculately crafted miniatures with their elusive, understated qualities and extraordinary orchestral sonorities.
Elder's declared intention of making something special of the Hallé Choir, joined for a performance of Verdi's Requiem by Leeds Festival Chorus, was clear in a thrilling performance of extraordinary wide dynamic contrast. Is the Requiem an opera dressed up in church vestments? You bet, on this occasion anyway, the flames of hell fanned up with unerring dramatic instinct and the often inward, unaccompanied passages illuminated with an uninhibited fervour.
Further details of the Hallé Orchestra Season on 0161-237 7008
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