Hallé Orchestra reviews
Vaughan Williams: Job; Songs of Travel
Debussy: Images for Orchestra etc
Wagner: Das Rheingold
Sibelius: Symphonies Nos 4 & 6
Momento Immobile: Arias by Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4; Chopin: Sonata No. 2; Ballade No. 4
Debussy: Trois Nocturnes, etc
Sir Mark Elder conducts Vaughan Williams's Symphonies Nos 4 & 6 with the Hallé orchestra
Vaughan Williams’s ferocious Fourth Symphony was first performed in 1935, four years before the outbreak of World WarII. The stormy Sixth was completed two years after the War. Whether or not Vaughan Williams conceived these symphonies as ‘tracts for troubled times’, they certainly sound like that now. The urgency, the mixture of anguish, violence and desolation feels as relevant today as it ever did.
Sunwook Kim performs Brahm's Piano Concertos Nos 1 and 2 with the Hallé
Performing these Herculean works end-to-end takes stamina. Sunwook Kim and the Hallé launch into the first of these as if pacing themselves carefully, but it also may reflect the tortuousness of the First Concerto’s gestation. As Anthony Burton’s liner note points out, it began life in 1854 as the first movement of a sonata for two pianos, then was recast as the first movement of a symphony, with its final form – which Brahms went on tinkering with after its first performance – only emerging in 1859.
Sir John Barbirolli conducts Handel's Messiah with the Hallé Orchestra
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Heavy tempos alternate with moments of inspiration in this recording made live for BBC broadcast. The two choirs respond impressively to Barbirolli’s direction. One for specialists only. Terry Blain |
The Hallé conducted by Mark Elder perform choral works by Bax and Elgar
Laurence Binyon’s texts of The Spirit of England have the kind of war-memorial sensibility that divides opinion today. It was a sensibility that appealed deeply to Elgar himself, as to millions of his compatriots; and it drew from him some vintage musical material, particularly in ‘To Women’, the second of the three sections. The one deficiency in an otherwise memorable Hallé live performance relates to the work’s only soloist: Rachel Nicholls’s soprano voice, for all its beautiful tone and line, sounds uncertain when expanding above mid-volume.
The Hallé perform Sibelius Symphonies Nos 5 & 7
The Hallé’s new recordings reaffirm its thriving Sibelian tradition, matching Sir Mark Elder’s measured, often massive readings with playing excellent even in these predominantly live performances. In the Fifth Symphony Elder again leans away from the high-Romantic, Tchaikovskian Sibelius towards the spacious and structural, cool and detailed.
Hallé Orchestra play Gounod
Hallé - Vaughan Williams - A Sea Symphony
Birtwistle: Night's Black Bird
Birtwistle may be a musical bogeyman for some, but these are among the most powerful orchestral pieces of recent years. Both The Shadow of Night and Night’s Black Bird are related to Dürer’s engraving Melencolia 1, which inspired a work with that title in the mid 1970s. Each of them, too, is musically underpinned by a song by that master of melancholy, John Dowland.