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We kick a batch astir performance halls successful the UK. The acoustics of the Barbican, Royal Festival Hall and Royal Albert Hall; the practicality of Usher Hall and St George’s Bristol; those seats astatine Snape Maltings, and that foyer astatine Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. But bash we truly person it truthful bad?
As Manchester’s Hallé opens its play with a solemnisation of 30 years of the Bridgewater Hall, it’s a bully infinitesimal to retrieve what we’ve gained successful the 3 decades since a car parkland became Britain’s champion acoustic. A flagship London hallway whitethorn inactive beryllium a fantasy, but with Gateshead’s Foster-designed Glasshouse, Saffron Hall, Kings Place and Milton Court each opening their doors since 2000, it’s hard to consciousness despondent.
The Hallé and main conductor Kahchun Wong celebrated their home’s day with a large caller committee – James MacMillan’s sixth symphony. After a rhythm of symphonies that seemed to enactment up to the choral epic of 2019’s fifth, the sixth feels similar a caller beginning.
There are echoes of some Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide successful a enactment that looks simultaneously successful and out: inward to the household members who inspired 4 short, expositionary movements – the cardinal to the chaotic parade that follows – and outward to the composers who inspired the 5th movement’s consequent textural and ceremonial manipulations.
The effect is disorienting. There’s a pastoral, folk-inspired trio of flutes, a buzzing swarm of muted brass, a peal of gongs, bells and bowed vibraphone, and a yearning solo cello. And, lasting isolated from the rest, a Debussyean duet for harp and piano. How are we to assemble the fragments? Optimistically, MacMillan and an incisive Wong look to urge. Low woodwind and trombones (together with a nagging siren) whitethorn effort to propulsion america under, but surging life-force successful brass-gilded climaxes pushes valiantly back. Tempests rage, but the still, tiny dependable of the alto flute mildly persists.
What a clever prime to framework the symphony with a uncommon show of Liszt’s compact epic Les Préludes (brass resplendent successful the communicative highs, strings fretting convulsively successful the lows) and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5: battles, both, for man’s endurance and supremacy. Perhaps egged connected by this cumulative energy, we got a much robust “Emperor” from soloist Stephen Hough than usual, his opening cadenza flinging down a gauntlet gleefully plucked up by Wong and his players successful a heroic duel that climaxed successful an exuberant, close-combat finale.
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