Concerts devoted to the music of a single composer can be curious affairs. An evening of Stravinsky, for example, might generate a range of works so disparate as to barely seem linked at all. But Ralph Vaughan Williams? His musical fingerprints are so readily identifiable – echoes of Tudor church music, English folksong, modal harmonies, the pastoral, the whole thing touched by the shadow of 20th-century conflict – that one might wonder whether an entire evening of his works would in the end be too much of the same thing. This concert, however, in which Andrew Manze conducted the Hallé with complete commitment to the cause, proved that even an evening of ‘greatest hits’ could generate sufficient variety to hold the audience’s attention throughout. Indeed, there were times in both The Lark Ascending and the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis when one could definitely have heard the proverbial pin drop, so mesmerised were the audience by the spell Vaughan Williams’ music cast over Sheffield City Hall.
Introducing the programme from the platform, Manze described the first half as “pre-cataclysm Vaughan Williams”, three works from a more innocent time. (Even if The Lark Ascending reached its finished form in the early 1920s, it was conceived before the 1914 war.) The Wasps Overture revealed, said Manze, chirpy urban life as seen by this adopted Londoner, a kind of sequel to Elgar’s Cockaigne. The Hallé played it with gusto, taking a rather broad brush approach to its principal theme in response to Manze’s sweeping gestures. His conducting style is, one might say, idiosyncratic (not, perhaps, the technique of a performer who night have begun his musical career as a conductor), but the musicians responded to his engagement with sensitivity, especially at those moments when Vaughan Williams’ music tends towards stillness, or when (as in the slow central section of the overture) the melodies employ an explicit folk song idiom.
The other two works in the first half were, in their different ways, hugely impressive. The Hallé’s leader, Roberto Ruisi, was a lyrical and eloquent soloist in The Lark Ascending, while the orchestral strings showed why they have such an impressive reputation in performing English music. However, the absolute highlight of the first half was the Tallis Fantasia, a work surely touched by genius. Here Manze shaped the contributions of the different string ensembles to perfection, so that the work’s antiphonal interplay ebbed and flowed seamlessly. Special mention should go to the orchestra’s Leader, Emily Davis, and Principal Viola Timothy Pooley, whose rhapsodic solo lines were impossible to imagine being delivered with greater purity and tenderness.
It is easy to regard the Symphony no. 5 in Dmajor, especially in the context of its wartime conception, as a vision of peace, with the pastoral mode to the fore. But Manze prefaced the performance by highlighting not just the work’s importance to him personally, but also its ambiguities (“What it means is up to you”), evident in the troubling dissonant interruptions of the first movement and the shadowy misterioso quality of the following Scherzo. However, woven through the symphony is the spiritual journeying depicted in Vaughan Williams’ opera The Pilgrim’s Progress, particularly apparent in the Romanza third movement, which blossomed most fruitfully in Manze’s hands, with the horns on sweetly blended form and Thomas Davey’s cor anglais solo a thing of beauty. After this the finale’s peals of ‘alleluias’ brought the concert to a rapt conclusion, orchestra and conductor as one in their commitment to the music of this most English of composers.
