One of the pleasures of the BBC Proms is to survey the current state of our regional orchestras and I was really looking forward to the Hallé's visit with Mark Elder. Yet, at the end of the concert, I felt curiously unfulfilled.
George Benjamin conducts his explosive orchestral debut in Amsterdam, while exploring some other vastly different soundscapes in a large orchestral setting.
Sir Mark Elder conducted the Hallé in the final concert of their 2012/13 Thursday Series, with a truly titanic account of Mahler’s First Symphony at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester.The evening began with the première of Near Midnight, the first commission for Helen Grime in her role as Associate Composer of the Hallé.
In days gone by, if you went to see a Mahler Symphony, you wouldn't feel you’d had the full experience unless Gustav himself was waving the baton. Nowadays the privilege of watching a composer conduct his own work is a somewhat rarer one, though fortunately not yet a completely extinct practice, and watching Knussen’s Symphony No.
It must be heart-warming for a young composer, sharing the bill with Beethoven and Stravinsky, to know that the programme has been named after her piece. The clear, confident writing in Helen Grime's A Cold Spring (2009) effectively conveyed the visual contrast offered by sharp-edged, bright days at this time of year.
Continuing the Hallé’s project of juxtaposing Beethoven symphonies with modern works, the underrated fourth symphony was flanked by works by Helen Grime and Igor Stravinsky, with an intriguingly placed Bach Suite closing the concert.
Les concerts de musique d’avant-garde sont réputés difficiles. Pourtant, le concert donné à l’occasion du 90e anniversaire de Pierre Boulez s’est déroulé devant une salle pleine, ou presque, d’un public manifestement enthousiaste.
