Polish-born Stanislaw Skrowaczewski was the Hallé's principal conductor from 1984 to 1991. We hear less of him these days, possibly because he has tended of late to concentrate on composition rather than conducting, though he still regularly returns to Manchester as a guest. He's something of a musician's musician, scrupulously refined in his approach, his performances gaining their power from the cumulative effect of meticulously observed shifts in detail rather than up-front emotionalism.
In Berlioz's Le Carnaval Romain and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, the opening and closing works in this concert, the dividends were enormous. The demotic fever of Berlioz's carnival derived not from broad-brush exuberance but from the sense of a myriad individual instrumental voices overlapping in jubilant, garish clamour. His interpretation of Shostakovich's Fifth, meanwhile, was overtly political, yet essentially reflective, a meditation on the sad waste of totalitarianism rather than a shriek of protest at its destructive force.
The emotional centre was located, not in eruptive clangour but in the symphony's quieter passages - the slow theme of the first movement that gradually loses its serenity, the lucid flute and harp splashes that are cruelly dismissed and, above all, in the magical yet delusory shift from minor to major with which Shostakovich closes the slow movement. An interpretation, in short, that will linger long in the memory, above all as a radical counter to more explosive versions.
In between, however, came a performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto that was less successful. The soloist was Andrew Haveron, a late replacement for the cultish Sergey Khachatrian. Haveron, leader of the Brodsky Quartet, is a fine chamber musician, though he's less suited, perhaps, to the extrovert demands of a concerto. He played the Andante with an unaffected simplicity far removed from the treacly sentiment that many interpreters prefer, though the first movement was technically proficient rather than committed and the finale short on humour.
