Cellist turned conductor Jonathan Bloxham made his Hallé debut with a streamed concert from Hallé St Peters, the orchestra’s rehearsal, education and performance space in Ancoats. Much of the programme examined ideas of hope and nostalgia, though at its centre was the world premiere of Hannah Kendall’s forceful, aphoristic Where Is the Chariot of Fire?, composed in lockdown and drawing its inspiration from the turbulent biblical imagery (Armageddon, the Gadarene swine, Judas’s betrayal of Christ) of Lemn Sissay’s poem Godsell. Resolving harmonic violence and disorientation into queasy, unstable calm, it’s strikingly scored: music boxes, one of them playing the spiritual Deep River, can be heard tinkling away as slithery textures give way to greater lyricism. It was played with considerable virtuosity.
The concert began, however, not with music but with words, as poet laureate Simon Armitage read his own the event horizon, commissioned for the opening of Hallé St Peters in 2019 and incorporated into the building on a steel plate by the auditorium door. The final phrases speak of “raw music” that “comes pitching into the soul,” though in this instance, the poem ushered in the restrained, sad opening of Quiet City, Aaron Copland’s haunting examination of urban solitude, in which trumpet (Gareth Small) and cor anglais (Thomas Davey) call to one another across the spaces and abysses suggested by slowly shifting strings chords.
Jess Gillam was the soloist in Glazunov’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings, with a performance that combined emotional warmth with humour and terrific dexterity. The composer’s last orchestral work, completed in exile in Paris in 1934, the concerto gazes back in bittersweet reflection on Russian late Romanticism, before peremptorily sweeping nostalgia away in an impish fugal finale. Prefaced, meanwhile, by Armitage’s poem Evening, with its quiet contemplation of the imperceptible passing of a life from youth to age, Bloxham closed with Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye. He’s a superb Ravel interpreter on this showing, wonderfully alert to every shift in colour and mood and immaculately sustaining the magic atmosphere from beginning to end. It was exquisitely played, too.
• Available on demand from www.halle.co.uk (£) until 14 April.
