January 7th and so to the Bridgewater Hall Manchester to hear the Halle Orchestra play Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B minor, Luke Bedford’s new BBC commission ‘Rode with Darkness’ a world premiere, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No.6 in B minor. Isabelle van Keulen, the soloist in the Elgar was making her first appearance in Manchester with the Halle. Mark Elder the conductor and the Halle Music Director, in the post concert event called it ‘a mad concert’ but clearly was pleased with the evening’s work. It was indeed an enjoyable and stimulating evening.

The post programme ‘conversation’ with Elder and the Halle’s principal Tuba Player, Ewan Easton, and David Hext, Percussionist in support on either hand and Luke Bedford speaking from the wings, ranged over rehearsal times.. two and half days by my calculation and not enough,... playing the Xylophone with a bow and painful moments on the tuba. However the main focus was new work and should the Halle play more, which Elder wants but there are strong forces against it. More of this last in a moment.

But was it ‘a mad concert’ and indeed was there any connection between the pieces?. Reading the programme notes carefully suggested there was. There was no musical link but each of the works the works represented represented in some way a composer trying to solve a similar important problem but at different times.. In the case of Shostakovich, Gerald McBurney made the problem clear. It was how to build a new foundation for the his music. The work is a parody in the proper sense of that word (to take Mcburney further) of neo classicism. But to do this, the whole at to be properly constructed: on Bach in the first movement, on the early classicals in the second and Mozart in the third. At the same time the surface of the music was attractive enough for a Stalinist audience and just about musical enough for his contemporary critics. And it did not betray what had gone before. A rational madness in a mad world

Elgar tackled a not dissimilar issue. Of course his English listeners were mostly content with the big tunes and the fantasies they could build round them. But Elgar as his European critics recognised was hier to the great clash between Brahms and Wagner/Liszt. The bit in between the tunes can be seen to be all about this, together with motto themes and the accompanied cadenza in the final movement. The accompaniment of this thematic review is a shimmering pizzacato tremolando of thrummed strings. Little wonder then the leading British Elgar expert, Michael Kennedy resorts to describing the development section of the first movement as a sort of free fantasia to encourage the fantasists. The lost madness of love raises elegiac ghosts and the struggles of times past.

Luke Bedford is in the early part of his career but his concern is trying to find a way to make traditional elements of music work in the twenty first century. His work tries to assemble four cords and a single tempo bit by bit rather as the old Channel 4 Logo assembled itself from various shapes and colours. Lots of fancy instrumentation and dynamic helped to cloth the skeleton. A reasoned structure clad in a wizards garb.

This all need and audience, a Thursday Concert audience as Elder called us, gathered for the post concert review. But I am not sure that the sixty or so of us were at all representative of the 1500 in the hall. It is not that the crowd was not knowledgeable but that their average age meant that their musical taste was likely to have been developed in the 50’s of the last century and the New Halle has not yet found an audience for the sort of programmes that Elder would like to offer. It is not helped by the local critic Robert Beale of the Manchester Evening News who is certainly an Old Halle person (he has written a book about the history of the Halle). He just managed a rude dismissive comment on Friday on the Bedford piece and his stringers often tell us in advance what the audience should think of anything after 1920 (with obvious exceptions)

I fear Mark Elder might be the New Halle’s Tony Blair.

Samples of the Elgar and Shostakovich mentioned can be searched for at Amazon