Mendelssohn, Wigglesworth, Schumann: Sheffield City Hall, Wigglesworth, Hamelin, Halle – 3/11/21

Mendelssohn A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Scherzo, Nocturne, Intermezzo, Wedding March; Ryan Wigglesworth Piano Concerto; Schumann Symphony No.2.  Ryan Wigglesworth conductor, Marc-André Hamelin piano, Halle Orchestra

This was my first time in Sheffield City Hall for, I think, almost two years……I was struck again by its very dead acoustic; in the space after a loud orchestral chord instead of appealing reverberations there’s a sound like a football bouncing off a formica table. Apparently people have been talking about its unsatisfactory acoustics since the 1930’s but no-one seems to have come up with a solution…..

For some reason I had chosen to sit in the front row of the stalls – this means that you’re up, close and personal with the violins but everything else seems to be happening at a distance over your head. In that unsatisfactory position and acoustic, the Halle still sounded very good indeed – violins in particular really together and sharp (as in ensemble, not tuning . I counted just one slight early entry from a single violin in the piano concerto, but otherwise they sounded razor-edged)

The Mendelssohn MSND extracts were very enjoyable – it’s a long time since I have heard this music. I was struck by the similarities between some of the music and early Wagner – Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner were all born within 4 years of each other, all were around in Leipzig during a similar period, yet there is little I heard this evening that connects Wagner with Schumann, while with Mendelssohn there are many similar turns of phrase and melodic cells. Interesting…..

The Wigglesworth piano concerto was a hard nut to crack, for me anyway, and I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as some other contemporary works I’ve heard recently.  My understanding wasn’t helped by the fact that seemingly City Hall had given up on issuing programmes, so I was unable to know in advance the structure of the piece or get any advance notice of particular aspects of it. The piano concerto is in 4 movements, and I enjoyed the third one (Notturno) best – into a strange arid and disturbed landscape of meandering strings, the piano brings at (I think two) points a simple melody – I thought it might be Chopin but apparently it’s a Polish folk tune – which is very touching, and gives a sense of incredible loneliness and desolation. I also got on with the first movement reasonably well, where the strings seemed to have a set of Mahler or maybe Berg-like themes to play while the piano wandered through this density with a cool calm set of reflections. The scherzo and the final fugue made little impact on me, I’m afraid.

For some reason, while I have known the 1^st, 3^rd and 4^th symphonies of Schumann since I was a teenager (with vinyl recordings by Furtwangler and Solti) I never listened to the 2^nd symphony to the same extent, so it is only more recently I have come to appreciate it. While commentators often talk about the symphony being linked to the recovery of Schumann from serious illness and his relationship with Clara Wieck, to me it always sounds as though it is linked to the mental illness he suffered from – now thought to have been a combination of bipolar disorder and perhaps mercury poisoning which led to “manic” and “depressive” periods. The scherzo 2^nd movement, with its obsessive repetitive rhythms, is, to me, pretty manic, and the slow movement is then a wonderful reaction to it – not dangerously exalted, but a  deeply felt reflection. The final movement then does sound genuinely like an overcoming of illness, and is very moving in its energy and joy. I thought the Halle’s performance was very good – maybe not with the sweep and grandeur that a Berlin Philharmonic could bring, but with precision and energy. Wigglesworth, like Mark Elder, splits the violins across the stage, and this led somehow to a lot more energy in the orchestral sound in the outer movements, while giving a real bloom to the reflections of the slow movement and its wonderful melodies. Maybe there wasn’t quite the fullness of some performances in the first and last movements but still – an excellent rendering of this work………..