BRITTEN Peter Grimes: Four Sea Interludes, ADÈS Inferno Suite, WALTON Belshazzar’s Feast. The Hallé with Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus and Leeds Festival Chorus; Conductor Finnegan Downie Dear, Baritone, Benjamin Nelson
This sounded like a very good concert though my hearing is a bit all over the place till Tuesday afternoon (visit to clinic).
The City Hall copes very well with the bright sounds that these three pieces offer. The Halle sounded in great form and the jazzy inner voices of the Walton came out well. The Britten in particular sounded incisive, passionate and really well characterised, with the complex harmonies of the Sunday morning church scene particularly memorable
The Adès piece I had heard in full last October at Covent Garden and it was remarkable in these extracts from the Inferno section of the ballet how many of the themes and turns of phrase I remembered. It all sounded exceptionally well under the Halle’s playing and this deserves to be a modern classic. It was clearly appreciated by a Sheffield audience not necessarily prone to welcome the new with open arms. The one thing I did think is that maybe Adès needs to consider is how to end this ‘symphony’ of extracts. The penultimate movement is riotous – very accessible and great fun; it drew spirited applause. The final scene -the actual encounter with the devil, in its nullity and blankness – I remember it being very powerful in its listlessness and inertia, in the theatre – but in the concert hall it is too short and not sufficiently audience drawing. It led to confusion at the end as to whether the work was over. I was struck again by how balletic this music is and the obvious influence of the big Tchaikovsky ballets
The Walton I doubt if I’ve heard live since the 70s. I’ve always enjoyed listening to it in the Previn recording from that era, and even seem to remember either Walton conducting it or coming on stage after it in the late 60s at the Proms.
The baritone, Benjamin Nelson, was very good in projecting the drama, with very clear diction. The Halle wee admirably tight in all the jazzy rhythms, and the racket was indeed colossal in the closing bars! The combined Leeds and Sheffield choruses didn’t quite have the heft one might imagine from such a large group of singers but I have to say that they sounded very effective, with little in the way of flabby sound. I realised how tricky a lot of the harmonies are particularly for the women choristers – it can’t be easy to sing
I also thought their diction was very good. A danger with this work is that the conductor ets over excited and the music moves too fast to really be able to snap and crackle That didn’t happen, but there were some rather exaggerated rallentandos, I thought
The concert did give me though lots of gloomy thoughts on the future of concert going at least in Sheffield. The concert was one that before the pandemic would have had the hall comfortably full, if not packed out. This one 3 years on had swathes of empty seats on the stalls and the gallery was closed off – and this despite two hundred or so choristers with potentially relatives to cheer them on. Part of the problem is the size of the hall – 2200. Part of the problem may be continued nervousness about infection and the pandemic. But it may be that the audience is simply dying off and not being replaced and the other problem that Sheffield has is that it is simply a much smaller place than Manchester and doesn’t have the surrounding conurbations to attract in the way Manchester does. The latter seems to have been much better too at attracting a student audience which is clearly vital for the future. What’s needed really is a smaller building and maybe less ambitious programming – but then that risks a spiralling decline. Before the concert the new Sheffield International concert season was announced. It’s got some big names – Vengerov, Benedetti – but I doubt if it’s going to pack them in. This seems to be very much a regional problem not a London and SE problem, though it will be interesting to see how the Proms fare this year. Sheffield also suffers because unlike Liverpool Birmingham and Manchester it doesn’t have its own ‘ home’ orchestra with the particular loyalty that provokes
To be honest if this concert didn’t pull them in it’s hard to see what would. Too many concerts are recycling the same narrow band of works and despite the whole pandemic experience orchestral managers are just retreating to business as usual.
John's musical journey 