Sir Mark Elder conductor, Halle Orchestra, Sir Stephen Hough piano: Dvořák Scherzo capriccioso; Stephen Hough Piano Concerto (The World of Yesterday); Butterworth A Shropshire Lad: Rhapsody for Orchestra; Elgar Variations on an Original Theme, “Enigma”
This was Mark Elder’s last appearance in Sheffield as the Halle’s music director so for once the hall in Sheffield was completely full. The audience has spent years not going to the Halle’s concerts, so that City Hall has rarely been more than half full for their appearances, even when Elder was conducting, so it is deeply ironic they only turn up when he’s leaving¬ There was flimflammery from the leader of Sheffield City Council who rocked up with a cardboard copy of a silver dish of the City Hall as a parting present for Elder – which was to ‘be ready in a few weeks’ time apparently'(clearly they had been bounced into this late in the day) – despite having sat on their hands for years in terms of providing better acoustics for the hall. Oh well…..
The audience as always in Sheffield was a mixture – there was a bloke next to me extolling the virtues of the Kleiber Tristan recording with Margaret Price, and at the same time people clapping after noisy variations in the ‘Enigma’.
The very dry dead acoustics in City Hall can play havoc with how an orchestra sounds – the wide shallow stage seems matched by a kind of compression in the sound, and a lack of richness and depth. It is to the huge credit of the orchestra and Elder that despite the acoustics, they sounded full and rounded in sound, and made use of the clarity that the hall undoubtedly possesses to offer some wonderful insights in the Elgar work.
The performance was prefaced by a much better gift than Sheffield Council’s – the Sheffield Music Academy produced a young composer and string players who performed a short piece called Waves, obviously playing on both waves as in water and waves as in saying goodbye to Mark Elder. This was excellent
When the concert finally got going, the Dvorak piece was pleasant enough, and extremely well played, if a bit inconsequential. Stephen Hough’s piece I liked, though I am not sure that it would bear much repeated listening. In a talk before the concert, Hough has described it as originally a film score he’d been commissioned to write, for a film about a pianist in the 1930’s commissioned to write a piano piece by a duchess. I got the impression the film had fallen by the wayside, so Hough reworked the music. The World of Yesterday, the title of the piece, is also the name of an (excellent) memoir by Stefan Zweig, about pre WW1 Vienna, while Hough’s work is a look back at the piano concertos of the 1920s and 30’s – think Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Bartok, Gershwin etc. The piece was shortish – 22 minutes or so – and didn’t outstay its welcome, with passages both lyrical and glitteringly bright (I seem to remember a duet between the piano and the xylophone at one point).
After the interval, the Halle, and Elder came into its own with the Butterworth and Elgar. The Butterworth provides some sort of link, I suppose, with the Hough piece in terms of nostalgia – this time for a rural past, though the Butterworth also has anger in its central part, at the waste of young ‘lads’ lives in the Boer War. The Halle produced a glorious sound – wonderful clarinet and horn playing and transforming the usual sound of the hall into something rich and strange.
The Elgar work is a work I have heard Elder conduct several times and my reactions have been the same each time. Up until the finale, the way Elder conducts the piece, and the way the Halle performs it, is remarkably good. There were so many little touches in the orchestration coming out that you never normally hear – some wonderful detail in Ysobel and W.N, and all the tempi well-judged. Elder crafted the climax of Nimrod superbly -sometimes the horns can blare rather vulgarly, but here they were held back and enveloped in a wonderful mushrooming orchestral sound. Another touch was the more-than-usually audible sound of the side drum in Variation 13 (was it Elgar who talked about a penny rolled around the drum surface?) which coloured the rest of the orchestra’s sadness very effectively. I had the same thought on the finale as when I have heard this team perform it before – that somehow the basic tempo Elder sets for the movement is too slow and becomes flaccid, and not climactic enough; it’s very different from how Elgar himself conducted this movement. I’ll listen again to the radio broadcast on 22 May, and see if I think differently………..
John's musical journey 