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Audiences can be fickle. The Hallé’s latest programme featured one of the world’s most celebrated trumpeters, a UK premiere from one of the world’s most high-profile living composers, and one of this country’s most successful young conductors – yet the Bridgewater Hall yawned with empty seats. Whatever the reasons, those who decided against booking missed an exhilarating evening.
It started politely enough, with the rollicking baroquery of Britten’s Courtly Dances from Gloriana. A set of Tudorbethan pastiches, these dances encourage orchestral good behaviour. But conductor Alpesh Chauhan also allowed glimpses of a harsher, modernist world outside in the viciously chirrupping winds and off-kilter repetitions of the central Morris Dance and the gleeful snaps and rattles of the closing Lavolta.
A Hallé co-commission, Nico Muhly’s trumpet concerto Doom Painting was composed for Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth and inspired by the instrument’s biblical roles. Muhly’s note on the piece points to distinct sections featuring the trumpet as a ceremonial instrument, as an expressive fixture of depictions of the apocalypse, and as a jubilant feature of the psalms. Such distinctions were hard to detect in performance. Instead, I was struck by the sympathetic resonances between the orchestra and Helseth’s solo line, which crawled around in the muddy lower legions of her E flat trumpet before eventually reaching, with surgical precision, into its gleaming soprano. There were delicate skeins of upper woodwind through which the trumpet keened, and long phrases whose ends Helseth snatched violently over looping strings and a bedrock of tuba and double basses. Elsewhere, Helseth and the Hallé’s trumpets exchanged volleys of savage crescendos. Only the ending was unpersuasive, seemingly interrupted mid-phrase.
No such quibbles in Walton’s Symphony No 1, which grips, relentlessly, throughout. Chauhan – always a full-body conductor – conducted as if pulling a vast canvas taut. The brass was in blistering, battering-ram mode in the first movement, the strings serving up a malign, razor-edged almost-dance in the second. Chauhan embraced the equivocal lyricism of the third, its cashmere softness threatened by dense shadows of bass. The finale was thrilling: its quiet moments lucid and urgent, its climaxes devastatingly intense.
· Also at Sheffield City Hall on 15 March
