Hallé/Mandeal – review

Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
5 out of 5 5
    • The Guardian,
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The Hallé is, for many, the orchestra of choice as far as Sibelius is concerned. In his lifetime, the composer assigned it many of his most important UK premieres, and successive generations of conductors have renewed traditions of performing his music that remain consistent in their power and insight.

  1. Hallé/Mandeal
  2. Bridgewater Hall,
  3. Manchester
  1. Until 12 December
  2. Box office:
    0161-907 9000
  3. More details

Cristian Mandeal is the latest to tackle him here, bringing his own qualities of fastidiousness and intensity to bear on his music. As with any major Sibelius interpreter, Mandeal is aware that his impact depends primarily on a sense of organic development to which any hint of external pressure can be ruinous. Mandeal's reappraisals of scope and emotional content, however, were often startlingly new.

He opened with the Pelléas and Mélisande incidental music, scaling the orchestra down to the size of the theatre band that would have given the premiere. The resulting austerity required a period of adjustment. What followed, however, was a muted exercise in foreboding, which in turn paved the way for a performance of The Swan of Tuonela that also seemed different. Some conductors have gone sensual with this of late, but here the waters of the lake of death sounded ice-cold, while the swan's song was lethal in its beauty.

Finlandia and the Second Symphony inevitably brought with them greater extroversion and grandeur, though both were also uncommonly, even pulverisingly, turbulent. Finlandia was so superbly marshalled that I finally realised there's actually more to it than rabble-rousing rhetoric. The symphony swung between exhilaration and a kind of brooding stasis that seemed to teem with a myriad latent possibilities. This was edge-of-your-seat stuff and absolutely outstanding.

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