Manchester Classical 2025 Day Two – Live Review

Sunday 29 June 2025

Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

For a review of day one of the festival click here and for the opening night click here

Manchester Collective: The Body Electric

The title of Sunday afternoon’s concert, The Body Electric, has been used in many cultural contexts, including music by Weather Report, Rush, The Sisters of Mercy and Lana Del Ray. The phrase comes from an 1855 poem by the American poet Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric. The poem is divided into several sections, each celebrating a different aspect of human physicality. Rahki Singh, Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of the Collective, explained that the analogy of the body electric referred to the imaginative structure of the programme – the body as a big house with lots of different rooms, with ‘something new behind each door.’

One of the joys of following the Collective’s work is that the forces always vary from one concert to another – from a fairly large ensemble with choir in Rothko Chapel to a smaller ensemble with African drums, bass guitar, and the fantastic African cellist and singer Abel Selaocoe in Sirocco. On Sunday, the Collective consisted of two musicians, Singh on violin and the cellist and composer Zoë Martlew.

The concert began with Singh ‘in outer space among the stars’, playing ‘Joy’, the first movement from David Lang’s Mystery Sonatas. Bathed in white light, with the rest of the hall in complete darkness, Singh played on the upper strings and with harmonics to create images of glacial beauty, an icy landscape in the depths of space. The piece had an almost spiritual feel, and Martlew retained the mood of a piece she described as ‘iconic… encoding geometry in sound’, the ‘Prelude’ to Bach’s Cello Suite No.1. Martlew played with a lovely tone, relatively slowly, and with expressive rubato.

Martlew’s response to Bach’s piece was her own composition, G-Lude, commissioned by Spitalfields Festival, and premiered in July 2021. She explained to the audience that she had become weary of live performance and spent lockdown in a ‘state of profound silence, looking out to sea, communing with nature.’ This marked a move from being a cellist to composing. She said her tribute to Bach’s piece was ‘based on the architecture of the original.’ G-Lude is a remarkable, unsettling work. At times, Martlew appeared to be fighting her cello, with exaggerated breathing that was written into the score. She felt like the Jimi Hendrix of the cello, playing like a rock star, with heavy metal riffs, scraped strings and gorgeous harmonics. She put the bow down and ended with a gentle, stately pizzicato.

This segued into Missy Mazzoli’s Vespers for solo violin, which Singh had performed in the Rothko Chapel concert. Embellished by electronics, the amplified violin part features echoed flourishes and long, held chords in the accompaniment. Singh created a vision of light, with a recorded female voice gradually becoming more prominent, creating a cathedral of sound. It was a profoundly moving, spiritual experience, which was enhanced by Martlew’s calm performance of the ‘Allemande and Sarabande’ from Bach’s Cello Suite No.1.

It would have been easy to end the concert with something equally contemplative, but Singh had other ideas. She finished with her arrangement of LAD by Julia Wolfe, written for nine bagpipes and premiered by the Bagpipe Orchestra in New York City in June 2007. Her arrangement was for solo violin and eight pre-recorded violins. Perhaps inspired by Martlew’s rock star stylings, she announced that she would put her violin through an octave pedal, normally used by rock guitarists. She told us the piece would take us to ‘the depth of the earth’ and that the ‘gnarly’ opening always made it feel ‘like her insides had been rearranged.’ Tunes were also promised.

LAD began with a fiercely disquieting, visceral two-note theme and then a terrifying rising phrase. The combination of a drone and this rising phrase created an effect like the Shepard Tone, where an auditory illusion is created of an endless, constantly rising phrase. It’s used very effectively to ratchet up anxiety and tension in Hans Zimmer’s score for Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk, and also by Pink Floyd at the end of their track Echoes. Singh eventually played the folky tune she had promised, an ecstatic smile on her face. A second, folky tune featured an evocative swoop, which brought to mind the stunning score that Jóhann Jóhannsson wrote for Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival. A truly cinematic ending to an excellent concert.

Finale

The festival ended with a joyous celebration of classical music in Manchester, with combined forces from the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the RNCM, the Chorus of ENO and the Hallé Choir, superbly conducted by Alpesh Chauhan.

The concert opened with the pulsating joy of John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine, with all the musicians playing as one with infectious exuberance under Chauhan’s passionate baton. The audience reaction at the end was highly enthusiastic. The buzz that had been palpable throughout the festival, in the outdoor events as well as those on the main stage, continued right to the end of the festival.

Perhaps the highlight of the Finale was Iain Farrington’s Street Party, which had its world premiere on Sunday. In a fascinating pre-concert talk with Elizabeth Alker, he explained that he had written the new work in a jazzy style, partly inspired by composers like Gershwin and Bernstein, continuing a musical line from Saturday evening’s concert. He said that British orchestras are now used to playing jazz; when Alker asked him whether they might improvise during his piece, he replied, ‘I hope not!’

Farrington’s brief was to write a piece for the final concert in ‘this amazing festival.’ His aimed to create something ‘joyous, celebratory, open and inclusive… with a carnival atmosphere.’ He grew up in the market town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire. Some of his earliest memories are of outdoor festivals and street parties, including one that was closed down by the police because it was too popular (an experience which fed directly into the piece, as we found out later). He wanted to bring ‘outdoor music to an indoor situation.’ Along the way, he gave a huge compliment to Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, ‘The most amazing concert hall… We’d kill for a hall like this in London.’

Street Party began with rollicking percussion and jazzy brass. There was a series of solo sections for wind, strings, brass and tuba. Farrington explained that this was to showcase the parts of the orchestra, a bit like Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. It also sounded at times like the theme tune from an American TV series, of the kind that the late, great Quincy Jones used to write. The chorus joined, with a wordless chant of ‘Na, na, na’, which Farrington said was meant to sound like a crowd singing along at a pop festival. The piece was immediately attractive and moved the feet as well as the soul. At the end, there was an amusing coup de théâtre. Two ‘officers’, from the entertainment division of the police, walked to the front of the hall and ‘arrested’ the composer, presumably for creating excessive joy in a built up area. It was a fair cop.

Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances provided us with an early opportunity to hear the chorus of English National Orchestra prior to them coming to Manchester later in the year. They didn’t disappoint; the sound was huge but well-balanced. The final piece was Respighi’s Pines of Rome, a chance for the combined orchestra to shine. There was a glittering opening, perfectly describing children playing amongst the pines. In the second movement, luxurious lower strings were joined by evocative, muted horns to create the subdued atmosphere of the Roman catacombs. An offstage trumpet, played in the gallery, had a lovely limpid tone. The plainsong chant of the priests was beautifully evoked as the movement reached its climax. The third movement was a nocturne, which began with a piano motif and a mellow clarinet solo. There was a lovely moment when there was a sudden change of harmony in the strings and heart-meltingly gorgeous orchestral playing in a huge romantic sweep. The recording of a nightingale that the score demands was perfectly blended with the orchestra. To end, we went back in history to the marching of Roman soldiers along the Appian Way, gradually building to a climax with majestic inevitability. Coruscating offstage brass joined, and finally the organ, as the music reached its apotheosis. What a way to end a wonderful festival!

Artists and repertoire

Manchester Collective: The Body Electric

David Lang Mystery Sonatas, mvt 1. Joy
J.S. Bach Prelude from Cello Suite No.1 in G Major
Zoe Martlew G-Lude
Missy Mazzoli Vespers
J.S. Bach Allemande and Sarabande from Cello Suite No.1 in G major
Julia Wolfe arr. Rakhi Singh LAD

Rakhi Singh violin (Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Manchester Collective)
Zoë Martlew cello

Pre-concert talk – Iain Farrington and Elizabeth Alker

Iain Farrington composer
Elizabeth Alker presenter

Finale

John Adams Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Iain Farrington Street Party (world premiere)
Borodin Polovtsian Dances
Respighi Pines of Rome

Alpesh Chauhan conductor
Musicians from the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, RNCM, The Chorus of ENO and Hallé Choir