Sunday 8 February 2026
Aviva Studios, Manchester
From the grounded to the ethereal: Manchester Collective shine at Aviva Studios
*****
The first time I reviewed Manchester Collective was when they played at the White Hotel in Salford over six years ago. Over 150 posts later (not all of them reviews of Manchester Collective!) I have seen them several times at the RNCM, Stoller Hall and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, and at a late-night Prom at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Last night was the first time I have seen the Collective at Manchester’s Aviva Studios. Rakhi Singh, Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director, described the Collective as ‘a shapeshifting ensemble’, varying in size and forces for each concert. Whatever the venue, and whatever the nature of the group, they never cease to delight and inspire, and to introduce us to new repertoire (including new commissions) as well as juxtaposing old and new music in surprising and thought-provoking ways.
On Sunday evening, Singh was a warm, passionate communicator, introducing the pieces to us and explaining technical terms where necessary. She promised us ‘a really beautiful programme.’ She didn’t break her promise. She led a string quartet consisting of Singh on first violin, Donald Grant on second, Ruth Gibson (viola) and Alice Neary (cello).
The concert began with Summa by Arvo Pärt. The piece started life as a setting for choir of the Nicene Creed (also known as the Credo in the Latin Mass), the central statement of Christian faith. Sunday evening’s version was for string quartet, gently lilting, contemplative and ritualistic. The Collective’s performance was quietly mesmeric. Behind them, four lights resembled stained-glass windows in a church, reinforcing the piece’s religious feeling.
Singh said that Pärt’s piece had an ‘ancient quality’ that made it hard to know whether it was old or new (the original version was written in 1977). The oldest piece in the concert was written in 1680, and the most recent was completed ‘five or six days ago.’ The 17th-century piece was Henry Purcell’s Fantasia in C Minor, Z. 738. It was paired with the first movement of Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2, which was first performed on 21 November 1945 at a concert marking the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death.
The Purcell piece felt both starkly modern and ancient. Purcell was writing in a style that was already out of fashion: fantasias for viol consort were no longer being written. The Collective, playing without vibrato to emphasise the startling false relations (deliberate dissonances where two notes clash) that make this music feel so modern. Their playing was beautifully poised, with elegant ornamentation. The slow passages were doleful in the style of the earlier composer John Dowland, who described himself in a song title as Semper Dowland Semper Dolens (Always Dowland, Always Doleful). The middle, faster section was perfectly controlled.
The Collective performed the Britten movement with the same intensity as the Purcell. According to Hugh Morris’ programme note, Britten himself saw a clear link between his work and that of Purcell, which was characterised by ‘clarity, tenderness and strangeness.’ Britten was in his early 30s in 1945 when he wrote the string quartet, basking in the success of his opera Peter Grimes, which has since become part of the standard repertoire (Opera North is bringing it to Lowry in Salford in March). This is music written by a young man at the height of his powers and creative confidence, celebrating the ‘strangeness’ of Purcell, with something of the austerity of that music but also at times a quiet ecstasy. The Collective skilfully brought out the false relations in Britten’s music and the piece’s contrasting joy and anguish.
Mica Levi is probably best known for their film scores for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and The Zone of Interest (2023), which won major international awards. They are also known as member of the experimental pop band Good Sad Happy Band, originally known as Micachu and the Shapes. Singh introduced their 2015 composition You Belong to Me, as an example of how a non-classical composer uses instruments in a different way. Hugh Morris traced a link back to Pärt’s’ economy of musical gesture,’ and ‘the idea of spinning large fabrics out of tiny fibres.’
Levi’s piece began with fluttering of the upper strings, like a bird hopping from one tree to another. A low melodic section felt like an ominous creature that suddenly ground to a halt. A repeated two-note phrase, surrounded by filigree decoration from the upper strings, had the sensibility of electronic dance music, with the timbre changing as if a filter had been applied to a synthesiser. A single note was thrown around the players, with a bass line that could have come from dance music, that suddenly changed. There was a stunning moment when we entered a new world in a completely different key. A discordant chord contained false relations of the type we heard in the Purcell. Little fragments of melody were thrown around, like snatches of distant memory. For a while, it felt as if we were stuck in an endless labyrinth, with horrifying cello glissandi. A stunning piece, perfectly executed.
Singh introduced the second half by saying that if the first half had been grounded, then the second half was mostly ethereal. We began with the new commission, Poems of Consciousness, by the young British composer Jasmine Morris. The work, in her words,
‘examines how language, music and consciousness interact, and how meaning arises from both what is spoken and what remains unsaid.’
The first movement, Half in a dream, half in the snow, seemed to follow on from the Levi piece, with fractured harmonics, snatches of themes and unsettling glissandi. The space between the notes felt as important as the notes themselves, and the failure to communicate seemed an important driving theme. The Decay of the Angel unravelled with fragments of melody beamed from outer space, music from beyond the cosmos, or melodies heard in a fever dream. There were occasional snatches of night music as in Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). The final movement, Fingerprints on the Dragonfly in Amber, felt more grounded as we briefly returned to Earth, the lower string lines weaving together with romantic flourishes. There were more false relations, and at the end, we seemed to be briefly back in space.
In the final piece, we were back on Earth but looking up to space. John Luther Adams was an environmental activist before he became a composer. His piece Canticles of the Sky gave the concert its title: the first movement is called Sky with Four Suns, and the other movements depict the sky with four moons, with nameless colours, and finally with endless stars. The music is drawn from Adams’ large-scale choral work Canticles of the Holy Wind, with sixteen choral parts condensed into a string quartet.
The four suns and four moons of the first two movements are phenomena seen at the Arctic Circle: refractions of light through frozen particles in the air that create the impression of additional suns or moons, like mirages in the sky. The four lights behind the performers became suns and then moons.
Singh had a lovely way of describing each movement of the piece beginning and ending in silence, as if the music had always been there and the string quartet was joining in. This called to mind the concept of ‘Music of the Spheres‘, in which the movement of celestial bodies creates music that only the soul can hear.
In his notes, the composer wrote that ‘All sounds should be legato’, and it felt as if the bows of the Collective never left their instruments. The music was tonal, slow-moving and almost ritualistic, taking us back to the opening music by Arvo Pärt, except – appropriately – where there were more false relations. As the music morphed slowly, the concentration was evident on all four players’ faces. The overall effect was mesmerising, like experiencing the sun rising on a distant planet. At the end, the audience remained silent for several seconds, as if contemplating what they had just heard. This was a superb concert, imaginatively programmed with a clear narrative thread, a compelling mix of the old and the new.
Repertoire
Arvo Pärt Summa
Henry Purcell Fantasia in C Minor, Z. 738
Benjamin Britten String Quartet No. 2, I.
Mica Levi You Belong to Me
Jasmine Morris Poems of Consciousness (World premiere tour; Manchester premiere)
John Luther Adams Canticles of the Sky
Performers
Rakhi Singh Violin
Donald Grant Violin
Ruth Gibson Viola
Alice Neary Cello
Manchester Collective perform Sky With the Four Suns at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Thursday 12 February