Tag: Alpesh Chauhan

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Manchester Classical 2025 Day Two – Live Review

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

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

Musicians from the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, RNCM, The Chorus of ENO and Hallé Choir
Musicians from the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, RNCM, The Chorus of ENO and Hallé Choir. Image © Alex Burns

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.

Zoë Martlew
Rakhi Singh and Zoë Martlew
Zoë Martlew
Rakhi Singh
Rakhi Singh and Zoë Martlew. Images © Alex Burns

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.

Alpesh Chauhan.
Aloesh Chauhan. Image © Alex Burns

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.

The Chorus of ENO and Hallé Choir
The Chorus of ENO and Hallé Choir. Image © Alex Burns

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

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BBC Philharmonic – A Hero’s Life – Live Review

Conductor Alpesh Chauhan with the BBC Phil

Saturday 16 November 2024

The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

****

A celebration of the human spirit: the cello concerto Shostakovich wrote for his 60th birthday; Richard Strauss’s description of a heroic life; an Anna Clyne UK premiere inspired by Buddhist writings and Mozart.

Conductor Alpesh Chauhan with the BBC Phil
The BBC Philharmonic with Conductor Alpesh Chauhan. Image © BBC/Chris Payne

Anna Clyne This Moment (UK premiere)

Anna Clyne is the BBC Philharmonic’s Composer in Association. In 2023, she was commissioned to write a new work for the Philadelphia Orchestra. The piece was premiered with, and partly inspired by, Mozart’s Requiem, and quotes directly from that piece. It was also a reaction to the shared loss and grief of the pandemic.

“The meditation on death is a very important meditation. When you meditate on death, you love life more, you cherish life more. We can learn many lessons from it.”

Thích Nhất Hạnh

This Moment was also inspired by the work of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen Master and peace activist, Thích Nhất Hạnh, known as the ‘father of mindfulness’, who died in 2022 at the age of 95. Before his death, he told his followers not to contain his ashes in an urn,

‘If I am anywhere, it is in your mindful breathing and in your peaceful steps.’

The title of Clyne’s piece is inspired by another quotation from Nhất Hạnh, ‘this moment is full of wonders.’ She told Alex Ariff in a YouTube interview that Mozart’s Requiem is ‘bursting at the seams with wonder’, and that she wanted to match the drama of that piece.

Clyne told Ariff that the first quotation from the Requiem came from the ‘Kyrie’, an ‘ascending chromatic line in the sopranos, and the first fugal subject in the basses.’ The second was from the ‘Lacrimosa’, the first line of which, ‘Lacrimosa dies illa’ [that day of tears and mourning] reminded her of another quote from Nhất Hạnh, ‘the tears I shed yesterday have become rain.’

The piece, for large orchestra, began mysteriously, with enigmatic strings chords and a bowed gong, and a rising romantic figure with gorgeous harmonies. It slowly eased itself into another, stately theme, and then into a lower key with brass and woodwind flourishes. The piece built to a climax, with meditative woodwind swirling above a Requiem quote in the strings. A further climax led to quieter, limpid textures and a brief hiatus. A Mozart theme in the brass led to an unexpected key change, and a new theme with shimmering glockenspiel. A baroque-style melody led to a serene ending to this evocative and highly effective work.

Composer Anna Clyne
Anna Clyne. Image credit Victoria Stevens

Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 2

The rest of the concert featured the composer as hero of their own work. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Cello Concerto No. 2 to celebrate his 60th birthday on 25 September 1966, dedicating the work to the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Strauss wrote Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s life) as an unashamedly joyful celebration of his heroic life as a composer, and his disdain for his critics. But the view of the hero in each work could not have been more different. As Robert Matthew-Walker wrote about the Shostakovich concerto, it ‘unveils no great Romantic hero battling against orchestral might.’

The concerto opened with an intense, low theme on the cello joined by low strings. The concentration on soloist Alban Gerhardt’s face was evident throughout, and he barely took his fingers or bow off his cello during the whole piece, stopping once to throw a glancing smile at conductor Alpesh Chauhan, and on another occasion when the orchestra allowed him brief respite. The concerto was played as one continuous movement, making this a remarkable feat of concentration, memory, virtuosity and the expression of profound dark emotion by Gerhardt.

Cellist Alban Gerhardt and Conductor Alpesh Chauhan with the BBC Phil
Cellist Alban Gerhardt with the BBC Phil conducted by Alpesh Chauhan © BBC/Chris Payne

Although the orchestra was huge, it often felt like a chamber orchestra, with individual sections – often the massed lower strings – accompanying the cello as Gerhardt played with passionate vibrato. The first movement featured a series of thrillingly bizarre duets: cello and xylophone with leaping, dystopian woodwind; cello and a robust bass drum; cello and a plaintive, mellow solo horn.

Shostakovich was at his most sardonic when he wrote the second movement, based on a street song from Odessa, Bubliki, Kupite Bubliki!’ [Bagels, buy my bagels]. Gerard McBurney described the song as, ‘saucy, cheap, vulgar and indecent’. Apparently the bagel-seller had, ‘more to offer than bread rolls.’ The story goes that Shostakovich, when asked to play his favourite melody at a New Year’s Eve party, teased the other guests by choosing this one. It’s also evidence of Shostakovich learning from Mahler’s symphonies in his use of folk song. On Saturday, Gerhardt dug deep into his strings, bringing out the sarcasm of the writing, with bitter slides up and down the fingerboard, accompanied by grumbling low winds. The xylophone joined the macabre dance, sounding like a dancing skeleton.

There was another strange but effective pairing with the cello in the third movement, this time with a solo tambourine. There was a brief moment of consonance with a serene, lyrical classical theme ending with an elegant trill from Gerhardt. This theme appeared again several times amongst the organised mayhem of the rest of the movement. Gerhardt’s playing was profound as he again dug deep, sometimes angular and lyrical, sometimes light and subtle, sometimes beautifully smooth as the mood demanded. He was again joined by an array of percussion – solo xylophone, and what felt at times like a jazz band. The full orchestra had a brief chance to assert itself with a return of the folk song from the second movement, complete with the sound of whips. But it was left to the cello and percussion to end the piece, as in Shostakovich’s 15th symphony which also ends with percussion. The cello had the final statement, but only just, a long held note subsiding briefly after the other instruments had given up.

Cellist Alban Gerhardt with Conductor Alpesh Chauhan and the BBC Phil
Cellist Alban Gerhardt with the BBC Phil conducted by Alpesh Chauhan © BBC/Chris Payne

To end the first half, Gerhardt delighted the audience with an encore, Moderato by Mstislav Rostropovich, one of two studies for solo cello written in the 1940s but not published in Moscow until 1972. As Gerhardt said, the work had nothing to do with Shostakovich or the atmosphere of the cello concerto, although Rostropovich was an obvious connection. In Gerhardt’s performance it was great fun, jolly and virtuosic with so much double stopping that a times it almost felt as if Gerhardt was accompanying himself to create a string quartet.

Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben

In 1898, Richard Strauss wrote to a friend from the Bavarian Alps, with what Robert Philip described as ‘characteristic irony’

“As Beethoven’s Eroica is so very unpopular with our conductors and is therefore seldom performed nowadays, I am meeting a pressing need by composing a great tone poem entitled “A Hero’s Life” (true, it has no funeral march, but it is in E flat major and does have lots of horns, horns being quite the thing to express heroism).”

Richard Strauss, letter to a friend July 1898

The stage on Saturday was specially extended to accommodate all the 100 or so players needed for Richard Strauss’s description of his heroic life as a composer, which he completed in 1898. In the opening movement, ‘The Hero’, conductor Alpesh Chauhan brought out the individual heroic themes very clearly – this movement can sound muddled with such a large orchestra. The ensemble in the low and upper strings was impeccable.

The second movement, ‘The Hero’s Adversaries’ , began with a characterful description of a swarm of irritating critics [did Strauss mean us?!] and weary strings expressing Strauss’s response to them. Wagnerian chromaticism brought some Parsifal-like regret. The sniping critics returned, but were overtaken and obliterated by the joyful playing of the rest of the orchestra.

Richard Strauss's wife Pauline de Ahna
Richard Strauss’s wife, the German operatic soprano Pauline de Ahna

The highlight of the BBC Phil’s performance was the third movement, ‘The Hero’s Female Companion’, referring to Strauss’s wife, the opera singer Pauline de Ahna. This movement was in effect a short violin concerto, with the Leader of the orchestra Zoë Beyers taking the solo part in a stunning performance. Beyers described the female companion’s various moods, her playing alternately sweet, emotive, tender, flirtatious, deeply passionate, sensual and skittish, contrasting with the lugubrious bass theme representing her husband. There was a spellbinding bloom of orchestral sound as a huge, sweeping Romantic tune showed the couple united in love, overcoming the snarky critics who briefly tried to break in at the end.

Offstage trumpets announced ‘The Hero’s Battlefield’, in which we experienced the visceral thrill of a massive orchestra, with fiercely war-like percussion, stentorian trumpets, and golden-sounding horns, conductor Chauhan dancing with delight on the podium as the hero won his battle.

The fifth movement, ‘The Hero’s Works of Peace’ was an ecstatic summary of the composer’s work to date, including quotations from Don Juan (1888), Death and Transfiguration (1889) Don Quixote (1897), and Till Eulenspiegel (1894–95) recently performed by the BBC Philharmonic at the Bridgewater Hall. The brass were magnificent in this movement, and the timpani must have been hit harder than they have ever been hit before in the Bridgewater Hall.

The final movement, ‘The Hero’s Retreat from the World and Fulfilment’ began with an ominous tuba theme from the critics and the hero’s anger in return. A lovely cor anglais solo from Lydia Griffiths led to a pastoral section and a return of the solo violin and the horn theme from earlier, Chauhan conducting delicately now, with one foot slightly raised. Although the critics briefly re-appeared, the piece ended in a blaze of Romantic glory, with a nod to Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) as the lovers retreated into their love nest. Chauhan gave numerous, well-deserved ‘curtain calls’ to individual soloists and whole sections of the orchestra, bringing a lovely evening to a close.

Performers

Alban Gerhardt cello
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Alpesh Chauhan (Principal Guest Conductor of the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra and Music Director of Birmingham Opera Company) conductor

Repertoire

Anna Clyne This Moment (UK premiere commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra in 2023)
Dmitri Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 2
Mstislav Rostropovich Moderato (encore)
Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben

Sources

A Conversation with Composer Anna Clyne. Credit WRTImusic/YouTube/Alex Ariff.

Ariff, Alex, A Conversation with Composer Anna Clyne (WRTImusic YouTube 30/01/2024)
Philip, Robert, The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music (Yale University Press, 2020) 
Schuh, Willi, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years, 1864–1898, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Bryant, Miranda, From MLK to Silicon Valley, how the world fell for ‘father of mindfulness’ (The Observer 22 January 2022)
Clyne, Anna Programme Note on This Moment
Matthew-Walker, Robert, Sleeve Notes to Shostakovich Cello Concerto No 2 in G major, Op 126/Britten Cello Symphony (Hyperion Records/Signum Classics)
Burney, Gerald Repertoire Note on Concerto for Cello and Orchestra No. 2 in G major op. 126 (1966) by Shostakovich (Boosey & Hawkes)

Saturday’s concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 in Concert on Wednesday 20 November at 7.30pm. It will be available for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds.