Thursday 27 November 2025
Stoller Hall, Manchester
****
Samantha Fernando’s new piece Wintering celebrates winter’s withdrawal from daily life
On an unseasonably warm winter’s night, Manchester Collective returned to their home city for the second leg of their Wintering tour. The ensemble’s co-artistic director, Jasmin Kent Rodgman, introduced the concert. She said that the Collective is a ‘shapeshifting ensemble’, tonight made up of a string quartet and a vocal quartet from the Marian Consort. This is what makes Manchester Collective unique: every concert features different and unusual music, there are varied and unusual ensembles, and the music-making is always of the highest quality. They have built up a level of trust with their audiences that means we will follow them, whatever they do.
‘Rather than resist fallow seasons of the year and our lives, we embrace them… we allow ourselves to rest and reflect.’
Jasmin Kent Rodgman
The title Wintering comes from the book by Katherine May, which inspired a new piece by Samantha Fernando. As Rodman said, ‘Rather than resist fallow seasons of the year and our lives, we embrace them… we allow ourselves to rest and reflect.’
Much of the music in the concert was notable for its reflective quality, and for the space between notes. (I like to scribble my thoughts during live performances for later use in writing these posts; I often had to stop writing last night during the intense silence of the pauses in the music). As Miles Davis said, the space between the notes is often as important as the notes themselves: ‘it’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.’
The concert began with excerpts from Prophetiae Sibyllarum by the sixteenth-century composer Orlande de Lassus. We heard more excerpts in the second half of the concert. The 12 motets set texts known as the Sibylline Oracles or Prophecies. The Sybils were pagan prophets or oracles who predicted the coming of Christ. Rory McCleery, founder and director of the Marian Consort, explained that, on the face of it, these pieces have little to do with winter, but that they are ‘seasonal prophecies’ that explore the coming of Jesus through his mother, Mary, and her state of mind.
McCleery also drew our attention to the ‘bold, pioneering, incredibly chromatic music’ of Lassus, and referenced the similarly chromatic music of other sixteenth-century composers like Cipriano de Rore and Vicente Lusitano, who has been described as the first published Black composer. The Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo also springs to mind.
The opening Prologue, the most chromatic section of all, was peppered with remarkable key changes. In 1574, Adrien le Roy, music publisher to King Charles IX of France, wrote to the composer to say that the King was ‘so ravished by it that I cannot describe it.’ This was our first chance to hear the four voices of the Consort singing a capella. Soprano Caroline Halls sang with a lovely, pure tone. Rory McCleery had a gorgeously fruity, powerful counter tenor voice. Will Wright sang with an ardent, lyrical tenor. Bass Jon Stainsby sang with a rich, warm tone. All four were excellent, both as solo singers and in ensemble. Their tuning was impeccable in the intricate Lassus pieces. The strings of the Collective played with minimal vibrato, suiting the Early Music style.
Rodgman introduced David Lang’s the national anthems as part of the concert’s self-reflective theme, describing not the pomp we might expect but pride in our community and also fear and uncertainty. Lang wrote that his original plan was to take ‘just one hopeful sentence’ from each of the world’s national anthems to create a larger text, but was shocked to find in almost every anthem there was,
‘A bloody, war-like, tragic core, in which we cover up our deep fears of losing our freedoms with waves of aggression and bravado’.
He wrote five pieces, which are a meditation on our insecurity about freedom. Last night we heard two of the pieces, our land our peace, which contains the deeply ironic line ‘we fight for our peace’, and later fame & glory, which contains the brutal line, ‘we will die before we are made slaves.’ In the first piece, the words, sung in unison at first, were split up with complete silence in the gaps. Jagged, impassioned harmonies were then offset against the solo bass. The strings were eerie and intense, at times icy, which suited the winter theme. The second piece featured a superb extended solo from Rory McCleery. The piece ended with anxious harmonics from the upper string and chattering viola.
The central point of the concert was Samantha Fernando’s Wintering, which was commissioned by Wigmore Hall in London and premiered there on 22 November. Fernando introduced her new work from the stage, saying that it felt unusual to be with people when she spent most of her time as a composer on her own. She chose chamber instrumentation as it felt intimate, but also to allow the singers’ words to cut through. At times, voices were treated as instruments or provided sound effects.
This remarkable piece began with eerie wind noises from the singers, and lovely, ambiguous wordless chords, discordant yet optimistic. Soprano Caroline Halls joined with a wordless, lamenting folk tune; other singers provided evocative vocal slides. Icy, spellbinding string chords described a bright but bitter winter landscape as the voices came into focus on the word ‘cold’. Fernando’s striking harmonies were full of deliciously painful false relations, a technique often heard in Renaissance polyphony, such as the Lassus pieces.
The most powerful and innovative of the six movements was the fourth, To Do: Do Less, which deservedly drew its own applause. The composer’s instructions in the score summed it up well,
This movement consists of a guided meditation (sung) and an internal monologue (spoken soprano)
Halls was perfect for the role of internal monologue, fretting about everyday concerns such as work meetings, a dental appointment, buying a birthday present, collecting a prescription, finding a babysitter and World Book Day costumes. There was a stunning moment in Fernando’s piece when the soprano suddenly joined the other singers on the words ‘back to the breath’; the meditation had briefly succeeded. Anyone who has tried to meditate will understand exactly the brutal battle to concentrate that Fernando describes here. Her tonal but often discordant language, evident throughout the work, perfectly expressed this inner conflict.
After the interval, there was a palette cleanser, a selection of movements from Jonathan Dove’s lively Out of Time for string quartet. This was a chance for the Manchester Collective quartet to shine, which they duly did. The Collective’s irrepressible co-founder, Rakhi Singh, was absent last night, but her colleagues performed with the brio, passion and precision that have become the Collective’s trademark. First violinist Sara Wolstenholme explained that this energetic and vibrant piece summed up the personality and the life-changing energy of the husband of the woman [Mrs Elizabeth Allsebrook], who commissioned it to celebrate the life of her late husband. Some moments recalled the music of John Adams, whose music was recently celebrated by The Collective in their Shaker Loops concert. The first movement was lively and spiky, the second was flowing and joyful, quietly ecstatic. The third began with a fizzing explosion and a bubbling theme as the music almost fell over itself with excitement.
The concert ended with a superb reworking of Andrzej Panufnik’s Song to the Virgin Mary, described by Rodgman at the start of the concert as expressing the composer’s ‘yearning for the religious folksong’ of his home in Poland. Panufnik wrote that he was inspired by memories of ‘the naive beauty of the religious folk art of Poland’, and by ‘the moving and powerful mediaeval Latin text of an anonymous Polish poet.’ The work takes a melodic theme, based on the pentatonic scale, which Panufnik described as ‘closely related to Polish folk music.’ The theme appears in all 12 keys as it passes through the voices.
Panufnik wrote two versions, the first for a cappella choir in 1964 and the second for string sextet (1987). The Collective drew on elements from both versions to create an extraordinary new hybrid that, in Wolstenholme’s words, was not how the composer envisaged it. In this context, the work felt like a continuation of the chromaticism and false relations we heard in the Lassus pieces earlier. Sometimes it was hard to tell which were voices and which were strings as they entwined each other. Beginning in near darkness with a solo soprano voice, the music gradually gained intensity, until by the end the performers were bathed in glowing light.
The Wintering Tour continues in Liverpool on 29 November, York on 3 December and Bristol on 5 December
Repertoire
Orlando di Lassus selections from Prophetiae Sibyllarum Motets
David Lang the national anthems, i. & iii
Samantha Fernando Wintering (new commission)
Jonathan Dove Out of Time, III–V.
Andrzej Panufnik Song to the Virgin Mary
Performers
MANCHESTER COLLECTIVE
Sara Wolstenholme Violin
Lily Whitehurst Violin
Alex Mitchell Viola
Peggy Nolan Cello
THE MARIAN CONSORT
Caroline Halls Soprano
Rory McCleery Alto
Will Wright Tenor
Jon Stainsby Bass
Read on…
