Manchester was the place to be for superb performances in 2025
The Year in Classical Music
Sometimes going abroad reminds you how good things are at home. In the spring of 2025, I went to the Shostakovich Festival in Leipzig, featuring world-class performers such as the Gewandhausorchester and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. So it was lovely to return home to Manchester to find performers who are just as good.
This post doesn’t pretend to be a ‘best of’ list. There are plenty of those elsewhere. It’s a look back over some of my personal highlights of the year. I have chosen only one concert or opera from each of the performing groups I reviewed in 2025, to celebrate the music of Manchester… and a few other places too.
Manchester Classical
The biennial Manchester Classical Festival is rapidly becoming a fixture in Manchester.
A highlight on Day One was the concert by Riot Ensemble, who have now chosen Manchester as their home base. As they say on their website,
“Why Manchester? Because the classical music scene here is simply electric: welcoming, ambitious, and fiercely creative.“
Under their Chief Conductor, John Storgårds, the BBC Philharmonic has had another excellent year, but I have chosen one of many highlights, the strings of the orchestra in a stunning concert directed from the violin by Leader Zoë Beyers.
Manchester Collective continued to surprise and delight us with their varied and unusual programmes, always performed with passion and deep humanity. The new piece Wintering by Samantha Fernando gave its name to a concert with The Marian Consort at Stoller Hall in November.
Kahchun Wong is quickly becoming established as a fine conductor of the Hallé. At their performance of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto in November, following a successful tour of China, he made a bold statement of intent,
“After China, we have a new mission: to represent Manchester and this region as cultural ambassadors, with your support”
Opera North
Opera North continue to delight us with their productions at the Lowry. Their production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman was another triumph, reviewed here in Leeds.
In October, we welcomed English National Opera to the Lowry in Britten’s Albert Herring, their first fully-staged production here. We look forward to many more productions in the future.
Kantos Chamber Choir provides immersive experiences through its thoughtful programming and staging. One of the highlights of the year was their spellbinding, emotional journey through the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612.
The year ended with a joyful celebration of Christmas in the delightful company of The Apex Singer, a mix of favourites and pieces from their new album Kvällen.
Elsewhere, the Southwell Festival in Nottinghamshire, now in its eleventh year, included another personal highlight, a concert by the Portuguese singer-songwriter Inês Loubet.
Leipzig is one of the most musical cities in the world, home of the Gewandhausorchester and with links to Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Robert and Clara Schumann. JS Bach is buried in Thomas Kirche, where he was director of music, so it was profoundly moving to hear his music performed there.
Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand in St Paul’s Cathedral
When I sang in the Hallé Choir, I was privileged to perform at the opening concert at Bridgewater Hall in 1996. Before we went on stage, conductor Kent Nagano told us that this was a one-off experience – we would probably never get the chance to sing at the opening of a major international concert hall again. So I can imagine how much it meant for members of London’s Bach Choir to sing in the choir’s 150th anniversary concert at St Paul’s Cathedral in October, a concert that will live long in the memory, for performers and audience alike.
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
A tribute to the variety of sounds that strings make, and the human connections that music brings
Manchester Collective
Some concerts are about the music only, the sheer joy of music-making. Others have an external framework, which may be emotional, intellectual, musicolgical, or even spiritual; or a mixture of all of these. Sunday afternoon’s excellent concert by Manchester Collective at the RNCM in Manchester combined all these elements.
Linda Begbie, the Collective’s new Chief Executive, introduced the concert. Last week, she had been auditioning young students for the new Manchester Collective studio at the RNCM. They expressed their fears about a world that was ‘very dark and dangerous, a very scary place.’ With evident emotion in her voice, she said that music is all about connection, ‘if we move away from this, that’s where things go wrong. ‘The Collective’s ethos, she said, was about bringing full humanity to their performances so audiences could meet them there. The concert would address life, death, and divine ecstasy.
Rakhi Singh, Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of the Collective, and lead violinist and conductor for this concert, took up the theme, describing her arrangement of the ninth-century Christian hymn Veni Creator Spiritus as an invocation of the Holy Spirit. She said that the Collective tries to evoke its spirit in the rehearsal room, but it usually only appears in front of an audience. She echoed the feelings of Begbie’s students, that the world seems to be falling apart; we need to find our kindness and courage, and use our despair and outrage to take positive action.
I would try to imagine what a Shaker ceremony must have felt like – those normally stern souls suddenly sprung loose in a rapture of religious ecstasy as they shook in sympathetic vibration with their creator
John Adams on ‘Shaker Loops’
The John Adams piece, Shaker Loops, also has a spiritual aspect. Adams was inspired by the minimalism of pieces for tape loops, repeated looping patterns found in pieces like Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain (1965).
Adams was also inspired by the ecstatic, spiritual dancing of the Shakers religious community, which was set up in the North West of England in the eighteenth century before moving to America. Reading his works over sections of the music, Lancashire-born poet Christ Bryan celebrated the Shakers and its founder Ann Lee in the first of three poems, Genesis. He honoured Lee as ‘The Seer.. God the Mother’, who founded the Shakers as an offshoot of the Quakers, during the Industrial Revolution, when,
‘The town’s waters are no longer used for baptism Crucified new to the crux of commerce.’
The second poem, Exodos, laments, in Bryan’s words, ‘the spiritual malaise of modernity and materialism of all forms – theological, philosophical and economical.’ It begins with evocative words describing a post-industrial landscape,
‘The provocation of concrete is now in bloom The endless bankrupt brick blossom.’
The third and final poem, Revelation, like the other poems, takes its name from one of the books of the Bible. It’s a joyful reworking of the Shaker Hymn A Beautiful Day,
From brook and from fountain come voices of welcome To look beyond to that region where the supernatural lay Where beameth forever a beautiful day.’
Singh described the divine connection of music and dance in Adams’ piece; she said the Collective sought a divine connection in their playing and brought it to the audience.
The musicological aspect of Sunday’s concert was touched on by Adams in his programme note to Shaker Loops, referring to the musical meaning of to shake, ‘meaning either to make a tremolo with the bow across the string or else to trill rapidly from one note to another.’ The viola player Ruth Gibson introduced Terra Memoria for string quartet by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho by asking players to demonstrate the varied string techniques used by the composer. This was not just a technical exercise. The piece illustrated the whole range of emotions that form part of the grieving process, from lamenting, pain, anger and resignation to moments of reconciliation and yearning, and hope.
“The title Terra Memoria refers to two words which are full of rich associations: to earth and memory. Here earth refers to my material, and memory to the way I’m working on it.”
Kaija Saariaho
The concert’s opening piece, Such Different Paths by the Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova, also featured varied string techniques. The composer asks for playing at one point to sound ‘like a folk fiddle, and elsewhere asks the players to ‘think Baroque.’ The Collective, here consisting of a septet, brought out the full range of colour in this dense and complex piece.
Throughout the concert, The Collective embraced all the music’s musicological, intellectual and spiritual aspects, absorbed them, and created an emotional whole. Their playing throughout was virtuosic, passionate, precise yet emotional. They continue on their mission of communicating deeply through music.
Manchester Collective and Christ Byran
Performers
Rakhi Singh Violin Haim Choi Violin Will Chadwick Violin Donald Grant Violin Rose Hinton Violin Anna Tulchinskaya Violin Bethan Allmand Violin Mira Marton Violin Eloise MacDonald Violin Ruth Gibson Viola Abby Bowen Viola Gemma Dunne Viola Ben Michaels Cello Alex Holladay Cello Jess Schafer Cello Alice Durrant Double bass Christ Bryan Live poetry
Repertoire
Dobrinka Tabakova Such Different Paths Kaija Saariaho Terra Memoria Hymn arr. Rakhi Singh Veni Creator Spiritus John Adams Shaker Loops feat. Christ Bryan
Refractions: A Unique Concert Journey Beyond Genres
A refracted image of Clark and Rakhi Singh
This Blog has sometimes considered the definition of music beyond the convention that it must contain melody, rhythm, or harmony. Ambient music like Steven Wilson’s Ghosts on Magnetic Tape, which he recorded under the name Bass Communion, challenges our assumptions. Manchester Collective, under their Creative Director, Rakhi Singh, also like to challenge our assumptions, albeit in a different way, by breaking down barriers between musical genres. Their mission statement reads,
To us, music is most powerful when it’s immediate and personal, not bound by convention.
This applies not only to how they present their concerts but also to how they blend musical genres. A good example of this is their recent Sirocco tour, part of their long-term collaboration with the South African cellist Abel Selaocoe, who plays classical cello but also uses his voice to stunning effect in African throat singing.
On Friday evening in Manchester, the Collective completely broke down the barriers between genres, with music performed by a string ensemble led by Singh, electronics by the English musician Clark and dance choreographed by the Australian/Javanese choreographer and performer Melanie Lane.
Choreographer Melanie Lane on Refractions
Although my father, the church organist and choirmaster John Charles Holmes, was born in the 1930s, he would have understood what the Collective is aiming for. He knew little about pop or rock, but musically, he had an open mind – he was a fan of John Peel’s radio show. He once heard a track by electronic dance music pioneers 808 State and perceptively commented that it sounded like Baroque music. On Friday, we heard contemporary electronic music by Clark, seamlessly combined with music of Bach, Beethoven, Hildegard von Bingen, and Picforth. There was also more recent classical music by Britten and Ligeti.
Clark. Image by Ingrid Turner
The programme ran as a continuous musical sequence with no interval. There was scattered applause after the first piece, but after that, the audience remained silent until the well-deserved standing ovation at the end. Significantly, the list of pieces played was handed out to the audience after the concert, presumably to avoid preconceptions about the music colouring our perception. One of the joys of the concert was trying to guess who was making the music and where it was coming from, so expertly were the different styles of music blended and contrasted.
Linear time is a story we tell ourselves. But what if we rewrote it? In Refractions, medieval and baroque music crashes against modern electronica. Dancers call upon rituals from both ancient and alien civilisations.
From manchestercollective.co.uk
Choreographer Melanie Lane bought into the concept through the three dancers, Samantha Hines, Niamh Keeling and Moses Ward. She was inspired by Renaissance paintings, with sometimes violent imagery, and the movement and posture of many of those paintings. She was also inspired by science fiction, how the body might evolve into ‘something other’, and the journey from the Baroque to the modern. The costumes, designed by Don Aretino, were also a mix of the Baroque and the futuristic. There was a stunning example at the end of the concert, when the three dancers came on wearing what appeared to be long dark cloaks of the kind worn in the eighteenth century. As the dancers twisted and turned and spun, the cloaks opened up like flowers, creating an image of great power and beauty.
Manchester Collective and Clark with dancers Samantha Hines, Niamh Keeling and Moses Ward. Image by Ingrid Turner
Elsewhere, the movement of the dancers was deliberately angular and disturbing. It was fascinating that when they first came on, the women facing up to each other, while Moses Ward seemed to exist in his own separate world, there was no music, defying the convention that dance is accompanied by music. Here, dance came first. Later on, the dancers interacted with the musicians, again defying convention. They sat and watched the musicians before they broke into dance, and at one point, one of the musicians tapped the pianist on the shoulder. There was a fantastic coup de théâtre when all three dancers suddenly appeared as a living sculpture in the middle of the musicians, with a brief white spotlight on them. In another scene, they wrapped themselves round each other to create a single living entity. One of them crawled out from under the piano with feral, cat-like movements.
Images by Ingrid Turner
Musically, the concert was a tour de force. It began with gentle electronics that exploded into something more sinister, as dry ice rose ominously from the stage. We then went on a phantasmagoric musical journey, as if in a fever dream. It was impossible to predict where the journey would take us next. There were moments of extreme beauty and serenity, such as the choral Antiphon by Hildegard von Bingen. Later, there was an extended section where it felt as if we were immersed in a horror film. Clark’s electronics were evocative and mesmerising throughout the concert, richly textured and emotive. As usual with the Collective, the standard of musicianship was incredibly high. Special mention should be made of Rakhi Singh, fiercely concentrating as she led the ensemble; the two cellists Nick Trygstad, Peggy Nolan and double bass player Alice Durrant, who provided stunning bass parts to match the electronic basslines; and pianist Junyan Chen whose touch was beautifully even.
It will be fascinating where Manchester Collective take us next, but the depth of imagination in their programming ensures that wherever they go we will want to join them on their musical journey.
Performers
Dancers Samantha Hines, Niamh Keeling, Moses Ward Electronics Clark Violin I Rakhi Singh, Martyn Jackson, Marie Schreer, Roman Lytwyniw Violin II Eva Thorarinsdottir, Will Newell, Lily Whitehurst Viola Alex Mitchell, Lucy Nolan Cello Nick Trygstad, Peggy Nolan Double Bass Alice Durrant Piano Junyan Chen
Cellist Abel Selaocoe and Manchester Collective stand on the shoulders of ancestors to create an evening of joyous, life-affirming music
Ruth Gibson, Simmy Singh, Rakhi Singh, Abel Selaocoe,Sidiki Dembele, Alan Keary
‘Home is where one starts from.’
T.S. Eliot East Coker (Four Quartets)
In his poem East Coker, T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘Home is where one starts from.’ Manchester Collective have been touring Sirocco, their collaboration with South African cellist Abel Selaocoe, since June 2018 when they first performed the programme at the Stoller Hall. Coming full circle, they ended their latest tour of the show, which had begun in Prague earlier in the month, at their home in Manchester.
Selaocoe said how pleased he was to be home, and this concert was based on a sense of place both in geography and history. Sirocco combined African music and Western classical music, sometimes juxtaposed and sometimes in the same piece. This mixing of styles has been described as ‘fusion’, but Selaocoe, talking to BBC News Africa, rejected the term,
“This is not fusion, but an opportunity for different places to live in the same space.“
Selaocoe told the audience that the Sirocco project has been a melting pot of musical languages from people who had grown up on different continents; ultimately a ‘plea for us to listen to each other.’
Introducing the second piece, Improvisation, he invited us to leave Earth and join him and the Collective on a journey to the cosmos. Selaocoe began with spiritual whispering, as if summoning up the ghosts of his ancestors, with a high melody on his cello, and gently strummed bass guitar from Alan Keary, with the very human sound of the talking drum from percussionist Sidiki Dembele. Selaocoe gently intoned an endless melody as we journeyed towards the stars. A frenetic cello motif, constantly evolving, led to a moment of stasis as we left the Earth’s atmosphere, then percussion and cello rose together as we reached the stratosphere. Floating in space, a serene solo cello looked down over the earth from afar.
Three movements from Purcell’s Fairy Queen were illuminated by the improvisation, becoming a stately place to be, as a cosmic dance lifted the spirits, and we began to move quickly through the cosmos past the stars. The journey wasn’t only across space but through time, back to the end of the 18th century when Purcell wrote The Fairy Queen.
Selaocoe spoke movingly about the voices of his ancestors, who passed on not just their name but their stories, and on whose shoulders he felt privileged to stand. In IbuyileL’Africa, which described liberation from apartheid in South Africa, there was a heart-stopping moment when he, the Collective and Keary sang a gorgeous South African choral piece in the style of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
Abel Selaocoe. Photo: ableselaocoe.com
Ibuyile was paired with a movement from Haydn’sString Quartet Op. 76 No.1, played with elegance and poise by a quartet of Selaocoe on cello and the three string players from the Collective. Selaocoe saw this as part of the dialogue between musical traditions – in his mind, a fabric binds Western classical music with African music. He also saw links between African music and the work of Benjamin Britten, whose March from Three Divertimenti the quartet delivered with fierce brilliance, swooping strings, and amazing precision and attack; the piece felt both timeless and contemporary. Selaocoe said he would have enjoyed hanging out with Britten outside the technicalities of music, and that Britten used his techniques in an African style.
The Britten piece was followed by O Fredrik, O Fredrik by contemporary Norwegian composer Johannes Rusten. Electric bass and percussion joined the string quartet, another example of different traditions collaborating; the piece was arranged by the superb Danish String Quartet, and re-arranged again by adding African instruments. The two Singh sisters, Rakhi and Simmy, danced as they played a folky African melody, and Keary’s bass playing was seriously funky. Simmy provided a stunning, jazzy solo in the style of Jean-Luc Ponty or Stéphane Grappelli. As Selaocoe, said, the thread that binds the greatest music, is the groove, present not just in the Scandinavian sound of Rusten, but in classical music, jungle music and everywhere.
“This concert is a love letter to music and camaraderie. Music is a language that transcends borders and space and time… Manchester Collective is all about community”
Jasmin Kent Rodgman, Co-Artistic Director, Manchester Collective
Selaocoe’s sense of traditional African music and Western classical music existing in the same space was also evident in the opening piece, Qhawe [‘those who ask questions will find answers’]. It began with an austere, intense solo cello, with a touch of Bach, followed by Selaocoe’s phenomenal African throat singing. He told BBC Africa that he learned this style from the singing women of the Xhosa people, using a voice that took him to ‘a much more magical place.’ He began as if he was almost talking to himself, with rapid breathing. Then he stood to address the audience with passionately rhythmic, stentorian singing, his sheer physical presence absolutely compelling. The variety of his vocal talents was illustrated later by Lerato, in which he sang with a gentle, plaintive, bluesy voice, achingly beautiful, accompanied by gorgeous, hymn-like meditative harmonies from the women of the Collective.
Percussionist Sidiki Dembele, from Côte d’Ivoire brought a touch of West Africa to his formidable playing in the traditional song Takamba from Mali. He used only two drums – a djembe (left), shaped like a large goblet with added bells on either side, and a calabash, traditionally made from half of a large, dried gourd – but he produced a sound like a rock music drum solo on a complete kit.
Dembele brought not just virtuosity but joy, with frenzied playing at the end of Takamba as the audience clapped along to his complex rhythms with incredible accuracy (Manchester audiences are very sophisticated…) Viola player Ruth Gibson provided a delightful folky, evocative solo above a slow groove. There was joyful virtuosity in other pieces, too. Bass player Alan Keary made his instrument sing in a wonderful solo in Qhawe, going joyfully off-piste as the performers smiled indulgently at him. At the start of IbuyileL’Africa, he played with a beautifully mellow tone, a melancholy response to the Haydn string quartet movement, with a sound like the fretless bass of the great Jaco Pastorius (there can be no higher praise than that).
In the final piece, Kae Mo Rota, there was more Jaco-style playing from Keary, complete with overtones, as Selaocoe challenged him to play a virtuoso part in response to his short cello notes. Selaocoe explained that the title of the piece meant, ‘Dear friend, I like you very much’, and invited us to say those words to our neighbour. The piece was a stunning ending to the concert, with more astonishing percussion from Dembele, ending with an infectious groove which brought a well-deserved, spontaneous standing ovation. Selaocoe joked that he had nearly gone home at the interval, but in truth his spiritual home is on stage in front of an adoring audience.
After that, there had to be an encore. The band obliged withKa Bohaleng, Selaocoe inviting the audience to chant the title of the song. He came to the front of the stage, wielding his cello, and Dembele joined him in an ecstatic dance-off. By now the audience were all on their feet, some dancing in the aisles, all of us gleefully clapping along. Selaocoe did his best Freddie Mercury impression, inviting us to match the virtuosity of his singing.
This was a wonderful, life-affirming concert, a reminder of the exhilaration that music can bring. It provided food for the mind, balm for the soul, joy for the feet, and rhythm for the body. Selaocoe was a warm, generous host and the musicians around him shared in his jubilation and virtuosity. An evening to remember for a long time.
Sirocco: Ka Bohaleng (Official video) Abel Selaocoe with Manchester Collective & Chesaba
Performers
Abel Selaocoe Cello Rakhi Singh Violin Simmy Singh Violin Ruth Gibson Viola Alan Keary Bass guitar Sidiki Dembele Percussion
Setlist
Qhawe Improvisation Movements from Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen Polska from Dorotea (Trad. arr. Danish String Quartet and Manchester Collective) Lerato Takamba (Trad. Mali)
March from Benjamin Britten’s Three Divertimenti Johannes Rusten: O Fredrik, O Fredrik (arr. Danish String Quartet and Manchester Collective) Hlokomela Joseph Haydn String QuartetOp. 76 No.1 (Hob.III:75) 2nd movt. Adagio Ibuyile L’Africa Kea Mo Rata
Ka Bohaleng
Sources
Eliot, T.S., Four Quartets (Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1944) MKemoli, Debula and Michelle, Nyasha, How South Africa’s Abel Selaocoe includes throat singing while playing the cello (BBC News Africa 11 January 2024)
A musical art installation brings ‘a stillness that moves’ to Manchester
Manchester Collective first appeared on this Blog in December 2019, a review of a concert at The White Hotel in Salford, a small and (on the evening of the performance) very cold venue. Since then, this Blog hasn’t featured the Collective, for very boring reasons – partly due to the author being distracted by writing two books and by the joys of progressive rock (which, you will pleased to hear, will still be celebrated elsewhere on this Blog). In the interim, the group has continued to innovate, maintaining the highest possible artistic standards, deservedly performing to much bigger audiences, but never compromising its musical and artistic ambition. It remains one of the most exciting chamber groups on the UK classical music scene.
In 2009, the architect Zaha Hadid created a musical art installation for Manchester Art Gallery, turning an upstairs gallery into a temporary performance space called the JS Bach Chamber Music Hall, in which small-scale works by the great German composer were played live while the audience and performers were surrounded by a continuous, snaking piece of white Lycra. Lynne Walker in The Independent described it as ‘the perfect union of sound and space.’ Last Friday, Manchester Collective created, to adapt Walker’s phrase, the perfect union of sound and visuals at the Bridgewater Hall to recreate the experience of being in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.
Using evocative lighting designed by Lewis Hall, the stage was set with a series of upright lights to suggest the corners of the Chapel, and a suspended lighting structure to suggest the shape of the roof. The visual effect, with the colours of the lighting changing to match each piece of music, was spellbinding. The audience often sat in darkness, in rapt attention as if observing a sacred ritual, with shafts of light from the stage casting mysterious shadows.
The Rothko Chapel opened in 1971, a year after the American painter Mark Rothko died. Known for his large-scale canvasses of single colours or blocks of colour, Rothko’s legacy in the Chapel was a temple of art, with 14 of his darker-coloured paintings on the walls of the octagonal building. The aim of founders John and Dominique de Menil was also to create a non-denominational chapel, open to all. According to the Chapel’s website, it provides,
‘A stillness that moves… A quiet disruption… A sanctuary for the seeker…’
The music in Friday’s concert often provided the same experience. The phrase ‘a quiet disruption’ was particularly apt for three new commissions by Isobel Waller-Bridge, Katherine Balch and Edmund Finnis. The concert took its title from a piece written in 1971 by the American composer Morton Feldman, Rothko Chapel which was first performed in the Chapel in 1972. The new commissions, scattered across the first half, were given the same brief of responding to the architecture and atmosphere of the Chapel. As Rakhi Singh, Manchester Collective’s Creative Director, said in a short introduction from the stage, it’s very unusual to hear three new works in one concert; it’s challenging to be faced with over half an hour of music of which no recordings exist yet; and all three composers brought a very different response to the brief. Hearing the pieces unfold in real time was a fascinating and rewarding challenge.
The first of the three works was No. 9 for choir, string quartet, celeste and percussion by Isobel Waller-Bridge. Viewing the Rothko Room installation at Tate Modern a while ago had a profound effect on me – standing in the middle of the room, not looking directly at the black and maroon canvasses, created a sense of oppressive claustrophobia; it was almost as if the paintings were breathing. Waller-Bridge quotes Rothko’s own words about his painting No. 9; White and Black on Wine,
‘When you turned your back to the painting, you would feel that presence the way you feel the sun on your back.’
The composer’s reaction to the painting was very striking,
‘I stood in front of this painting for a long time. Sound emanated from it.’
Rakhi Singh’s description of the new piece was that it was ‘very bold.’ There were moments when it felt as if we were watching a pagan ritual from a horror film, the lights causing members of the Sansara choir to appear in silhouette; all that what was missing was the cowls that are often worn in such rituals in films. The piece began with a simple falling motif from Sansara choir, which was soon joined by interlocking string passages as the choir reached a delicious cacophony with intense strings. The music rose to a horrifying, frenetic climax, with the ominous rumble of percussion, scampering strings and tubular bells that might remind some of the music for the 1973 horror film The Exorcist. Minimalist chanting recalled the feverish atmosphere of George Crumb’s string quartet Black Angels (1971). The clatter of drums led to the choir singing in fierce, nightmarish unison, before the music fell away with serene chords, then tone clusters that were reminiscent of music used in another film, Atmosphères (1961) by György Ligeti from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A long held soprano note with more intense chord clusters ended the piece as it died away.
Rakhi Singh gave only one clue about the second commission – ‘the details are important’ – but it was helpful to know what to listen for in songs and interludes for choir (women only), harmonica, celeste and percussion by Katherine Balch. The piece has a fascinating set of influences, concepts and structural references, drawn as Balch says, from ‘a few disparate sources.’ Firstly, she adopted Feldman’s structure from Rothko Chapel, interspersing songs with instrumental interludes. Secondly, rather than using the dark colour palette from Rothko’s paintings in the Chapel, Balch was inspired by his earlier Color Field works from the 1950s which are painted in much brighter hues and warmer tones. Finally, to provide linking texts, she took words from Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) and using black-out poetry techniques redacted almost all the words on the page, leaving a fragmented version of the essay with only one or two words per page. She says,
‘The result resembles, in my mind, Rothko Chapel’s black triptychs – mostly monochromatic, with textural ripples.’
The piece began with overlapping bursts of voices, demonstrating strong harmonic invention. Resonant percussion led to a moving, magical section where various choir members played harmonica. It sounded as if the music was being beamed from a different dimension. A moment of profound stillness and beauty. A single, solo voice was followed by transgressive whispering and brittle percussion. Fragments of melody bloomed as the percussion became more fractured. If the devil was in the atmosphere of the Isobel Waller-Bridge piece, here the devil was in the detail of the tightly structured miniatures. The piece ended with high harmonica notes and a vocal fugue. Throughout, the virtuosity of percussionist Delia Stevens who did the work of two or three people at once, and the choir of women, was fully in evidence in a superb performance of the work.
Rakhi Singh didn’t provide any clues about the third and final Manchester premiere, Blue Divided Blue for choir, string quartet and tubular bells by Edmund Finnis. In the programme note, Finnis quoted Rothko’s description of the appropriate reaction to his paintings – they are about much more than the use of colour,
‘The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.’
Finnis uses a text, ‘assembled exclusively from words found in titles of paintings by Rothko’ to create a ‘lament.’
The piece began with solo viola played by Ruth Gibson, intently going round and back on itself, leading to dense textures in the string quartet, and the choir passing the words ‘blue divided’ around from singer to singer. Calm, contemplative strings led to vocals spiralling forever upwards until they fell back again with gorgeous textures. Yearning, ambiguous chords morphed into each other, with dense choral textures slowly evolving as they came in and out of focus. The singers’ voices dropped to the depths as a busy string theme led to the final motif on tubular bells.
It was a privilege and a profound pleasure to hear three such contrasting new works, and before the interval Singh made an impassioned plea for the importance of new music. All the rest of the music in the concert has been performed and recorded elsewhere, but was beautifully programmed, as is always the case with Manchester Collective, to create a unique, special experience.
The concert began with the choir singing Solfeggio (1963) by Arvo Pärt, a fairly early work in serialist style before the composer developed his later tonal. bell-like style, the tones floating on the air to belie the formal structure. Nick Trygstad immaculately performed two works for solo cello, the plainsong-like Ave Maria (1972) by Giacinto Scelsi, and 7 Papillons: No. 2 by Kaija Saariaho, graphically describing the fluttering first flight of a butterfly. But perhaps the highlight of the first half, apart from the three substantial new commissions, was Vespers for Violin (2014) by Missy Mazzoli superbly performed by Rakhi Singh on a heavily echoed instrument, with supporting electronics including a recorded female voice that lurk unsettlingly below the soaring, ecstatic violin line, suggesting a twisted ritual remembered in a fever dream.
The second half of the concert was devoted to Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, another piece with ritualistic elements that at times were similar in emotional depth to a later work, The Protecting Veil (1988) by John Tavener. Both works feature a solo string instrument, viola and cello respectively. In concert, they create a sense of communal contemplation, a collective gathering of thought. Appropriately then, after the enticingly challenging nature of the earlier works in the concert, the piece ends with a simple folk melody, a restatement of the basic humanity that lies behind the spirit of the Chapel itself, sending the audience out from the reverential darkness of the Chapel to the bright sunshine of a Mancunian evening. An uplifting ending to a stunning concert.
Creative team Rakhi Singh – Creative Director Tom Herring – SANSARA: Artistic Director Lewis Howell – Lighting Designer Tomoya Forster – Sound Engineer Kate Green – Producer Declan Kennedy – Producer Alex Benn – Stage Manager
Manchester Collective Rakhi Singh – Violin Donald Grant – Violin Ruth Gibson – Viola Nick Trygstad – Cello Delia Stevens – Percussion Katherine – Tinker Celeste
SANSARA Lucinda Cox – Soprano Fiona Fraser – Soprano Daisy Walford – Soprano Clover Willis – Soprano Laura Baldwin – Alto Amy Blythe – Alto Anna Semple – Alto Jack Granby – Tenor Will Wright – Tenor Piers Connor Kennedy – Bass Ben Tomlin – Bass Tom Herring – Conductor, Bass
