The Hallé Orchestra launched its new season last week in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, with a rich programme featuring works by two late Romantic masters. They played Elgar’s Enigma Variations as well as one would expect of a band that enjoys an unparalleled relationship with that composer, and they performed Death and Transfiguration, one of Richard Strauss’s early masterpieces, with no less colour. In fact it could be said that, under Mark Elder, whose music directorship is entering its sixth year, the Hallé has won its colours back.
When he succeeded Kent Nagano in 2000, Elder said, in a phrase that is damning for being so understated, that he found a group of players who were ‘competent, but not involved’. That is how the audiences felt, too. Despite leaving its old home, the famous but antiquated Free Trade Hall in 1996, for the liberating pleasures of the superb Bridgewater acoustic, the Hallé sounded like an orchestra whose glory days remained in the memories of those who recalled the 30-year stewardship of the man whose name will forever be associated with Manchester: Sir John Barbirolli.
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