Manchester Collective. Lakeside, Nottingham, 19 March 2025, 5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

Photo Credit: Nabihah Iqbal

Manchester Collective. Lakeside, Nottingham, 19 March 2025,

5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

“Exhilarating, cutting-edge music-making.”

If you ever feel that your ears need a re-boot, then I have the perfect remedy: come to a Manchester Collective concert.  Your entire auditory system will get a thorough work-out…and it won’t be just your ears.  You will find bits of yourself vibrating in all sorts of unexpected ways – and you may want to change your whole definition of music.

Their first piece, Aheym by Bryce Dessner is written for string quartet, although you have to keep reminding yourself that this is same combination of instruments used by Haydn and Beethoven.  Its inspiration comes from the composer’s Jewish grandparents who fled Russia and Poland to settle in America.  Dessner calls it ‘a musical evocation of flight and passage’ and it wraps its irresistible rhythms around you from the very first bar.  The music weaves constantly evolving shapes too – and its textures are almost tangible, as the players use their instruments in unusual ways: eerie harmonics, for instance, or sliding along the strings with the wood of their bows.

Nabihah Iqbal’s What Psyche Felt is a new commission from Manchester Collective and the first piece of classical music that the composer has attempted.  Composed for string quartet, it also features electronic wizardry (created in this performance by Iqbal herself).  It’s gentle, calming music which exploits varying sound textures, producing layer upon layer of meaning as it explores through sound the world evoked by John Keats in his poem ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’.

Ben Nobuto’s somewhat ironically named Serenity 2.0 is again an extraordinary sensory experience in which attempts by music to soothe are thwarted by random attacks by noises which intrude into all our lives: news headlines, TV game shows…and various clicks, beeps, rumbles and crashes.  The work does indeed live up to its name at the end but it’s hard not to feel that our modern lifestyle is a high price to pay for eventual serenity.

In complete contrast there was Insight by Dobrinka Tabakova, a work for string trio and one which uses the unfamiliar rhythms of Bulgaria, where the composer has her roots.  It’s music which uses a traditional medium to suggest a variety of other sounds (organ, brass fanfare etc) whilst cocooning listeners in long, rather gorgeous, slow-moving lines of music.  If Insight is difficult to pin down, perhaps the title says it all: music often stimulates mental images…but no two people will share the same pictures.

Sebastian Gainsborough’s Squint is another piece which melds traditional instruments with electronics and creates a sound sculpture which embraces song and spoken word, placing them in a melting pot of ideas: love, isolation, medieval mysticism, and much else besides.  Listeners are enfolded by waves of sound in ways both beautiful and deeply mysterious.

Finally came Opus by Eric Prydz, a piece which has established itself as a classic in the world of electronic music numbers.  It starts slowly and hypnotically before gradually accelerating and scooping up its listeners as it does so.  Its core is super-exciting and you find yourself wanting to leave your seat and dance.  It returns to slow serenity at the end, like a fairground ride coming back to base.  If it left me wanting the emotional equivalent of a shower and massage table, then goodness knows how it makes the musicians feel.  The dazzlingly virtuosic members of Manchester Collective provide an assault course for the senses, from which they emerge sharper and re-energised.

Manchester Collective: Rakhi Singh (violin), Julian Azkoul (violin), Alex Mitchell (viola), Alice Purton (cello), Beibei Wang (percussion, Nabihah Iqbal (Electronics in ‘What Psyche Felt’)