The Hallé, Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham. 01 March 2024. 5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.
Nottingham
The Hallé
Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham
01 March 2024
5***** Review: William Ruff.
“Sir Mark Elder and Bruckner 8: an overwhelming experience.”
If anyone ever writes the classical music history of Nottingham, I hope they’ll give Friday’s Hallé concert a chapter all to itself. There are many reasons why Sir Mark Elder conducting Bruckner’s 8th Symphony was a musical landmark. For a start it’s Bruckner’s 200th anniversary this year. And 2024 is also the year that Sir Mark retires from the orchestra he has directed for nearly 25 years.
The last time the symphony was performed in Nottingham was 40 years ago, so this was only its second outing in the Royal Concert Hall. Its rarity is perhaps unsurprising. It may be magnificent but it’s also very long (80 + minutes) and intensely serious from beginning to end. It was written by a man who was devoutly religious and who tended to think of the orchestra in terms of the cathedral organ that he knew and played so well. Bruckner followed his own rules when writing his symphonies and listeners have to get used to things like the music stopping and starting, reaching huge climaxes, petering out and starting all over again. They are great cathedrals of sound: bright light flooding through stained glass windows one moment, the darkness of a side chapel the next. They are not symphonies written with the casual listener in mind.
No 8 is very much a ‘darkness to light’ symphony, beginning in the gloom of uncertainty and ending in the light of unshakable faith and optimism. It strikes many as being the working out of a question, from the restlessly probing opening to the final affirmation. Any performance of this work has some demanding territory to navigate: the anguished longing and desolation of the huge Adagio, for instance, or the grim vision of death at the end of the opening movement, where the music’s heartbeat weakens into oblivion.
Sir Mark ended his short introduction to the symphony with two words to those who had never heard it before: ‘Good luck!’ And then the adventure began, in an atmosphere of intense concentration. All sections of the Hallé performed magnificently, no matter what demands the music threw at them. Bruckner uses each section much as an organist uses the manuals and stops of his instrument, the brass and woodwind operating as separate choirs rather than subtly combining. This puts them under an unusually intense spotlight, especially the 18 brass players who underpin the whole symphony and are present at its most thrilling moments.
Sir Mark brought a lifetime of rich experience to his interpretation of this great (but often baffling) work. It remains an intellectual and emotional challenge for all involved but a live performance offers a musical experience like no other. As the symphony’s four main themes came together at the end of Friday’s Nottingham performance there was an overwhelming feeling that the ‘answer’ - for which the music had been searching since that darkly mysterious opening - had been reached. The cheers which greeted it are still ringing in my ears.
The Hallé conducted by Sir Mark Elder