The Hallé, Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 17 May 2024. 5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

Photo Credit: Sim Canetty-Clarke.

The Hallé, Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 17 May 2024.

5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

“Two musical knights in a concert to treasure.”

For many in Friday’s Nottingham audience the line-up must have been a musical dream-come-true: The Hallé (the city’s orchestra-in-residence), its much-loved and soon-to-be-departing conductor – plus another local and national treasure as the concerto soloist. And the music they played wasn’t bad either.

It’s not everyday that two musical knights take to the concert stage together but in this concert conductor Sir Mark Elder joined forces with pianist Sir Stephen Hough. And the piece they played is one of the most daunting in the repertoire: on an epic, titanic scale, requiring almost superhuman technique and physical stamina from the soloist. Brahms’ Piano Concerto No 1 was a struggle for its 20-something composer to write, and that struggle is audible in the music.

It starts with the orchestral equivalent of a volcanic eruption: phrases thrown upwards by the violins, growling basses and a ferocious drum roll. Its seriousness is matched by the demands it places on its interpreters. Sir Stephen’s long experience with this work was evident everywhere – as was his muscular strength, often moving from extreme tenderness to striking chords so loud that one feared for the Steinway’s strings.

The first movement was driven but never rushed (all those fearsome trills really making their mark) and the central Adagio had an almost chamber-like clarity and sensitivity together with a moving solemnity and beauty. The finale added vivacity and grace to its initial brusque dance of victory. The whole performance, enhanced by the closest rapport between soloist, conductor and orchestra, was a mighty achievement. An encore seemed inevitable, Sir Stephen obliging with an exquisite Chopin waltz.

The concert’s second half started poignantly with George Butterworth’s orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad, a piece which now sounds like an elegy for all those young soldiers who lost their lives (as did Butterworth himself) in the Great War. It evokes the beauty of the English countryside and distils the sadness of poems by A. E. Housman that grieve for the loss of young potential. Much of the music is very quiet and fragile, requiring extreme sensitivity from its performers to make the subtle colouring really tell. This is music which seems to flow in the Hallé’s veins and their performance was deeply moving.

Finally came Elgar’s Enigma Variations, the composer’s set of character studies based on his ‘friends pictured within’. It’s a piece which shows two very different sides to its composer’s personality: the robust confidence of the self-made English gentleman – and the restless diffidence of the outsider. Sir Mark handled all facets of the piece with equal insight: the confidential immediacy of the theme, for instance, the glorious nobility of ‘Nimrod’ – as well as the sense of fun, of splendour and of swaggering ebullience in the self-portrait which ends the piece. If the audience had entered the Hall with the highest expectations, they certainly wouldn’t have gone home disappointed.

The Hallé

Sir Mark Elder (conductor), Sir Stephen Hough (piano)