The Hallé. Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 03 June 2025, 5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

Photo credit: Angie Kremer.

The Hallé. Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 03 June 2025,

5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

“Music pulsating with drama and sonic spectacle to end another Nottingham Classics season.”

You couldn’t expect a season finale to pack a bigger punch than the one delivered in Nottingham by The Hallé on Tuesday night.  Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture followed by Beethoven’s 9th Symphony: music which pulsates with drama and sonic spectacle.

Wagner’s opera is all about a young knight who is torn between a selfish life devoted to all sorts of sinful, sensuous pleasures (represented by the goddess Venus) and a life of spiritual purity (embodied in his beloved Elizabeth).  The fact that Tannhäuser only achieves salvation through Elizabeth sacrificing her life for him makes the opera somewhat hard to take these days.  Luckily, Wagner sums up the story in the Overture, one of the great orchestral showpieces, which is dominated by Tannhäuser’s Ode to Venus; the whirling, orgiastic Venusberg music and (especially) the Pilgrim’s Chorus, the sort of music for which the term ‘tingle factor’ could have been coined. 

Kahchun Wong paced the whole Overture beautifully: the opening quiet, contemplative, mirroring the Pilgrims heard in the distance.  The huge climaxes were massive, the mighty chorale theme made resplendent by trombones and trumpets whilst the strings cascaded around them.  The Venusberg music, by contrast, had lightness and fluidity, a wicked allure which made sinful pleasure seem highly attractive.  Kahchun Wong conducted from memory, illuminating the Overture’s structure, highlighting detail and drawing vivid instrumental colour from his players.

Beethoven’s 9th Symphony followed.  For all its iconic status, it remains a startling and provocative work, no matter how many times one hears it.  It begins with hesitant uncertainty, as if trying to find a purpose and sense of direction – and ends in a blaze of thrilling, exultant, inspirational energy, with voices proclaiming universal brotherhood.

Once again Kahchun Wong conducted from memory, no mean feat in a piece so long and complex.  He had a sure sense of the symphony’s architecture, from individual phrases to the vast spiritual journey as a whole.  Wong created at the outset an atmosphere of intense expectancy, the tension continually growing until the main theme emerged.  The second movement had impressive rhythmic bite, underpinned by startling interjections from the timpanist.  The slow movement is one of Beethoven’s most sublime creations, based on two themes, one majestic, the other tender.  Both were handled with glowing tenderness in this performance.

The symphony’s finale is now so familiar that it’s hard to imagine how deeply shocking it must have appeared to its first audiences in the 1820s.  One by one Beethoven parades the themes of the symphony’s first three movements to be judged by the cellos and basses – and all three are dismissed as inadequate.  Then a simple, catchy, irresistibly singable melody emerges and is greeted with open arms.  This then becomes the theme on which the rest of the movement spins variations.  But instruments alone are not enough.  Beethoven needs voices too: because his vision of human solidarity requires words to bind people together as they march together into an idealistic future.  It must have seemed deeply eccentric to Beethoven’s first listeners.  If you think about it too much, it can still seem a bit naïve today,  but this isn’t what matters.  The vision is thrilling, its message perpetually relevant, its status still the heartbeat of Western musical culture.

The Hallé Choir were on splendid, full-throated form, coping heroically with all of Beehoven’s unreasonable demands.  The solo quartet of Nardus Williams, Susan Bickley, Nicky Spence and William Thomas were all impressive individually as well as forming an eloquent ensemble.  It was a thrilling way to end another Nottingham Classics season – and the audience stood to roar their approval.

The Hallé

Hallé Choir

Kahchun Wong           conductor
Nardus Williams          soprano
Susan Bickley             mezzo soprano
Nicky Spence             tenor
William Thomas         bass     

This concert also marked the departure of Neil Bennison after nearly 20 years of outstanding service as the Royal Concert Hall’s Music Programme Manager.