Manchester Collective finished their latest tour at The White Hotel, Salford, as has been the norm for the last few concert seasons. The Centre Is Everywhere tour contained a wide variety of music for string instruments and voice including the performance of a new piece, 'The Centre Is Everywhere' for strings by Edmund Finnis commissioned by the Collective.
This show was very much a concert in two halves – the first half lasted around 35 minutes and was a continuous performance containing two Bach Chorales, Summer and Winter from Vivaldi’s Seasons, Ligeti’s Metamorphoses Nocturnes. These were cleverly linked together by vignettes written by Manchester Collective composer, Paul Clark.
Manchester Collective chief executive, Adam Szabo provided a warm welcome and brief introduction to this part of the concert. He mentioned that the Bach and Vivaldi were associated with day while the Ligeti nocturnes are associated with the night. This was a tenuous, if factual, link as this contrasting programme itself did much more than portray night and day.
The placing of these pieces together – opening with the string players humming quietly then proceeding to sing an unspecified Bach Chorale. Rather than words, the musicians simply sang 'aah'. This was certainly atmospheric, providing an enjoyable complexity through the polyphony and dissonances allowable in Bach’s time through the medium of very sweet and warm voices. The singers gradually replaced their voices for their instruments and the song merged into a string section that was much more decidedly contemporary. In turn, this became the start of Vivaldi’s Summer and so on the concert went, moving from Vivaldi to Ligeti via Clark, then back to Bach, then Ligeti then Vivaldi to finish.
Sometimes ideas like this can be gimmicky – let us just hear the music please! Not so with the Manchester Collective – this was a very clever and effective organising of the programme. Clark’s vignettes were carefully constructed to blend the Baroque with the 20th century and indeed the stark contrasts in mood between both periods was very well united by his work.
The White Hotel is not a concert venue in the traditional sense of the word – it is really a former mechanic’s premises, complete with corrugated roof, high ceilings, exposed breeze block and huge shutter type garage doors. It is fair to say it never has been nor never will be a hotel any time soon! Little, if anything, has been done to the venue to improve the listener’s experience apart from the adding of a fantastic sound system, which of course was not used for the live performance this time. The concert tonight was followed by another event – a night of electronic music and it typically hosts rock, punk or club nights. I had the choice to attend this concert tonight in The White Hotel or in The Stoller Hall, Manchester, last Saturday and while I am a huge fan of The Stoller Hall, I had no hesitation in choosing The White Hotel. There is something very different about hearing the music of the Collective in a venue like this, away from the sanitised, perfect and formal performances in places like the Stoller Hall. Don’t get me wrong – The Stoller Hall is fantastic and in hindsight I would have gone to both concerts, The Stoller Hall allows the greatest of detail to be heard magnificently better than even the majority of traditional concert venues.
This performance then, which was entirely acoustic, still sounded amazing in this incongruous place. I have never heard Vivaldi’s seasons performed live before and under Rakhi Singh’s direction I was astounded by the excitement, fire and drama of this piece. The 12 piece string orchestra really pushed the dynamic contrasts and had an intense precision in the various string techniques used in this piece. While every piece like this is always better live than recorded, I am sure that Manchester Collective musical director and orchestra leader Singh was responsible for this outstanding performance, and doing so while performing the virtuosic solo parts was even more astounding.
The contrast between the seasons and Ligeti’s Nocturnes is massive, but the placing of both of these works together highlighted the array of instrument technique that both composers use. It is a feature of 20th century music that sonority becomes a principal part, to the extent even that it can supersede melody. Elements of this can be heard in the Ligeti piece, but until now I hadn’t really noticed it as part of the Vivaldi. His intentions were to imitate weather through the instruments – wind and driving rain, storms and thunder. Ligeti uses similar techniques, and other newer techniques, not for narrative nor even emotional purposes, but to provide distinction in instrument lines in moments of great complexity or simply for the sake of it, in an abstract, emotionless yet engaging way. Indeed there was more than one occasion when the sounds heard from the stringed instruments sounded like they were from another world.
A striking juxtaposition was created in this first half both in terms of style and mood. This resulted in a genius programme that was masterfully crafted together and impressively performed by The Collective. The constant attention to detail made this seem like an interaction with a living, breathing thing. The final segue from Ligeti to Vivaldi’s final movement of Winter was breath-taking. If you want to improve on some of the finest pieces of music that have ever been written, ask the Manchester Collective to do it.
The second half of the night returned to a more traditional layout of a programme. Finnis’ new string piece, The Centre Is Everywhere, was introduced by Singh. Finnis, like Ligeti, embraced a mix of extended string techniques allowing the piece to fizzle in. Singh used two words from the score to highlight some of this – white noise and glistening. These certainly made sense. It is startling how new sound possibilities are still being discovered from these centuries old instruments. White noise indeed is how this piece started, entirely created by the string instruments. This piece is like a writhing sea with lines rising and falling over each other. “These days, everyday is an elegy for the end of everything” is part of the text accompanying this piece. While, after reading this text, it still remains unclear to the listener what this piece is about in a very deep way, or indeed if it needs to be about anything, there was a clear idea to me of many human voices clamouring, singing, sighing not in competition with each other but simply communicating somehow whether they are being heard or not. The bookending of this with ‘white noise’ string sounds further adds to the perception of technology and communication making this a very relevant piece that picks up society around us. It is a touching piece of music without being in any way preachy or dogmatic. You need not understand or seek a meaning to it to be washed by the sounds that the twelve string musicians play.
This was followed by Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen. This piece was written towards the end of Strauss’ life in 1945 and it contains an obvious sadness and poignancy typical of the final writings of many composers. He is also very clear about the music being a reflection on the most devastating period of human history, the second world war. Strauss’s musical output is firmly born in the late Romantic period and he began to pioneer changes in the use of dissonance which heralded in the huge changes in music in the 20th century. Salome, 1905 was his first internationally recognised work of art. This contains clear dissonances and musical language that had not been heard before, but would become universally familiar over the following years and decades. Hearing this piece, with his history in mind, struck home the importance of Strauss’ work but also how unique his music is from the point of view of him having his roots in the Romantic period. It is clear that dissonance is used for extremely expressive, subjectively emotional impact as was the case in 19th century music. The Collective added their own touch to this piece, avoiding lush over-sentimentality in the string playing but allowed the music to grow over time until the final section, labelled 'In Memoriam' by Strauss, in which a quotation from Beethoven’s Marcia Funebre in his Symphony No. 3 is heard. The Manchester Collective tamed this monstrously difficult piece and brought through the clear voice of Strauss’ lament for his homeland, Germany, for the World and for his own ageing self. This performance caught my breath and the final, fading notes melted into a long silence as the audience took time to let what they had just heard sink in.
Manchester Collective is what music is really about. This concert was a whirlwind of an experience that was uniquely crafted together and performed by incredibly dedicated and talented musicians under Rakhi Singh’s musical direction.
Reviewer - Aaron Loughrey
on - 30/11/19
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