Hallé/Currie review — Jonny Greenwood helps to launch Manchester Classical

Times

14 hours ago

Far from the madding crowd at Glastonbury, one pop luminary at least decided to head for Manchester instead at the weekend. Tucked at the back of the Hallé Orchestra in the Bridgewater Hall was a familiar figure in studious thick-rimmed specs, hair flopping over furrowed brow as he concentrated on pumping out the bass guitar line and (a novelty in the pop world) counting the bars of rests in Steve Reich's 2015 work Pulse.
Yes, Jonny Greenwood was in the house to launch Manchester Classical. It was a weekend aimed at banging the drum for all the orchestras, chamber groups and music education institutions in the city (and even to welcome the chorus of English National Opera, which may or may not be resident in Manchester from 2029) with more than a dozen concerts spread over 48 hours.
Greenwood, of course, is as much an orchestral composer these days as a pop performer with Radiohead, and very courteous about acknowledging how his own work has been influenced by other composers. Reich, whose music was showcased in this opening concert, is one of them — and apparently the admiration flows both ways. In 2012 the veteran American minimalist (90 next year) incorporated two Radiohead songs into a piece called Radio Rewrite.
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Pity that this concert didn't include it, or indeed anything else involving Greenwood, who shuffled off after the 15 minutes of Pulse and wasn't seen again. Under the expert direction of the virtuoso percussionist Colin Currie, however, the Hallé players still managed to pack many sides of Reich into little more than an hour.
Currie himself, joined by the Hallé's principal percussionist David Hext, opened with Clapping Music, that brilliant exercise in out-of-sync rhythmic phasing, written in 1972, that lays bare the basic code of early minimalism. In its skeletal purity it couldn't be further removed from Pulse, which weaves luscious, wistful counterpoints of strings and woodwinds over a gently throbbing bass line, beginning and ending with a gentle spaciousness reminiscent of Aaron Copland.
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Two other pieces filled out the programme. The 2016 piece Runner was so named, Reich said, because the conductor must get the pace of its Ghanaian-influenced rhythms exactly right, like a long-distance runner, to guide the players safely through. No problem for Currie here. And the sparky 2005 work Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings was performed with terrific verve.
No programmes or programme notes, either printed or online. No announcements of which piece was which. If the point of Manchester Classical is to entice newcomers to this musical world, that's a strange way to go about it.★★★★☆Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews