Halle Orchestra: Sheldonian Theatre (From The Oxford Times)

Halle Orchestra: Sheldonian Theatre

10:14am Thursday 12th October 2006

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This was one for the Sheldonian record books: it was the first time that conductor Mark Elder, soloist Alina Pogostkina, and the Hall Orchestra have performed there. "I am aware that this building is more familiar with Bach and Handel, I'll try not to dislodge the chandeliers," remarked Elder cheerfully as the concert began.

The last time that the Hall appeared in Oxford is believed to have been at the Town Hall in the 1960s. Since then, the orchestra has been through a lean period, but things soon changed when Mark Elder was appointed music director in 2000. To judge by this concert, the Hall now plays with great confidence, and the sort of unity that is only achieved by musicians who work together full-time, and who are motivated by their conductor. The sound is anything but bland, too, with warm yet rugged string playing, sensitive wind sections, and blazing brass climaxes - all characteristics that can be heard on the classic recordings made by the Hall and its legendary former music director, Sir John Barbirolli.

The concert opened with the sound of a gentle breeze in the trees, the beginning of Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1. This work demonstrated Elder's ability to draw transparent and open textures from his players, a characteristic that was all the more remarkable in the larger-scale works that followed - it's very easy for the sound of a big orchestra to degenerate into a blur in the Sheldonian, but that never happened here.

The Hall's confident sound was well matched by soloist Alina Pogostkina in Sibelius's Violin Concerto. Pogostkina obviously has a very clear vision of this concerto: particularly impressive was her switch to an appropriately meditative, and really beautiful, tone in the second movement. Elder's accompaniment was impeccable.

Finally, the orchestra let rip with Brahms's Second Symphony. Elder plainly doesn't regard this work as Brahms's lightweight symphony, and you really felt that you were being taken on a musical journey. Let's hope that Music at Oxford can bring the Hall back before another 40 years have elapsed.

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