The Daily Telegraph - Features
Old and new mixed in surprising ways
Classical
Manchester Camerata
The Stoller Hall, Manchester ★★★★★
To flourish in a city already provided with two fine symphonysized orchestras, the Manchester Camerata chamber orchestra has to be nimble on its feet. One week it plays core classical repertoire of Haydn and Mozart, the next it intrigues us with a carefully curated event that mixes old and new in surprising ways.
Last Friday’s concert, in which the Camerata was joined by the chamber choir Kantos and the Scottish mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill, was one of the latter. We heard nine pieces, ranging from the late-17th to the 21st centuries, unified by two things. There was an overall mood of spiritual uplift, darkening sometimes to an intense yearning to escape from an intolerable life, as in Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra, or a desire for God, as in Sally Beamish’s Showings. And there was the sound of a solitary bell, which ushered in Purcell’s choral piece Hear My Prayer, marked a solemn tread through Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten and Da Pacem Domine, and rang out at key moments in Phaedra.
The way Pärt’s Cantus seems to emerge at a huge altitude from nothingness, like wisps of cloud, and gain heft and intensity as it descends, was beautifully caught. Nick Martin’s Falling was a somewhat soft-centred lament, but the choir and orchestra generated a real intensity in Beamish’s settings of poems by the 14thcentury mystic Julian of Norwich.
In Phaedra, the evening abruptly switched from calm meditations on the hereafter to the burning shame of a queen who has to admit that she lusts after her own son. Cargill didn’t quite catch the unhinged despair of the opening section, but she was magnificent in the final moments as the queen takes poison, and sings of how the glorious day that she soiled by her presence will soon resume its purity.
Standing to the side of all this anguish was Michael Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. The abrupt switches from the striding baroque dignity of Corelli’s original to Tippett’s rhapsodic ecstasies are hard to bring off, but the orchestra managed it beautifully. Under the disciplined but relaxed direction of the Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes, the music’s tangled melodic foliage burgeoned luxuriantly.
The concert’s end returned to its beginning, with more Purcell; we heard Karen Cargill, again regal and commanding, in Dido’s Lament, and finally the choir and orchestra joined in the lament over the dead queen. It was an apt ending to an evening which, despite the occasional rough edge, touched the heights – and the depths.