Putting the spotlight on the Hallé’s winds and horns, Richard Strauss’s Serenade, written when he was just 17, announced a composer with a precocious command of instrumental writing. A keenly-awaited Hallé debut follows: Isata Kanneh-Mason is the eldest of the…
The Festival’s culmination starts with The Oceanides, a tone poem depicting the daughters of Neptune luring sailors to their doom. Its ending, Sir Mark says, ‘is terrifying, a huge tsunami welling up through the orchestra.’ Sibelius felt that ‘Nature has…
Continuing the exploration of Sibelius’s symphonies, the Fourth and Fifth are worlds apart in mood; the Fourth, composed in the wake of illness and personal problems, is a brooding, dark masterwork of uncompromising beauty. Henning Kraggerud returns to play the…
Sibelius found in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, a rich source of inspiration for his tone poems, as in Pohjola’s Daughter, where the tale of how the hero Väinämöinen fails to win the love of a stony-hearted maiden is…
Sir Mark considers Sibelius a singularly important composer for British music-lovers. His music is embedded in the Hallé’s history with Barbirolli, Beecham, Harty and Richter all advocates; Sibelius himself conducted the orchestra in 1931. In the Hallé’s and Sir Mark’s…
