Evaluation of Hallé live performance with Ian Bostridge and performed by Kahchun Wong

Kahchun Wong (cr. Angie Kremer)

Kahchun Wong’s live performance with the Hallé was a
actually attention-grabbing one – in the long run, not a lot for what it had appeared to
supply on paper, however for what it gave in follow.

The paper curiosity was a UK premiere: Sofia
Gubaidulina’s The Wrath of God, written in 2019, an 18-minute piece for
very massive orchestra (4 Wagner tubas in addition to 4 horns, two bass
trombones, two tubas and a number of percussion). It’s in regards to the day of judgment,
and suitably scary. It’s very loud a number of the time, although there are
stunning and delicately mysterious softer passages too, one for strings and
gong, one for strings and solo horn, adopted by clarinet, piccolo and
glockenspiel, then solo violin. These I appreciated: however the predominant impression
was that this considerably episodic piece retains making you assume it’s throughout,
then exhibiting you that it’s not.

The remaining components within the programme
have been mainstream 20^th century music. Britten’s Serenade for Tenor,
Horn and Strings featured the peerless and extraordinary voice of Ian
Bostridge, alongside the Hallé’s principal horn, Laurence Rogers. Between them
(and Kahchun Wong) they gave the stunning music cycle about night and night time with
many a dramatic twist. Bostridge regularly makes use of his voice in a
quasi-instrumental means, with intensive emphasis on some notes and contours: within the
Elegy (Blake’s “O Rose, although artwork sick!” and Dirge (the nameless “Lyke-Wake
Dirge”), notably (the latter has its personal evocation of the day of judgment,
in order that made loads of sense). Rogers matched him for expression and performed the
virtuosic half with consummate ability. And within the remaining Sonnet (Jonson’s “Hymn”,
to the Moon) we heard extra of a type of portamento within the Bostridge voice on
rising phrases that appears to hold a frisson of dread, even in essentially the most re-assuring
music. By no means a uninteresting second with these artists.

Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 is
in all probability the favorite amongst his whole set and really a lot a repertoire work for
symphony orchestras now. The problem for any conductor, I believe, is to catch
some sense of ambiguity in it, to set towards the clearly tuneful, enticing
and agony-to-ectasy journey that it seems to be on the floor. Kahchun Wong
did that very successfully: in a single sense he dramatized it a bit greater than others
may (within the first and final actions), however the principle traits of his
interpretation have been an assured and idiomatic method to its rhythms, a peak of
depth which made the impassioned Largo, the third of its 4 actions,
the unforgettable emotional coronary heart of the piece, and a extremely strategic change
of tempo within the finale (starting with the horn solo) that introduced an enormous
weight of unhappiness into the midst of the triumphalism and ensured that stolidity
endured to its finish, sound and clamour however. It’s a means of
conducting that will have been second nature to the nice maestros of the
first half of the 20th century – the time this music was born – and offers
a way of proportion and form which can be not possible to duplicate by some other
means.