Concert programming doesn't come much riskier. For his Manchester debut with the Hallé Orchestra, Mark Elder chose one of the most cruelly demanding works in the modern choral repertoire: Tippett's The Mask of Time. For the orchestra, and still more for the chorus, it's a hard slog - the writing always taxing, the expression always full on. At times the effect is like climax piled on climax. And for the audience there's the extra challenge of relating this onslaught of rich and strange sounds to Tippett's dense, elliptical and breathtakingly ambitious text - a history of Life, the Universe and Everything which, to be clearly understood, would need more footnotes than Eliot's The Waste Land.
But the risk payed off. The Hallé Orchestra and Chorus played and sang heroically. There were astonishingly few glitches. The semi-chorus wobbled a little in section five, Dream of the Paradise Garden, but they do have some of the cruellest writing in the piece.
Choral singing was complemented by four strong and characterful soloists. Soprano Claron McFadden was as soulful as she was spine-tinglingly precise in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Tenor John Daszak was ardent and fluent, as though Tippett's solo writing were the purest bel canto. Tippett's jokes tend to fall flat in performance, but mezzo soprano Felicity Palmer had just the right quirky dignity as the Dragon in Dream of the Paradise Garden.
What impressed above all, though, was the sheer musicality of this performance. Everyone followed Elder's beat minutely, but it was the vitality and beauty of the phrasing which held the ear. Parts of The Mask of Time that had previously seemed fatally opaque suddenly made sense. Tippett's melodic lines, even at their most angular and dislocated, really breathed. In so many performances one is too often aware of singers desperately trying to hold on to the notes. But Elder put musical understanding first. And his achievement in communicating that understanding to the performers was simply phenomenal. If this is a foretaste of what his directorship of the Hallé is to be like (Elder takes up his post in September), Manchester is set for a great musical adventure.
