Thomas Adès began his two-year residency with the Hallé last autumn. He will feature as conductor, pianist and composer, but in his latest appearance with the orchestra at the Bridgewater Hall he confined himself to just two of those roles, conducting a programme that ended with one of his major scores, Tevot.
As the concert also included one of Tippett’s rarely heard late masterpieces and a brand new work from Oliver Leith, it was full of challenges for the players, but every one of them was met triumphantly. It had all begun quite modestly with Purcell, or rather with a suite of movements from Purcell’s operas and masques arranged by the Hallé’s revered former principal conductor, John Barbirolli which, after an opening salvo of Bruckner-like horns, turned out to be quite sober.
But there’s nothing sober about Tippett’s Triple Concerto for violin, viola and cello. First performed in 1980, it is one of the most luscious of his later works, coloured by an array of exotic percussion and overflowing with lyricism, its heart a rapt slow movement, one of Tippett’s most intense inventions. With Anthony Marwood, Lawrence Power and Paul Watkins as the soloists, the lineup was about as fine as one could want, though there were moments when, from a seat in the Bridgewater’s choir circle at least, the balance between them was not all it could have been. And after it Leith’s Cartoon Sun, a Hallé commission, provided exhilaration of a very different kind; it’s a wayward processional, set in motion by tolling bells and generates some cataclysmic climaxes along the way.
Adès prefaced Tevot with Elgar’s Sospiri, drawing almost symphonic intensity from what is at first sight just a salon piece, but then demonstrated that his own work has a power that really deserves the word symphonic. Played as magnificently as this, Tevot becomes an immense statement, whichfollows its own irrefutable musical logic while also seeming – for me at least – to conjure up echoes of late Mahler (of the 10th symphony especially); it’s undoubtedly one of Adès’s finest achievements.