It’s the end of an era in Manchester. And at the centre of their last season together – the 24th year of one of the most successful and long-running partnerships in British orchestral history – conductor Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé are playing one of the monuments of the repertoire: Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. It’s a symphonic cosmos that’s a revelation of the emotional and expressive depths that they can reach together, and which displays every aspect of the Hallé’s collective and individual virtuosity. The orchestra distinctively combines long, singing lines – the slow movement unfurls as a superhuman stretching of time and feeling, in which the strings’ bows realise Bruckner’s infinitely long phrases with breathtaking conviction – with an absolute clarity of articulation, as the brass players sound clarion calls of apocalyptic conclusion in the symphony’s coda.
And yet everything isn’t as it seems. This concert isn’t the rolling out of a symphonic party-piece
