Is Artificial Intelligence pointing the way to musical composition in the future? The BBC Philharmonic, conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni and colleagues at the Royal Northern College of Music made a case for it in this concert.
Witch Fever are a seething punk outfit from Manchester whose debut album rampages at the patriarchy with unbridled fury. The tone throughout is summed up in “Sour”, wherein grimy, gloomy riffin’ is accompanied by oblique references to Christianity, before the whole slams into a chorus of shrieked outrage, “They won’t take no for an answer/As if they ever fucking ask/Yeah, we incite this violence/Nothing ever changed in silence.”
22 is a pretty young age to be jaded. But this album starts out with Mancunian rapper Aitch detailing how tough it is at the top, and how traumatised he is by life: "sitting on my throne with an open stare / 'cause to me it's just a broken chair". Alright, through the rest of the record there’s lots of rambunctious narratives of sex, wealth and partying, in which he seems to be having the time of his life. But that nagging sense of loneliness, mistrust and self questioning does remain a theme throughout too.
Manchester Collective were back on home ground last night in the tour of a programme featuring the first performances of a new song cycle by Edmund Finnis, Out of the Dawn’s Mind. Soprano soloist was the amazing Ruby Hughes.
It was home ground for her, too, in a sense: as a former student at Chetham’s School of Music she’s an old friend of the Collective’s leader and artistic director, Rakhi Singh.
An opera in the Hallé concert series, conducted by Sir Mark Elder, is rather like a blend of a religious observance and a masterclass in orchestral playing and singing technique.
While Britpop was a retrogressive media construct, Oasis were a genuine socio-musical phenomenon (albeit also retrogressive!). And at their heart was, of course, Liam Gallagher, bullishly Manc, sneeringly rude and pugnaciously charismatic, a proper rock star, perhaps the last before the oncoming generation of coffee-drinking, fleece-wearing nice-boys-next-door.
Since their 2010 debut, Man Alive, Everything Everything have dissected the various structures of human relationships, from socio-political to interpersonal, but all in their own experimental art-rock sound.
Saturday’s concert by the BBC Philharmonic was in large measure about the Mahlers – Gustav and Alma. The former’s First Symphony formed the substantial second part of the programme: Frau Mahler was the inspiration of the piece that opened the evening. New Zealand-born Gemma New returned to Manchester to conduct: we saw her last October on the Hallé rostrum, and the energy and fierce attention she brought then were even more evident this time.
The Mancunian tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams – a symphonic cycle shared by the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé – reached its conclusion with the Eighth Symphony last night. But, unlike most concerts in the RVW150 sequence, in this one (the final performance in the Hallé Thursday concerts series of 2021-22), Sir Mark Elder added an eclectic mix of other composers’ work to the evening.
In the first and sixth symphonies of Vaughan Williams, Sir Mark Elder had two of the most ambitious and rewarding of the whole canon to present in Saturday’s VW 150 concert, which consisted of those two works alone.