Hallé John Adams festival, Bridgewater Hall / RNCM, Manchester review - standing ovations for today's music

Am I dreaming? Did I really see a living composer of contemporary music given a prolonged standing ovation for conducting his own works in the Bridgewater Hall, twice over?

We all know the difference between polite applause for new music and real enthusiasm. And John Adams seems to have a following who show the real thing – of a variety of age groups, too. The California-based creator began his own festival with the Hallé on Thursday night with two pieces which were part of the celebration of the opening of the hall 29 years ago, one of them – Slonimsky’s Earbox – then receiving its world premiere from the Hallé under Kent Nagano. The other was his Le Livre de Baudelaire, an orchestration of four of Debussy’s early five settings of Baudelaire poems.

The national paper critics of 1996 were more keen to review the hall’s acoustics than the music, but Michael Kennedy recognized the audience appeal of Slonimsky’s Earbox, and he was not wrong. You can understand now why some of those pundits thought the resonant acoustics were to be blamed for muddying the orchestra’s sound: the music starts fortissimo, con brio, with triplets set against twos or fours. The woodwind are told to play “violently” at one point, though the tension unwinds beautifully part-way through, and we hear fascinating chords in some of the stranger modes referenced in the title – from Nicholas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns.

This time, with the present-day Hallé led by Roberto Ruisi, the platform extension was in use to accommodate the orchestra, with plentiful percussion and three keyboards, thus spreading the sound at its origin, and maybe now we have more appreciation of a composer who, as a teenager, queued at eight in the morning to get his copy of the Sergeant Pepper album. He knows how to heighten the vernacular.

Le Livre de Baudelaire is his evidence of mastery of traditional orchestration, its modestly conventional but piquant sounds forming an intriguing commentary on the lines sung with purity and poise by soprano Mary Bevan (pictured right). She returned after the interval with Pat’s Aria from Nixon in China, dreaming of the durability of home-town US virtues (and with pretty durable minimalist harmonies in the accompaniment – but this was a programme in which we moved steadily backwards in composition dates). Adams’ big choral work from 1980, Harmonium, completed the concert, with the Hallé Choir, trained by Matthew Hamilton, entering into the “transcendental vision” of its poetic texts. Adams’ setting of Donne’s “Negative Love” should build over 10 minutes to “an immense cataract of sound” (his description), and did so in full measure. In the elegiac “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (Emily Dickinson), with warmly gentle singing and playing and soft-hammered cowbells, his lyrical genius and love of evocative chords are evident. And the finale, “Wild Nights” (also by Dickinson), was everything its ecstatic eroticism calls for. No wonder they cheered.

Between two Bridgewater Hall concerts conducted by Adams himself, there was a lunchtime one at the Royal Northern College of Music, in which musicians of the Hallé and RNCM gave three of his smaller-scale works.Adams said he thought the performance of his Chamber Symphony was one of the best he’d ever heard, which must be a considerable tribute to the direction of Euan Shields, the Hallé’s assistant conductor, as well as the virtuosity of the 16 players, led by the Hallé’s other leader, Emily Davis, and including Alice Neary, a fellow-RNCM alumna, as cellist. It’s demanding and a lot of fun – recalling his phrase about “joyriding on the Great Prairies of non-event”. Hallelujah Junction, for two pianos, was played by Eliza McCarthy and James McVinnie – it ends with sheer exhilaration and was given it in spades. It was followed by a string quartet (Tako Tkabladze, Joe Steel, Emily O'Dell and Lola Garcia Marquez of the Emerz Collective) in John’s Book of Alleged Dances, which is played with a backing track of percussive sounds from a prepared piano. For these young musicians, it was probably an experience that will stay with them for the rest of their lives (pictured above).

Saturday’s concert, back at the Bridgewater Hall, offered two more recent works – one of them, Scheherazade.2, from 2014, the longest piece of the whole festival – along with The Chairman Dances, from 1985. The “foxtrot for orchestra” took us back to the old Adams days of motoric moto perpetuo, with a nostalgic, filmic quality near its end, as an imagined 78rpm gramophone record ends with scuffing and clicks. It was certainly foot-tapping – visibly so for those members of the orchestra needing to get their seriously complicated syncopations right.

Scheherazade.2 is for violin soloist (Leila Josefowicz, pictured left) and orchestra and described as a dramatic symphony, on the pattern invented by Berlioz. Its “provocative images”, as Adams calls them, are of a modern Scheherazade, a beautiful young woman with grit and facing male persecution. It was created specifically for Leila Josefowicz, a champion of Adams music, and her performance was emphatically gritty and energetic, and also beautiful. A long, involved, story-based piece, it seemed to show Adams exploring a route more explicitly based on the full noon of Romanticism (Rimsky-Korsakov’s version isn’t that far away, and the lavish orchestration includes both cimbalom and celesta). Was it a bit of a cul-de-sac? If the final piece of the concert showed where he is now, maybe so.

That was The Rock You Stand On, composed for Marin Alsop and first performed only a month ago. A Hallé co-commission, this was its UK premiere. Adams returns to his jazz roots and the syncopations are decidedly tricky: you have to think a pulse that’s not always audibly there, but it works up to a fine accelerated finish, with scalic motives and a big crescendo, and that was enough to get the fans on their feet again. In the end, he had to mime a plea to them to go home and let the musicians get some sleep. 

• More classical reviews on theartsdesk