Hallé/Chauhan/Helseth review – Muhly paints death with Helseth’s brilliant trumpet | classical music

AAudiences can be fickle. The Hallé Band’s latest program featured one of the world’s most famous trumpeters, was the UK premiere of one of the world’s leading living composers, and one of this country’s most successful young conductors – yet the Bridgewater Hall yawned with its empty seats. Whatever the reasons, those who decided not to book missed out on a delightful evening.

It began politely enough, with the rolling baroque of Britten’s gentle dances from Gloriana. A group of Tudorbans, these dances encourage good orchestral behaviour. But conductor Alpesh Chauhan also gave glimpses of a harsher, more modern world outside in the ferocious winds and off-kilter repetition of the central Morris dance and the joyous snaps and rattles of the closing La Volta.

Nico Muhly’s Trumpet Concerto, a joint Hallé commission, was composed for Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth and is inspired by the instrument’s writing roles. Muhly’s note on the piece notes distinct sections featuring the trumpet as a ceremonial instrument, as an expressive device for depicting the end of the world, and as a jubilant feature of the psalms. Such differences in performance were difficult to detect. Instead, I was struck by the sympathetic echo between the orchestra and Helseth’s solo line, which crawled in the muddy lower legions of her E flat trumpet before finally reaching, with surgical precision, the brilliant soprano. There were delicate strings of upper woodwinds through which the trumpet wafted, long phrases with Helseth violently plucking their ends over guttural strings and a foundation of tuba and double bass. Elsewhere, Helseth and Hallie’s horns exchanged barrages of brutal crescendos. Only the ending was unconvincing, and seemed to stop in the middle of a sentence.

There are no such quirks in Walton’s Symphony No. 1, which is relentlessly in control throughout. Chauhan – always a full-body conductor – performed as if he were pulling a huge canvas taut. The brass was in battering ram mode in the first movement, and the strings were performing a malicious, sharp-edged dance in the second movement. Chauhan embraced the ambiguous lyricism of the third, its Kashmiri softness threatened by the thick shadows of the bass. The finale was thrilling: its quiet moments clear and urgent, its climax devastatingly intense.

· Also at Sheffield Town Hall on 15 March