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Legacy of an Eminent Victorian

Michael Kennedy

Wednesday, 23rd January 2008

‘Mr Hallé’s Band’ began giving concerts 150 years ago. Michael Kennedy on the great orchestra

War brought a boom in the public’s appetite for the arts and the Hallé found that its link with the BBC was causing it to miss engagements. It was decided to offer a 52-week contract and to appoint a new conductor, Sargent having decamped to Liverpool. The committee was sure the BBC players would stay with the Hallé but only four did, and when the new man, John Barbirolli, arrived from New York he was told he had four weeks to recruit nearly half an orchestra before a week of concerts in Bradford. (‘It was nearly fraudulent,’ he told me later.) But miraculously he did it (the orchestra had no home in the city until 1951, when the bombed Free Trade Hall was rebuilt, and played in cinemas and a circus ring) and so began 27 years during which he took the orchestra to new heights of achievement, took it abroad and made it his own. All attempts to lure him away failed, even though he was constantly engaged in a running battle over subsidies with the city council. This did not prevent his becoming a Freeman of the city. He and Matt Busby were the idols of Manchester. It was a golden age, but there were sticky passages too, now forgotten. When he died in 1970, he was regarded as irreplaceable. James Loughran, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and Kent Nagano all did sterling work in different ways, but somehow the shadow of Barbirolli hung, however unfairly, over the concerts and the Hallé could find no one as charismatic as Simon Rattle in Birmingham.

In 1996 the orchestra entered a magnificent new home, the Bridgewater Hall, but the BBC Philharmonic had become the city’s leading orchestra. In 1998 the Hallé narrowly avoided bankruptcy and extinction. Two years later, with a new management, a new outlook and a new conductor, the 1943 miracle was virtually re-enacted. Mark Elder, not well known in Manchester then, revivified orchestra and programmes and the Hallé was soon being acclaimed, even by London critics, as the best in the country. The audience took Elder to their hearts as they had Barbirolli. It is now Elder’s Hallé as much as it was Hallé’s, Harty’s and J.B.’s. I have been listening to the Hallé for nearly 70 years as subscriber, critic and historian and I rejoice in the Elder ascendancy. Happy 150th — and Hallé-lujah!