Review of English String Orchestra 'Wall of Water' concert at the Bridgewater Hall

The one orchestral concert in the Bridgewater Hall’s ‘Waters of Life’ mini-festival was by the 12-strong English String Orchestra, and though its title was ‘Wall of Water’, the connections between all the items on the programme and the theme of water were, well, a bit fluid.

It was conducted by Kenneth Woods, who, with violin soloist in two of the pieces Harriet Mackenzie, and the composers of two of them, Deborah Pritchard and Emily Doolittle, introduced the music in a half-hour seminar before they played it.

The real common factors then began to be clearer: all the music was by women composers, and all of it was written in the 21^st century (and of course all was either written for, or playable by, an ensemble of 12 strings). Congratulations to the Bridgewater Hall for having the courage to put on such a programme as the major evening event of a self-promoted series: it didn’t pull an enormous crowd, but similar enterprise anywhere else might have pulled no audience at all.

First was Thea Musgrave’s Green, written in 2006 specifically for 12 strings of the Scottish Ensemble. It pits a melodic, harmonious sound against a discordant one that starts in the bass and gradually drowns the former – except for a soft high note on solo violin which just survives at the end. A metaphor for humankind’s environmental despoliation, perhaps?

It was quite hard going for this listener, as it takes some time to make its point, but that could never be said about the violin concerto, Wall of Water, by Deborah Pritchard (premiered only three years ago, by this orchestra and this conductor, who commissioned it). It was accompanied by projections of the paintings series of the same title by Maggi Hambling. Pritchard can take her musical responses directly from colour awareness, and these pictures for her embody ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ colours, and a mix of the two. I think it would probably work well without the projections, too, as it’s got a clear structure built on a soft, rumbling pedal effect which recurs twice and the solo violin’s cadenza-style introduction, which itself returns. The transformation and revisiting of the material makes real musical sense, and the solo was beautifully played by Harriet Mackenzie.

Emily Doolittle’s falling still is ostensibly about the natural world – with a varying solo violin song and a chord progression in the accompanying strings which is almost mechanistically prescribed. Actually the high-pitched notes of these chords seemed like an ethereal cobweb of sound to me – mysterious and subtle.

The ensemble finished with Kaija Saariaho’s Terra memoria, a version of the composer’s work for string quartet, and dedicated to ‘those departed’. It runs a considerable gamut of emotive tones – the ‘harmonic trills’ (alternation of fully stopped notes and harmonics) sounding like ghostly wailings, the more vigorous music like cries of protest, and the unisons like desperate clinging to the known world. It all ends very softly with a descending ostinato and whispered alternation of major and minor intervals … a resolution of sorts.

Since we so rarely hear a bill of concert music such as this in our major hall, the opportunity was one Manchester should be grateful for.