I would like to start this review off on a personal note. As some of you will realise I have not attended a Halle concert for a long time. This has been because I have been travelling  a great deal because of my work as a travel photographer, which is why there are a lot of reviews on the website for concerts abroad. Another reason is that I had been becoming increasingly hard of hearing.  I felt I could not give a good critique of such a world renowned orchestra with my hearing loss. Now I am the wearer of 2 tiny hearing aids but I was worried that the amplification would affect how I heard music so that I would be disappointed in the result, and I kept putting off  attending. Tonight's attendance was a trial to see how it worked out, with my hearing aids and I am glad to say the experience was so wonderful that during Barber's Adagio for Strings I sat with tears rolling down my face in gratitude for the NHS restoring my musical appreciation. What a life enhancing transformation. 

I am hoping to start covering Halle concerts again because tonight's concert brought home to me just how much I have been missing attending the Halle.

Turning to the concert now. There were four works on offer - Aaron Copeland's Suite Billy the Kid, Barber's Adagio for Strings, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Stravinsky's Petrushka.

Billy the Kid was the first of Copeland's Wild West Ballet compositions, and his descriptive style with its references to old cowboy tunes has been condensed by Copeland into a 20 minute six movement suite which cracks along like the Deadwood stage comin' over the hill, complete with gunshots, lassos, brawls and shot-outs. The soundscape of a frontier town is brilliantly evoked and Conductor Sir Mark Elder CBE as always brings out the humour as well as the violence with his precision and perfect timing .

The second piece, acting as a counterpoint to the raucous freewheeling Billy the Kid, was Samuel Barber's heartbreakingly beautiful  Adagio for Strings. Already a familiar piece to many people due to its use in films, adverts and even at funerals, yet this full bodied, expansive interpretation by Elder gave it such poignancy that my tears began to flow and the same applied to many other audience members. It was a finely judged performance that never slipped over into mawkishness.

The mood changed again as the orchestra together with young piano soloist Jonathan Scott played George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in the original jazz version. Scott handled the fiendishly difficult fingering with quiet flamboyance that belied his tender years. Again Mark Elder brought out the humouresque qualities of the work and delivered a fascinating  interwoven yet jolly performance which the orchestra itself seemed to enjoy playing. I loved it and noticed most of the audience was smiling all through the work. Scott is a soloist to watch out for.

The final lollipop as Sir Thomas Beecham would have called it, was another ballet, this time by Igor Stravinsky in his 1947 version of Petrushka. The eponymous anti-hero is a puppet brought to life by a sinister Showman at a Shrovetide Fair, very topical with Pancake Day on Shrove Tuesday next week.  Petrushka is the Russian equivalent of the clown Pierrot who loves the Ballerina puppet, but his rival for her heart is the Blackamoor. The love triangle partners dance and the Ballerina chooses the Blackamoor as her paramour. Anguished Petrushka fights his rival but is killed in the brawl and the Showman has to show the Crowd he is only a sawdust and cloth doll, but in the inconclusively abrupt ending the ghost of Petrushka appears to the crowd. In the first performance of the ballet Nijinsky danced Petrushka and Karsavina danced the Ballerina  with Fokine choreographing the ballet with a huge orchestra. In 1947 Stravinsky revised the instrumentation making it possible to perform with a smaller orchestra, though even this seems large by today's standards. The sheer opulence and variety of the orchestration brought the story alive in the imagination.

The concert was dedicated to Mike and Dorothy Hall who in June 2008 were killed by an avalanche in the Pyrenees. Mike, a violinist, was a member of the Halle Orchestra for over 40 years and a collection was being held at this series of 3 concerts to raise money for a cause dear to their hearts--the Buskaid Music School in Soweta in South Africa.

Tonight's performance was to virtually a full house but there are 2 more chance to experience this fantastic night of glorious music, tomorrow and on Sunday. So get your skates on, get your tickets online and go along to be entranced and to experience an evening you will never forget.