Top 3: Beautiful classical concerts to see during the Hallé’s Winter Season

The Hallé starts 2021 with a live-performance of The Event Horizon, helmed by the orchestra’s former’s assistant conductor Jonathon Heyward and featuring the eponymous poem by local wordsmith Simon Armitage. The duo previously collaborated during the 2019 opening of the Oglesby Centre at Hallé St Peters and here, will follow things up with a performance of Copland’s haunting Quiet City, alive with the sounds of cor anglais and trumpet solos. The world premiere of a new work inspired by Lemn Sissay’s ‘Godsell’ comes next, before Galzunov’s late-Romantic Saxophone Concerto is performed by virtuoso saxophonist Jess Gillam. To end the concert, audiences will be treated to an enchanted garden soundscape during a mystical rendition of Ravel’s fairytale-esque Mother Goose suite, conjuring notes of Tom Thumb and Sleeping Beauty. What better way to start the (hopefully brighter) year ahead?

In early March, audiences are invited into an epic world of pirouetting hippos and war-torn beaches as the Hallé spends a night at the movies. BBC presenter Petroc Trelawny joins conductor Stephen Bell to guide viewers through a range of classic big-screen moments which have used works by musical icons like Ponchielli, Offenbach, Mozart and Elgar to pull the heart-strings or hit home triumph, redemption and tragedy. Expect chorus lines of can-can dancers and a journey to the sweeping plains of Africa as this larger-than-life evening of live music resurrects tracks like Offenbach’s Overture: Orpheus in the Underworld, Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty and the slow movement from Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto like never before.

To round out the Hallé’s Winter Season, they’ve invited Israeli classical pianist Boris Giltburg to put his own spin on an evergreen masterpiece. In what will become his third visit to the Hallé following two previous show-stopping appearances, viewers will witness Giltburg interpret Paganini’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – a piece of music that originally received its UK premiere with the Hallé back in 1935 helmed by conductor Sergei Rachmaninov. Giltburg’s musical prowess will be showcased further in renditions of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and the world premiere of British composer Huw Watkins’s Second Symphony. Not to be missed.