Mark Elder has been music director of the Hallé Orchestra since autumn 2000, and has really made his presence felt in Manchester. The orchestra is enjoying a renaissance; its programmes are more challenging and imaginative, and its playing standards are much higher than they have been for years.
It is a sign of its new confidence that, following the example of the London Symphony, the orchestra has launched its own CD label. The first three discs mix recordings from concerts in Manchester's Bridgewater Hall with BBC studio performances. The results are first-rate, and the best possible testament to the orchestra's health under Elder.
The new venture is timely for the conductor as well. Elder's gifts as an interpreter of both the operatic and the symphonic repertory have been unaccountably neglected by the mainstream record companies for far too long, and his performances of Elgar and Nielsen on these discs show what we have been missing.
Elgar's First Symphony has a wonderful sense of cumulative power, a control of the musical architecture that leads inevitably to the final re-emergence of the opening theme. The account of In the South is painted in luminous colours. The Enigma Variations are sharply characterised, every portrait vivid; the Serenade for Strings has a charming intimacy, the Cockaigne Overture a real swagger and bustle.
The Nielsen Symphony No 5 is, if anything, even more impressive: its anarchic side drum is explosive in its interventions, and the gradual sense of calm exerted by the finale is wonderfully paced. For its part, the Flute Concerto, with Andrew Nicholson as the agile soloist, makes the best possible case for the work as the finest concerto for the instrument since Mozart.
To judge from this first trio of issues, the Hallé series will differ in one important respect from the LSO Live recordings. Those budget-price discs, taken directly from the LSO's recordings in the Barbican, generally consist of just a single major work - as in the latest two releases, Dvorak's Seventh Symphony and Holst's The Planets - whereas the Hallé is spreading its net wider, filling the available space more completely and thus justifying the higher retail price. So each of the Elgar discs contains a novelty.
The First Symphony and In the South are combined with In the Moonlight - the song (nicely sung by the mezzo Christine Rice) that Elgar fashioned out of some verses by Shelley - and the viola theme in the overture. The Enigma disc also includes Chanson de Matin and, more interestingly, the first ever recording of the original finale to the Variations. It is nearly a minute and a half shorter than the familiar version, and sounds distinctly perfunctory and short-breathed by comparison.
There is a world premiere recording on the Nielsen disc, too: the little Entrance March that formed part of the music Nielsen composed for a two-evening production of Aladdin in Copenhagen in 1919. It is no great discovery, but it is charming enough. Altogether, this very fine disc makes a hugely promising start to the Hallé's new venture.