Barbaric, but superb

THE WORLD AT WAR, Halle Orchestra, Bridgewater Hall
WAR seems such a macabre subject for a Saturday evening concert — even when the musicians are as supremely talented as the Halle — but Carl Davis’s repertoire was a confident balance of drama and lightness of touch.

The idiosyncratic conductor even managed to provide a rousing finale with selections from the 1960s musical Hair!, which the New Yorker justified by describing these as protest songs.

Davis had carefully selected the programme not only to bring out the considerable best in the orchestra, but also to satisfy the fans who flock to these quirky nights.

Davis revealed that the programme had been 12 months in the planning and he hit the spot with a selection that had the audience clapping along at one point in appreciation of the beautiful rendition of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings — the haunting work was chosen by director Oliver Stone as an elegiac counterpoint to the screen horrors of the movie Platoon.

The programme opened with the jaunty American salute and Morton Gould’s rework of the classically simple American Civil war song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”.

The contrast was stark with the John Barry theme from Dancing With Wolves before Davis once again teased our sensibilities with the Maurice Jarre overture from Lawrence of Arabia quickly followed by his own composition for Granada TV’s The World at War.

The orchestra’s pleasure at the lighter pieces — On The Town, The Great Escape and the eternally popular Dambusters theme — was evident in what was a thoroughly entertaining evening.

The encore was the ethereal theme to Bridge on the River Kwai, a fitting finale to a programme that brought a proportion of sense and understanding to an otherwise barbaric theme.