’Dynamic‘ is the inevitable cliché. Gianandrea Noseda was relatively unknown here when he was appointed principal conductor of the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic in 2002, but he soon made audiences sit up, scooping the South Bank Show award for last year‘s Beethoven cycle with its smash hit BBC download. We should have known. Five years before the BBC he was the first foreign principal guest conductor at the Mariinsky, and founded that company‘s Young Philharmonic Orchestra.
He’d already conducted opera with Domingo in LA, worked with the Orquestra de Cadaqués, Spain’s Euro-wide handpicked ensemble… Manchester’s gain leaves London bemused. Thursday marks a rare appearance in the Smoke. For once he restrains his criticism of London’s concert halls. ‘The acoustics aren’t the best,’ he admits of the notorious Albert Hall, ‘but with that audience, that atmosphere, who cares? The public’s an active part of the performance: normal people, not the elite, in jeans and T-shirt or black tie and suit.’ He muses on London’s lack of a great large-scale venue, despite its status as ‘one of the biggest musical capitals of the world’. Feature continues
Thursday’s programme reflects his special interests: Russian, with a dash of Italian. Music from Prokofiev’s ‘War and Peace’, first performed in its entirety in Florence, and ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Verona-inspired, of course (though there’s a north-country connection in Sunderland’s adoption of the Dance of the Knights), frame Shostakovich’s settings of Michelangelo poems. The Russian translator has resorted to an old style of language for the poet’s reflections on art, creativity and death, but it is not easily comprehensible. ‘Shostakovich can see many of the same struggles. He looked in the mirror and saw himself and Michelangelo.’ And the composer responded to the language’s sculptural qualities with music ‘like big blocks, stone or marble, or metallic…’
Hailing from industrial Milan, Noseda experienced almost no culture shock in Manchester, which, like his own area, is reinventing itself as a centre of shopping, culture and entertainment. Even the food is bearable: ‘I’ve found a couple of good Italian restaurants, Indians, several Chinese, a couple of Japanese…’ But then, his wife Lucia travels with him to help with home cooking in the 12 weeks he spends with ‘our beloved public in the Bridgewater Hall’. In addition there’s the touring. The Mancunians have projects as far afield as Turin, Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest. The only probelm is Manchester’s ‘shocking’ weather. ‘Even the English joke about it. Can you imagine what it’s like for an Italian?’
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