The Manchester Collective stars in Saturday’s 46th BBC Proms programme with works by Steve Reich, David Lang, Hannah Peel, Ben Nobuto and Oliver Leith.
This Saturday’s 46th BBC Proms programme at 22:15 at the Royal Albert Hall is one of the most interesting, in terms of current music, of the 2023 edition of London’s celebrated summer festival. The programme will feature Manchester Collective, a chamber orchestra founded in 2017 by Adam Szabo – the collective’s current CEO and artistic director – and Rakhi Singh – its musical director – for a simple reason: “because nobody was programming the kind of work that we wanted to perform – Szabo explained in an interview with the website Uncover Liverpool in October 2018 – . For us, it was originally about producing great shows, and programming music that felt risky and exciting. Along the way, we discovered that we had a real passion for building new audiences, and that it was great fun to take this work out of the concert hall and into a range of offbeat, alternative venues.”
Interestingly, with their debut at last year’s BBC Proms Manchester Collective arrived at one of the most majestic and conventional concert halls in all of Europe, the Royal Albert Hall. This Saturday they repeat the experience with a completely different, eclectic and daring programme that will culminate in a performance of Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, for which the New York minimalist composer won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2009. It is a twenty-two minute piece composed for two sextets of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano (or one sextet and tape, playing against a recording of themselves), which Manchester Collective has included on their third album, Neon, released last June by the Icelandic label Bedroom Community.
Double Sextet is one of two pieces on the Proms programme that Manchester Collective will perform on Saturday night. The other is Neon, a twelve-minute composition by Northern Irish composer (and radio presenter) Hannah Peel (Craigavon, 1985), commissioned by Manchester Collective for the album. The other three pieces that complete the programme are Mystery Sonata: No. 7, “Glory” for solo violin by American composer David Lang, to be performed by Rakhi Singh; Serenity 2.0, a Manchester Collective commission for British-Japanese composer Ben Nobuto, premiered on the collective’s Heavy Metal tour in December 2021, and A different ‘Fantasie from Suite No. 5 in G minor’ by British composer Oliver Leith, a short piece based on the music of English Baroque composer Matthew Locke from whom Leith arranges his Suite No. 5 in G minor for string quartet, adding an exaggerated use of vibrato and glissandi to blur and destabilise the surface of Locke’s original. The concert will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.