Hallé Summer Concerts - Elgar’s Enigma Variations (2.15pm)

Glinka Overture: Ruslan and Ludmilla 5′
Stravinsky Petrushka (1947) 34′
Elgar Enigma Variations 31′

Sir Mark Elder conductor

With its barn-storming brilliance, laced with Russian lyricism, Glinka’s overture to his Pushkin-inspired ‘magic opera’ Ruslan and Ludmilla, provides the perfect curtain-raiser to the Hallé’s Summer Season 2021.

Stravinsky, that towering figure of 20th-century music, died 50 years ago and this anniversary is marked here with his ballet Petrushka, the tale of a hapless puppet with human emotions. It starts in a blaze of brilliance evoking the St Petersburg Shrovetide Fair, but ends mysteriously with Petrushka’s theme wailing on trumpet as, chillingly, his ghost appears over the rooftops.

Richter conducted the premiere of the Enigma Variations in 1899, the same year that he became the Hallé’s Music Director. The opening theme, mixing melancholy and hope, encapsulates Elgar’s complex character, and at its heart are the variations enshrining his wife, Alice, and ‘Nimrod’, Augustus Jaeger, a portrait of a profound friendship, as he and Elgar discussed Beethoven quartets.