The Hallé

Sir Mark Elder conductor
Sir Stephen Hough piano

Dvořák Scherzo capriccioso 12’
Stephen Hough Piano Concerto (The World of Yesterday) 25’
Butterworth A Shropshire Lad: Rhapsody for Orchestra 11’
Elgar Variations on an Original Theme, “Enigma” 31’

For his final concert in Sheffield as Hallé Music Director, Sir Mark Elder acknowledges a core Hallé tradition; both old and new English music. In this true flagship programme, he is joined, as he was in his first season as the Hallé’s Music Director, by Sir Stephen Hough, an undisputed “keyboard colossus” (The Guardian).

They collaborate on Sir Stephen’s own piano concerto, a work that receives its European premiere just three days earlier in Manchester and which the composer describes as having “a large splash of romantic bravura … think a cocktail of Korngold, Ginistera, Walton, Barber – but none of them exact.” The concert opens with Dvořák’s Scherzo capriccioso, imbued with captivating Bohemian melodies and rhythms.

This celebration culminates with Butterworth’s orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad, his heartfelt postlude to his songs setting A.E. Housman’s poems, and Elgar’s Enigma Variations. These masterly vignettes of Elgar’s “friends pictured within” is the work that best encapsulates Sir Mark’s magnificent legacy with the Hallé.