Apart from its appearances at the Proms each summer, we get few chances to hear the Hallé in southern England. But the orchestra is now forging a relationship with Saffron Hall, and a full house for its latest visit there showed the popularity of the partnership.
The first half of Mark Elder’s programme was taken up with a single work, Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, in which Pavel Kolesnikov was the soloist. Kolesnikov has built a reputation as a “poetic” pianist, an artist of great subtlety and nuance, but his account of what is one of the grandest and most demanding of concertos in the piano repertory turned out to be surprisingly straightforward.
