Page 222 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

24 May 2024
Sir Mark Elder: ‘Manchester has never been a

great city for opera’

One of Britain’s finest conductors talks about the crisis at ENO and saying goodbye to the Hallé
Orchestra after 25 transformative years
Ivan Hewett24 May 2024 • 7:00am

Mark Elder conducting the Hallé Orchestra at the Albert Hall last year CREDIT: Chris
Christodoulou

Sir Mark Elder has never forgotten his first appearance with the Hallé Orchestra, more than 40
years ago. “We were performing Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole,” he says with a gleeful grin, “and had
just arrived at the first big explosion of energy. There’s supposed to be a dramatic silence but the
side drum stand collapsed, and when a player lunged to save it he knocked over a cymbal and
music stand. The din was amazing. At that moment I thought: ‘OK. That’s that. I’ll never work with
this orchestra again’.”
His thoughts were not prophetic. At the turn of the millennium, Elder became music director of
the Manchester orchestra, a post from which he is finally stepping down. Under his aegis, it has
widely been regarded as a golden age for the Hallé, yet Elder says that 25 years ago things were
rather different. “The orchestra was not in good shape. It felt as if they had lost their joy in music-
making.”

Elder knew that if he took on the job he would inherit the mantle that had draped around some
capacious shoulders, most notably Sir John Barbirolli, who had led the orchestra for 27 glorious
years, from 1943 to 1970. But when he arrived there was a problem. “The orchestra came very close
to folding at the end of the 1990s, because of the huge debts it had built up under the previous