Manchester's Bridgewater Hall turns 30 this season, and the Hallé chose to mark it the right way: not with a gala retrospective but with a genuine commission. James MacMillan's Sixth Symphony is the centrepiece, and it announces something plainly — the composer is done consolidating. His Fifth, the choral epic of 2019, felt like a culmination. The Sixth feels like someone who survived a summit and decided to scramble back down to basecamp by a different route. The symphony's architecture is unusual and worth tracking. Four short opening movements function as character sketches — four family members, MacMillan has said — before a fifth movement takes those materials and puts them through a formal and textural wringer. The Elgar Enigma and Britten Young Person's Guide are the obvious antecedents structurally, both works that introduce then develop, but MacMillan's fifth movement doesn't so much develop as collide. You don't hear themes grow; you hear them fight. The palette is deliberately disjunct: a pastoral trio of flutes sits nowhere near a buzzing swarm of muted brass; a Debussyean harp-and-piano duet hangs in the air like a non-sequitur; bowed vibraphone and gongs mark time in some other register entirely. The question the work poses — how do we assemble these fragments? — is not rhetorical. MacMillan and Kahchun Wong seemed to answer it in performance with something like stubborn optimism. Every time low woodwind and trombones, plus what the review describes as 'a nagging siren,' tried to pull the music under, gilded brass climaxes pushed back. The alto flute, at the end, simply persisted. Kahchun Wong conducted with the incisiveness the piece demands. This is not a symphony that forgives a conductor who waits for it to cohere on its own — the coherence has to be imposed, argued for, almost willed. Wong did that. The programming frame around the symphony was also cannily chosen: Liszt's Les Préludes and Beethoven's Emperor Concerto both stage battles for survival, which meant the MacMillan landed as the contemporary argument in a three-way conversation across two centuries. Stephen Hough's Emperor was more combative than his recordings typically suggest — his opening cadenza described here as 'flinging down a gauntlet' — and the duel with Wong and the orchestra through the finale had genuine competitive energy. As birthday concerts go, this one made an argument: that a hall's greatest achievement isn't its acoustic (though the Bridgewater's is legitimately excellent) but the kind of event it makes possible. A new MacMillan symphony of this ambition is exactly that kind of event.
