SPOTLIGHT ON: The Manchester Collective.
Interview with Artistic Director & General Manager, Adam Szabo.
Interview with Artistic Director & General Manager, Adam Szabo.
So what projects have been completed so far?
Adam: So 2017 has been our inaugural season and our first
concert was the Transfigured Night project which unusually featured a string
sextet and a harpsichord. The key work in that project was Schoenberg’s
masterpiece “Transfigured Night” for
String Sextet, but the rest of the program was a range of early music and much
newer music. We performed a string quartet by John Cage in which we alternated
movements with incidental music from the “Fairy
Queen” [Henry Purcell].
The Cage is a work that is very much rock inspired and we
felt that by juxtaposing that with the Purcell, there were aspects of both works
that would pull the audience in. It was something that wasn’t quite radical,
but it was definitely an unusual thing to do and people responded really well
to it. We also performed a work by Biber, the Battallia for Ten Intruments, and
in one of the movements we put down our instruments and sang an aria and so
that was another example of how we can kind of attack this repertoire in new
ways. And the project was incredibly well received! As part of what we do, we
live stream every project that we produce and we had more than 16,000 people tuned
in to the live stream of the concert so that was great. So that was our debut
concert in Manchester, at Islington Mill where we played the concert with the
audience sitting extremely close to us, closer than a metre. [That is] another
way that the audience can engage with the relationships going on between the
players themselves, and the players and the music.