Guy Garvey's collaboration with the Hallé at The Bridgewater

Hall, Manchester made for a truly memorable occasion.

You rarely see touts outside the Hallé’s performances at the Bridgewater Hall; and I don’t expect that you

see standing ovations at the interval that often, either. But there was absolutely nothing ordinary about

Elbow’s performance with Manchester’s revered symphony orchestra, staged as part of the Manchester

International Festival. Lead singer Guy Garvey shambled on stage in a jacket and looked around in wonder

at the hall’s banked tiers, packed with a wonderfully mixed and palpably excited audience, before bursting

into ’Station Approach’. An explosion of sound flowed from the stage, rich strings backed by an artillery of

timpani, the band completely integrated into the orchestra. Garvey’s marvellous Mancunian voice rose

above it all, delicate yet powerful.

At the end of the song, he looked round once more: “This is a very, very lovely thing,” he said. And though

the jacket came off, the mood never changed. Conductor and composer Joe Duddell, who resembled an

eager schoolboy on the podium, obviously really understands the band from Bury. His arrangements are

deeply sympathetic, keeping the character of each song rather than swamping them in over-lush strings.

So you got a raucous ’Grounds for Divorce’, with the Hallé Youth Choir leading the clapping, but a lyrically

gentle ’Mirrorball’; ’The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver’ became a swirling ballad of isolation. ’Weather

to Fly’, which concluded the first half and triggered the ovation, set the control of Garvey’s falsetto “are we

having the time of our lives?” against a wall of violins and brass. Garvey swayed along in closed-eyed

enjoyment. The effect was to take Elbow’s elegies for the everday, their stories of love, loss and lost

opportunities, and transmute them into anthems.

The songs became bigger under the Hallé’s wing, they acquired a kind of majesty. When the choir sang

’Grace Under Pressure’, at the start of the second half, it sounded almost sacred; ’Newborn’, which began

with Garvey on acoustic guitar, and ended in a crescendo of choir, massed strings and harp, was

astonishingly powerful; ’Powder Blue’ was discordant and tender; the finale ’One Day Like This’ became a

mass singalong, with the audience on its feet and waving its arms. The songs covered all four Elbow

albums and Duddell also composed an interlude which puts the band’s characteristic rising and falling

chord sequences into a purely orchestral form. It worked, even if the second half of the evening relied

slightly too much on such sumptuous effects.

But in the end the glory of the songs, the power of the playing, the way Garvey sang out over all the

orchestral power behind him, made it a truly memorable occasion. Very, very lovely indeed.

Sarah Crompton, The Telegraph