A Weekend in Leeds

I had to be in Leeds for work on Friday so I thought I would stay over and take in a bit of Leeds culture.

Friday night was Phoenix Dance Theatre's "Cattle Call" at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. I have seen Phoenix before and been impressed by their work but this was dreadful. The cast consisted of two women in "Tosca" frocks and a few men and women in warm-up clothes. The action was them standing up , sitting down and moving chairs around the stage. Occasionally there were confrontations over a microphone and fights broke out. The music was dominated by the singing of the two Toscas (if it was indeed them we were hearing) who had harsh ugly voices. All the music was amplified to painful levels. "The Times" on Saturday rated this as the number one dance event for the week. I thought it was rubbish.

Leeds Town Hall is a very impressive building, which I last entered when it was used as a court many years ago. The building is in the classical/baroque style, rectangular in shape, with two storeys over a basement. Once you have ascended the grand flight of stone stairs at the front, the entrance opens into a vestibule, with a domed ceiling. The floor is inlaid with tiles said to be similar to the tiles used in the Senate House in Washington. At the centre of the ground floor is the Victoria Hall, 92 feet high, 161 feet long, and 72 feet wide and with concert seating for 1500 people. The sides of the Victoria hall are divided into five bays by Corinthian columns which were decorated in imitation of Rosso-Antico marble with capitals gilded in bronze and gold. The circular roof is divided into five sections supported by the columns. Behind the plasterwork the roof is supported by laminated wood beams arranged in pairs; the only other buildings in this country to have this design were the Crystal Palace and King's Cross Station. Both the walls and ceiling are decorated with elaborate plasterwork. At each end of the hall and around the walls are various inscriptions, some in Latin and some in English, picked out in gold.

This lavish hall is the venue for the Leeds International Orchestral Season and on Saturday evening the orchestra of Opera North took the stage, conducted by Frederic Chaslin. The concert opened with Shostakovich's Festive Overture. This gave me a chance to assess the hall's acoustic, which is full and resonant, although with a tendency to be a bit 'churchy'.

The main piece in the first half of the concert was Chopin's Piano Concerto. This is sometimes criticised for its slightly perfunctory orchestral parts but I think that Chopin did not view a concerto as a battle ground between soloist and orchestra but rather as a piece for piano supported by orchestra. And so it was on Saturday. The soloist was Evgenia Rubinova (a former silver medallist in the Leeds Piano Competition) and she was excellent, revelling in the wonderful elegance of this concerto.

The second half of the concert was Prokofiev's fifth symphony. This was the first time I had heard this but it completely justified the programme note that told us that Prokofiev thought it his finest work and that it is one of the greatest of 20th century symphonies. Particularly memorable were the scherzo and the lovely passage in the last movement for divided cellos. The orchestra attacked the piece with panache, completing an excellent concert in a splendid venue.