Proms at the Lake: A Century of Shibden, Set to Music
Some evenings you know, while you are still in them, that you will be talking about them for years. Saturday 15 August at Shibden Park was one of those.
Proms at the Lake: 100 Years in Nature marked the centenary of Halifax's best-loved green space with three and a half hours of open-air orchestral music, running from seven o'clock until half past ten. Camping chairs, folding garden chairs and the odd veteran deckchair went up across the grass, an eclectic skyline of everyone's own seating. Picnic hampers came out. And as the light began to soften over the water, a public park quietly turned itself into a concert hall.
Music made for the open air
The English Chamber Orchestra, under conductor Toby Purser, took a programme built around the turning of the seasons and let the lake do the rest. Sound behaves differently outdoors. It travels, thins and arrives from somewhere you were not expecting. Mendelssohn's woodland writing made the case for why this music belongs outside. Vivaldi's Summer landed with real bite in the fading warmth of an August evening, Ofer Falk's solo violin cutting clean across the water. Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Greensleeves felt almost too apt, drifting across a Yorkshire valley at dusk.
Soprano Ella Taylor and mezzo-soprano Rebecca Afonwy-Jones took the solo and duet numbers, two voices holding a whole hillside with no roof to help them. Then came the Halifax Choral Society and the Hallelujah Chorus. Two centuries of choral tradition in this town, singing that piece, in that setting, with the hillside behind them going purple. Hard to top.
Anne Lister, danced
Except that Northern Ballet did top it.
The evening's stand-out was a scene from Gentleman Jack, danced on the main stage by Gemma Coutts as Anne Lister and Saeka Shirai as Mariana Lawton. Shibden Hall itself sat up the slope behind us, the house where Anne Lister lived, wrote her diaries and built the life that later reached millions of television viewers.
That proximity does something. The same choreography in a city theatre is fine storytelling; here, in the last of the light, on the estate that shaped her, it became a story about somewhere. The dancing carried a restraint that made it far more affecting than anything showier. When it ended, the seven hundred or so of us went very quiet. Some phones went up, catching a moment that will not come round again. Plenty of people simply sat there, not moving at all. That stillness was the review.
Sally Wainwright, who created and wrote the television drama, was in the audience. Whatever it feels like to watch your own script danced back to you on the estate that started it, she had the best seat in the house for it.
A park doing what parks are for
Credit to whoever priced this thing. The Yorkshire Day offer, a free under-16 ticket with every paying adult, meant the audience was not the usual classical crowd. Children lay flat on the grass watching the sky change colour while an orchestra played. Grandparents who have walked this park their whole lives. Teenagers who came for the ballet and stayed for Vivaldi.
The Mayor and Mayoress of Calderdale were there, as a hundredth birthday demands. Shibden Park was given to Halifax a hundred years ago as a place for everyone. Up at the front, the VIP area had tables and proper concert seating. Behind it, everyone else sat in whatever had come out of the shed that afternoon. Both got the same lake, the same light and the same orchestra.
If a centenary should say what a place has been and still is, this one said it. Here's to the next hundred years.
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