Ah, autumn! Blackberries picked, apples harvested, Keats consulted, barely-bronzed legs hidden till spring, and folk across the land are surprised and flattened by the forgotten weight of their high Tog duvets.

Students throng back merrily, dragging downwards by decades the average age of pedestrians on Manchester’s Oxford Road, and the cultural life of the city splutters into inevitable action again after a brief summer rest. Isn’t there something reassuring in this annual round, as we frantically fill our diaries to fend off Seasonal Affective Disorder, raging collectively against the dying of the light?

But I should park these poetical meanderings and tell you about ‘Legends and Lore’, the 2025/26 theme running through the Royal Northern College of Music’s new programme of events. 

The season launched with a sparkling concert from Manchester Camerata, centred on Beethoven’s Triple Concerto for violin, cello, and piano. One of the many successes of the RNCM has been the way it marries globally applauded training for its students with ever-deepening opportunities for them to work with organisations like the Camerata, Manchester Collective, the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic. Here, the RNCM’s outgoing junior fellow in conducting, Benjamin Huth, gave an energetic lead to the orchestra and to three well-polished soloists, Kryštof Kohout (violin), Findley Spence (cello) and Susanna Braun (piano), all of whom are graduating from the RNCM’s postgraduate International Artist Diploma Programme.

The Triple Concerto is a majestic, uplifting work, an ideal centrepiece for an opening concert which showcased three RNCM players in the early stages of their singularly promising careers. It was preceded by Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte from 2011, which mashes up Haydn’s final quartet with a more abstractly modernist soundscape to set up a centuries-spanning dialogue. It was wry, playful and delicate. Things concluded with a well-paced performance of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 (the Italian), with deft contributions from the Camerata’s woodwind section; a sharp, sunny way to celebrate the RNCM’s ongoing work.

There’s a busy, varied autumn at the college. The second year of its International Artists series welcomes performers like the two-time Grammy award-winning Attacca Quartet and genre-stretching cellist Seth Parker Woods. A highlight will be the Kantos Chamber Choir’s heady journey into Lancashire’s dark past with The Witch Trials on November 14 where vocal music old and new will combine with spoken word to evoke the 1612 trials. The sulphurous whiff of devilry continues with a screening of F.W. Murnau’s mighty Faust (1926) with live organ accompaniment from Darius Battiwalla (November 21). If 1922’s Nosferatu is all you know of Murnau, there’s a lot more to discover, and Faust is a good place to start.

Finally (and this is an embarrassingly scant supermarket sweep through a diverse and crammed season), the RNCM’s opera productions are always glad events and this winter we get Prokofiev’s absurdist comedy, L’Amour des Trois Oranges (The Love for Three Oranges). Even by the standards of opera, its frankly bizarre plotline defies neat description. It should provide some magical December fizz.

By Andrew Moor, Opera Correspondent 

Main image: RNCM, Manchester Camerata, Beethoven Triple Concerto. Photographer ©️Robin Clewley.

 

Details of the RNCM season can be found here.