Join us as the fantastic Hallé Youth Orchestra take centre stage for an amazing performance.

Under the baton of Euan Shields, Director of the Hallé Youth Orchestra and winner of the 2023 Siemens Hallé International Conductors Competition, the younger generation of our Hallé family open this concert with Awakening. A musical tapestry, it weaves together the rich and historical sound world of Wales and the vibrant energy of New York City; the two places Katie Jenkins has called home. Commissioned by the Juilliard School for the Juilliard Orchestra’s opening concert of 2024/25, this piece serves as a celebration of the excitement and anticipation of new beginnings.  

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is one of his most famous, and one of the greatest and most powerful of twentieth-century orchestral works. It was, supposedly, ‘A Soviet artist’s response to just criticism’. It is now known that this popular symphony was composed as a work of defiance so subtle that no-one realised at the time.