Tuesday 9th December 2025

Hallé at St. Michael’s, Manchester, England

The passage to oblivion is, in some ways, uneventful. No sooner have I arrived at St. Michael’s – a converted 19th-century Catholic church now serving as one of the smaller event halls owned by the Hallé Orchestra – than I am through its rustic, unattended front door and taking a seat in the third row. The evening is dark but it is even darker inside, the lights dim and close in both the foyer and the main hall where the audience begins to congregate. The most prominent light is the warm orange emitting from the stagelights, beneath which a single chair stands empty and anticipating.

There are still a couple of seats free in the front row, but I make no attempt to move towards them. For in truth, I feel like a bit of an imposter here. Two men seated behind me talk freely about the classical pieces they hope to hear tonight, including Piazzolla’s ‘Oblivion’, and while I’ve heard tonight’s artist play the song on one of the YouTube videos that first drew me to her music, I’m not sure I’d have the ear to pick it out, let alone opine on the nuances of its various performances the way those within earshot of me do so tonight.

This is my first concert of classical music, and one which I have attended on a whim. The algorithm – which, for all its sins, is wont to do this from time to time – had just a few weeks earlier shown me some videos of Edith Pageaud playing a classical guitar – beautiful, restful music amongst beautiful, restful settings. It was serendipitous that she would shortly be visiting my city, and I decided to attend. I was slightly daunted, however, because for the last few years I have been in the habit of writing reviews of each concert I attend, and I knew that I would have to either break with this habit or risk offering valueless comments on a form of music that I know even less about than the country, roots and rock music I usually write about.

Happily, I find in Edith Pageaud tonight a gentle and willing teacher. Dressed in a charming black evening gown with a black ruff around her neck to keep out the cold of the North of England in December, the strikingly beautiful young Frenchwoman takes her seat under the warm orange stagelight and drapes a black cloth across her lap. Resting her classical guitar against the cloth, she begins to play, her red hair falling over her face.

Over the next seventy-five minutes, Edith performs – but also teaches. With an engaging light humour delivered in a sweet and strong French accent (though in impeccable English), she introduces each of the pieces she plays with a comment or two on its provenance, syncopation or arrangement, such as how a piece originally written for the cello, which with its bow can easily glide across various notes, is rearranged for guitare classique by the use of tremolo, a sequence of rapid notes on the guitar which Edith then deploys masterfully on the music in question. She highlights some of the nuances of the pieces to watch out for before she plays them, and in this way she bridges the vast gap between my shallow pool of knowledge of classical guitar music and my deep enjoyment of it tonight.

I make the decision early on that I cannot adequately chronicle the night: not only had the promoter politely requested no photography but, more importantly, I lack sufficient knowledge of the music for any notes I would make on my phone worthwhile. Indeed, I take out my phone only once – to make sure it is on silent. To interact with it any more on a night of such refined and cerebral music seems like sacrilege.

It means that the short night passes by as some sort of fever dream. My recollections lack substance, at least for the purposes of a useful review, and the setlist I include at the bottom of this page is an incomplete hodgepodge of the official programme for the night and some other specific pieces I recall hearing.

But it does mean that I do become more involved in the night itself. Free of my self-imposed desire to make my own notes, to record and write and diarise, I surrender to the notes of Edith Pageaud’s guitar, and the silence between those notes. As Edith’s hands move across the neck and body of her guitar, ceaselessly weaving the night, I am privileged to hear arrangements of Schubert and Philip Glass and the Spanish guitars of the Argentines.

Some are arrangements created by others and played amply by Edith; Scarlatti’s ‘Sonata K. 466’ and Messiaen’s ‘Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus’ being especial highlights. Others are arrangements made by Edith herself, such as her impressive guitar arrangement of Rachmaninov’s ‘Prélude in C-Sharp Minor’ and Biber’s ‘Passacaglia’, which was the first arresting song I heard from Edith online and which drew me here tonight.

And there is, of course, Piazzolla’s ‘Oblivion’. I don’t know what the two men behind me make of it, or how it compares to the other times they’ve heard the piece. I myself cannot comment on its nuances, beyond what Edith herself generously highlighted to me and the rest of the audience before she began to play.

But I also learn that it does not matter. For all that this music is a cerebral force, requiring patience, application and an appreciation of quietude from its listeners, it is also music that, in the capable hands of Edith Pageaud, I can allow to just flow over me without thought or worry. Music is the universal language, the oldest one we know. The ancient cavemen of Lascaux would be moved by this music, were they able to be here tonight, just as my own uncultured mind can travel through the chords and be soothed without any of the more nuanced appreciation possessed by other attendees tonight.

Music runs deep, oblivious to the barriers we place with theory and culture and thought. And music is not just heard or seen, but felt; in light, in atmosphere and circumstance. As Edith Pageaud sits on the stage against a curtain of royal blue, beautiful and concentrating on the notes of ‘Oblivion’ she plays on her guitar beneath the warm orange stagelight, I can sink, thoughtless, into the warmth of oblivion and be moved by the music that resounds there.

Setlist:

  1. Glassworks: 1. Opening (Philip Glass, arr. Vladan Miladinovic)
  2. Introduction et Rondo Brillant (Johann Kaspar Mertz)
  3. Zer Guten Nacht, D. 903 (Franz Schubert, arr. Edith Pageaud)
  4. Aufenthalt (Schubert, arr. Mertz)
  5. Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus (Olivier Messiaen, arr. Matias Tozzola)
  6. Passacaglia (Heinrich Biber, arr. Pageaud)
  7. Prélude in C-Sharp Minor (Sergei Rachmaninov, arr. Pageaud)
  8. Étude Op. 8 No. 12 (Alexander Scriabin, arr. Pageaud)
  9. Sonata K. 24 (Carlos Seixas)
  10. Sonata K. 466 (Domenico Scarlatti)
  11. Oblivion (Astor Piazzolla, arr. Roland Dyens)
  12. El Bien Perdido (Atahualpa Yupanqui)
  13. Los Caujaritos (Ignacio Figueredo)
  14. Passacaille (Alexandre Tansman)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.