Manchester Collective: Sky With The Four Suns, Lakeside, Nottingham, 05 February 2026, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review by William Ruff.

Photo credit: Manchester Collective

Manchester Collective: Sky With The Four Suns

Lakeside, Nottingham |05 February 2026,

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review by William Ruff

“Cutting-edge music that both provokes and illuminates.”

There’s always a sense of excitement before every Manchester Collective concert, generated by both risk and trust.  The musicians balance on that dangerous edge of contemporary classical music, offering audiences not only the new and experimental but placing it within programmes which both provoke and illuminate.  Sometimes the experience is uncomfortable, bewildering, disorientating – but it’s never dull and they trust their audiences to open ears and minds to new sounds in surprising contexts. 

This concert featured a string quartet: Rakhi Singh and Donald Grant (violins), Ruth Gibson (viola) and Alice Neary (cello).  Together they explored ideas of line, space and introspection, tracing a path from the purity of early music to the physical and atmospheric landscapes of contemporary consciousness.  Each piece they played invited meditation: on faith, on musical architecture, on our place within a fragile natural world.  Their music spanned five centuries, from Purcell in the 17th to music that was receiving its 21st century premiere.

The concert started with Summa by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, a serene exercise in spiritual geometry, each note like a carefully placed stone in a sonic cathedral.  It certainly set the tone of the whole evening: far from dramatic, Summa evokes profound stillness and manages to feel both ancient and timelessly modern.

We then travelled back in time via Henry Purcell’s Fantasia in C minor, a piece whose 1680 sound is in many ways more modern and ‘crunchy’ (to quote Rakhi Singh) than 1970s Pärt.  It’s a piece which weaves four independent instruments into a rich, melancholic tapestry, full of ingenious, daring counterpoint, full of emotional power.  In Manchester Collective’s performance its technical complexity and often startling harmonic daring were means to drawing the audience into an eloquent conversation amongst equals, as if a public event had become something intimately private.

Britten’s 2nd String Quartet (1945) was written to mark the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death.  Manchester Collective had the measure of the music from the outset: the rocking, uneasy theme that sets off a series of developments that are more about colour and texture than anything else.  The ghost of Purcell hovers above its musical landscape of strange harmonics, searching melodies and restless energy.  The quartet’s playing showed minute attention to detail, revealing intense inward beauty.

The rest of the programme trod new ground.  Mica Levi’s You Belong to Me invites listeners to abandon all preconceptions about the string quartet.  Her sound-world is unique: haunting, minimalist textures, a blurring of lines between melody and atmosphere, an invitation into a world that occasionally sounds familiar but is more often unsettling.  At one moment the music suggests the colourful wings of exotic butterflies and the next it suggests bright sunlight.  Each instrument is mined for rare sonorities, such as the astonishing, rib-trembling vibrations created by the cello at the end.

Jasmine Morris’s Poems of Consciousness is an evocative piece of sound-sculpture, creating colour and texture rather than anything reliant on melody or rhythm.  Its ideas have the brilliance of shooting stars, its sounds are feathery, icy; they shine for a moment and then are gone.  They amount to a deeply thoughtful exploration of texture and resonance, in which instruments, musicians and the very act of listening are pushed to new limits.

Much the same can be said of the final piece: Canticles of the Sky by John Luther Adams, a work inspired by landscapes within the Arctic Circle and one which fuses sound with colour and intense light.  It’s a work which invites audiences to see and touch as well as to hear.  More than anything it creates wonder, a fitting conclusion to a programme that excites, challenges, calms and provokes – and always through vividly accomplished playing.

Manchester Collective

Rakhi Singh (violin), Donald Grant (violin), Ruth Gibson (viola), Alice Neary (cello).