With over 50,000 entries from over 145 seasons, the Hallé Archive’s Repertoire Database is in fact several databases that cross-reference. The two main ones are ‘Works’ and ‘Performances’. The Work records mainly consist of title of a piece and its composer. The Performance record includes the title as given in the programme, (which can vary over time), date and venue, the conductor and key performers such as soloists. This links into a smaller database of performers, effectively an index of soloists and conductors. Here you can also find any other special performance-related information such as whether it is a première.
For thousands of concerts, you can find the date, venue, conductor, pieces performed, composers, soloist and other bits and pieces particular to an individual performance. You can explore across the databases, going where your curiosity takes you. For instance, you may wish to find the instances of when and where we performed a certain piece; from there your curiosity about one of the soloists featured may lead you to finding all the concerts we have hosted that soloist; after that you could be interested in what else was featured in the programme for one of their performances and find the repertoire enjoyed by our audiences on that date.
Our main series of concerts from 1858 through to the 1989/1990 season and then from the 1998/1999 to 2014/2015 seasons, as well as the main run of concerts outside of Manchester from the 1945 to the late 1979/1980 season, and again from 1998/1999 to 2014/2015.
The gap in the 1990s is being diligently filled manually to meet 1998 which was the year the concert schedules moved from paper-only to digital.
Any help and information would be very welcomed. Human error both historically in the programmes and during creation of the database is bound to emerge. If you spot something you have missed, please do let the archive team who will add it to their regular “database to do” list. You can contact them on
archive@halle.co.uk
This is a work in progress and will continue to be updated for as long as we are performing. It has been a labour of love for volunteers working diligently for two decades, taking the information from our programmes archive. Extracting digital data from redundant software became a priority in 2024 which is why there is a gap between 1990 when the concert planning was paper-based and in 1998 when the first digital database was used by our concerts team. We are working diligently to manually close the gap in this data. We have not yet inputted the international tours or special concerts, but we aim to get to these series as soon as we can.
Our priorities have so far been focusing on creating the database for repertoire and concerts. Finding players is a little trickier. Not every programme has a list of the players performed, and the Choir only started to be listed in programmes after a few decades. Only permanently contracted players were listed in programmes, so any freelancers would not be listed. However, an index of players has been completed by a volunteer so basic enquiries can be answered by our Archivist, so please get in touch for more information.
Yes. Please place your order with us here:
Hallé Concert Society Archive Enthuse. Please let us know the date and city of the performance in the message area of the Enthuse order form. We will send you a .pdf digital copy to the email address used in the Enthuse form, upon receipt of the fee of £5 per programme. For more than 10 programmes, please contact the Archivist to discuss the timeframe of delivery
archive@halle.co.uk All funds go towards supporting our charitable aims and objectives.