Hallé’s Business Model and Methods

The statement by John F. Russel ¹ in 1938 that, although his first concert series made no real money at all, ‘the original account books, written in Hallé’s spidery script, show that four years after, in 1862, the profits had risen to £1,228, and four years later still they were over £2,000’ ² has been quoted in many subsequent accounts of his achievement. Russell himself repeated it verbatim in his 1948 articles in the Hallé Magazine ³ , and a similar sentence appears (but tactfully referring to ‘Hallé’s careful script’) in Kennedy’s The Hallé Tradition of 1960. ⁴