ABSTRACT
After the exhibition, Manchester’s music would not be the same again. 1 But the first visible sign of new initiatives involved neither Walker nor Hallé. An advertisement in the Manchester Guardian of 3 October 1857 announced that the ‘Lancashire Festival Choral Society’ would give an annual series of subscription concerts at the Free Trade Hall. The director was Joseph Harris, the Manchester Cathedral organist, and Sterndale Bennett (soon to be musical director of the Leeds Town Hall opening festival) was to conduct the concerts, having been approached about them in December the previous year. W.A. Fairbairn, brother of the chairman of the executive committee of the Art Treasures Exhibition, was a member of the new venture’s committee, and its inaugural concert was announced for 11 December, beginning a series of four, with other engagements ‘pending’. There were said to be 600 subscribers (at 2 guineas apiece – a very high ticket price), and the band and chorus would be ‘selected from the leading musical societies in Manchester, Liverpool and the principal towns in Lancashire’. 2 Sims Reeves was announced as a soloist for the second concert, which would be on 15 January, the dates of the third and fourth were to be announced, and there would be ‘a full band and chorus at each performance’. 3
