Widmann, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - razor-sharp attack in adrenalin charges

Perhaps all great music counterpoints and comments on the times, but Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra have been searingly congruent. Before he took up his post as Chief Conductor, there were the extinction whispers of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony the night before lockdown and the fury of VW’s Fourth on the eve of Boris Johnson’s election. Now the aggressive dynamism of Walton’s First raised us out of that sinking feeling as the USA worsens by the day.

George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5. “Visions” (the composer pictured below by Frank Schramm), could have been charged, too, under the circumstances, though the massacre of nine members  of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Southern Carolina, which prompted the 94-year-old African-American composer to action is an all-too-common source of horror at any time. Ultimately, this performance of total conviction left me just as puzzled as the one from the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner in 2022, the work’s UK premiere. As Pappano intimated in his spoken introduction, a seemingly incoherent rage may explain the stops and starts; I wonder what the Sinfonia might feel like with the original spoken text. Without it, the discordant blasts that will not be tamed alternate with passages, especially from the woodwind, that seem to edge towards coherence. The trouble is that none of these acts as much of a hook (a repeated piano phrase, played with impact by Elizabeth Burley, comes close). Nothing haunts the mind or sticks in the memory; the work just lurches about until its sudden end. And the playing here was as focused as it’s ever going to get.

In his Serenade for violin, strings and percussion – it’s a pity Pappano didn’t at the beginning of the concert utter the words “Plato’s Symposium” or “gay love” – Bernstein strikes memorable gold for each of the ancient Greek male celebrants in turn; this is surely his most vivid concert-hall work (if one counts MASS as a thing apart). Janine Jansen, arguably the finest violinist in the world today, had the flu, but Carolin Widmann (pictured below), a late replacement, would certainly do. Her tone right at the exposed start wasn’t remotely beautiful, as Jansen would surely have made it, and as Baiba Skride so unforgettably did in a Dublin performance; but she knows the work inside out, had the forthrightness for the extrovert passages and the virtuosity for the “Eryximachus” scherzo, and worked infallibly well with the orchestra and Pappano – perfect teamwork.

She also duetted poetically in what amounts to a double cadenza in the portrait of Socrates with principal cellist Rebecca Gilliver (whose performance of the Walton Cello Concerto on Sunday should be wonderful). The percussion sometimes needed to tone it down a bit, from where I am sitting, but the result, by the end, was that everyone turned out to glitter and be gay, like Widmann’s gorgeous outfit. Let’s hope this top offering among 20^th century violin concertos makes more of a comeback now.

Walton’s First Symphony was a regular concert-hall visitor when I was in my teens, and how I thrilled to it. Now it strikes as a bit, well, adolescent in its angst, a bit over-extended and worked-up at times. But crucially this was not a performance, like the last one I heard, hitting you over the head with a giant wooden mallet – Walton’s orchestration is often, too often, massive – but cutting like the sharpest of giant knives. Pappano’s energy emphasised every accent, every syncopation, and kept an LSO on top form out of the mud. Solos were all the more valuable because rare: first viola Eivind Ringstad made strange, jazzy sounds under the melancholy of flutes and bassoons (aptly caustic for the “malicious” scherzo) in the first movement, Gareth Davies’ solo leading the Andante con malinconia kept its mystery, and the distant last-post gleam of James Fountain’s trumpet just before the ultimate peroration brought more sudden pathos. The most remarkable aspect of the interpretation was how it brought such sudden blazing light to a finale with which Walton struggled throughout 1935 (the symphony’s first performance took place without it). The strings in the fugue sounded utterly brilliant, clean projection without the preceding thickness, their later patter transfixing; if in all of this, Walton was indebted to Hindemith, so much the better (maybe Pappano could mastermind a much-needed Hindemith revival, especially as LSO audiences will go with him whatever he does). Was there anyone who didn’t get goosebumps at the tremolo blaze, or thrill to the final spaced-out tattoo? The symphony may not be perfect, but it has Walton’s idiosyncratic personality stamped all over it, and last night that physiognomy was vivid at all times.

• Antonio Pappano's next concert with the LSO is on Sunday 9 February (Maconchy, Walton and Vaughan Williams)
• More classical music reviews on theartsdesk