LSO
David Nice
Antonio Pappano fervently believes that talking about music is a vital part of his communicative art, and nobody does it better. Given that the London Symphony Orchestra's enterprising Half Six Fix format is scheduled for an hour each time, and that Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé lasts almost that long, there wasn’t going to be much room for pre-performance demonstration yesterday evenng, but what we got still hit the mark.Pappano asked his LSO players to float away with the opening of “Daybreak”, start of the more often heard Second Suite but occurring some 40 minutes into the full ballet Read more ...
David Nice
It’s hard to know which aspect of this adventure to praise the most. Perhaps the fact that of the four recent works originally programmed, the two freshest were by young beneficiaries of the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme. There was also the pleasure orchestral members took in their colleagues’ playing, not just Rebecca Gilliver’s as soloist. The culminating glory was their response to François-Xavier Roth’s mastery in Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.More by accident than design, the living composers were bracketed by two great Hungarians. Admirably, Roth and the orchestra adapted to the sad Read more ...
David Nice
How lucky those of us were who grew up musically with the young Simon Rattle’s highly original programming in the 1980s. He’s still doing it at a time when diminishing resources can dictate more careful repertoire, and last night’s Americana proved spectacularly original. Four of the five works gave a different perspective on the decade and a half in which Shostakovich’s very different Fourth Symphony, LSO triumph of the earlier part of the week, failed to reach public performance.Did the sequence work? Not entirely. Bookending a John Adams premiere, an unfamiliar expansion of Gershwin’s Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
The LSO’s apéritif hour “Half-Six Fixes” have an informality that usually works and sometimes doesn’t. But the first of this two-night run of Dmitri Shostakovich’s monstrous and terrifying Fourth Symphony was unforgettable. Panels on the auditorium walls greeted the audience with a portrait of the composer and his famous note: “The authorities tried everything they knew to get me to repent… But I refused. Instead of repenting, I wrote my Fourth Symphony”.When Simon Rattle took to the podium he explained, for anyone who did not already know, the story behind them: pocket Shostakovich in 20 Read more ...
David Nice
That it would be a vividly operatic kind of oratorio performance was never in doubt. Mendelssohn, who said he wanted to create “a real world, such as you find in every chapter of the Old Testament,” instigates high drama with Elijah’s brass-backed opening statement. Pappano then let the orchestral and vocal narrative fly like an arrow, supported to the hilt by all involved, not least four great singers with whom he’d achieved several major successes at the Royal Opera.The only real problem with the evening was the work itself. You feel Mendelssohn was made for the sweet and the sorrowful, yet Read more ...
David Nice
An inexhaustible masterpiece shows different facets with each new interpretation. I’d thought of Jenůfa, Janáček's searing tale of Moravian village life based on a great play by a pioneering woman (Gabriela Preissová), as an open razor rushing through the world, cutting left and right. Simon Rattle presented instead an opulent bouquet, one slowly purged of the poisonous blooms within it.Last year’s concert performance of Káťa Kabanová offered a more obvious candidate for luminous lyricism. Jenůfa, an earlier work not without problems, rather than great originalities, of orchestration, needed Read more ...
David Nice
The only seriously false note about Maestro is its title. Yes, Bernstein was masterly as a conductor, and Bradley Cooper gives it his best shot. But he was no master of his life as a whole. Maybe the title should have been something like Lenny and Felicia (you think of something better).Broadway actor Felicia Montealegre, the woman he married after an on-off four-year relationship, is depicted as the shrewdest, harshest critic of the man rather than the artist, and though the music is brilliantly handled, Carey Mulligan is the real heart and soul of what Cooper as director and co-writer (with Read more ...
David Nice
It was good of the EFG London Jazz Festival to support this concert and bring in a different audience from the one the LSO is used to. But how to define it? Jazz only briefly figured in works by Gary Carpenter, Bartók, Barber and Abel Selaocoe. The only category would seem to be All Things Vital and Dancing. Anyone who’d come just for the phenomenal South Africa-born cellist, singer and composer must have been riveted by the rest, too.Charismatic conductor Duncan Ward, as attractive in presenting the works as in sinuously conducting them, would seem to have played a major part in the Read more ...
David Nice
Poetry came an honourable second to sharp rhythms and lurid definition in this choreographic poem of a concert. You don’t get more tumultuous applause after an opener than with Ravel’s La Valse played like this. Vienna may have nearly collapsed after World War One, but the Scheherazade of Fazil Say’s 1001 Nights Violin Concerto lives to see a bright dawn, and Rachmaninov cries “Alliluya’ to whirling demons in his swansong Symphonic Dances.Once again, there’s no doubt that the London Symphony Orchestra has made the right choice in Antonio Pappano, this season titled its Music Director Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Have Proms audiences heard it all before? Not by the longest of chalks. Remarkably, last night saw the festival’s first outing for a major work by Robert Schumann.True, an extract from his secular oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri once reached the Queen’s Hall – in 1909. But now Sir Simon Rattle, with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, had the chance to unroll the entire, sumptuously-threaded Orientalist carpet that Schumann completed in 1843.Based on a tale from the Irish poet Thomas Moore’s 1817 romance Lalla Rookh, this 100-minute hybrid – its blend of narration, solos and choruses Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Simon Rattle’s farewell season as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra has inscribed a sort of artistic memoir as he moves from one of his beloved blockbusters to another. Last night, he closed his account at the Barbican (though he will regularly return as “Conductor Emeritus”) with Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-Symphonie.Under the baton of Sir Charles Groves, it thrilled him as a kid in Liverpool. It thrilled us, too, as the composer’s ecstatic, unbuttoned post-Second World War shout of love and joy drew from the LSO the most ferociously uplifting performance anyone could wish to Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night at the Barbican was my first experience of a film with live orchestra, which has become a big thing in the last few years. The film in question was Alexander Korda’s extraordinary HG Wells adaptation Things to Come, from 1936, imagining a century of the future.As ever with sci-fi, while it is fun to see what predictions turned out right and which wide of the mark, the main takeaway is what the film tells us about the anxieties of 1936. Things to Come has a notable symphonic score, by Arthur Bliss, the first to be released as a commercial soundtrack album, and the film that first Read more ...