LSO
David Nice
What a jolting coincidence that one of the 20th century's angriest symphonic beasts should have a rare unleashing on a night of high national anxiety. Whether Vaughan Williams spewed forth his Fourth Symphony in response to darkening European clouds in 1934 or as a sublimation of sexual frustration, given his unhappy domestic life at the time, it hit us all hard last night. There was even some release of tension in the sheer energy of embattled themes and grinding dissonances, thanks to Antonio Pappano's stupendous control of a London Symphony Orchestra on fire.Most surprising, perhaps, was Read more ...
David Nice
So much was fresh and exciting about Michael Tilson Thomas's years as the London Symphony Orchestra's Principal Conductor (1988-1995; I don't go as far back as his debut, the 50th anniversary of which is celebrated this season). Carved in the memory are his concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada in "The Flight of the Firebird" festival, his high-octane piano playing as well as conducting in "The Gershwin Years", the transformative Prokofiev Fifth and Strauss Ein Heldenleben (both fortunately also recorded). He seems a more sober figure now, less swooping of gestures, eyes a little too Read more ...
David Nice
We have John Eliot Gardiner to thank for an unconventional diptych of Czech masterpieces in the London Symphony Orchestra's current season. He had to withdraw from last night's concert - he conducts Dvořák's Cello Concerto and Suk's "Asrael" Symphony on Thursday - but his replacement, Kazushi Ono, was no second-best. Familiar to us in the UK mostly as an opera conductor, firm and clear-headed in the three vivid narratives of the evening, he provided the ideal security for orchestral playing and stunning singing to fly.The programme proved, as always, that there's no slack in Janáček's mature Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Simon Rattle has a knack for unearthing large-scale orchestral works that pack a punch. Olivier Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà … (Illuminations of the Beyond …) was completed in 1991, a year before the composer’s death, and is both a reflection on mortality and a summation of his life’s work. Quotations from the Book of Revelation head many of the movements, and Messiaen envisions the heavenly world through expansive string movements, with muted violins intoning long, plaintive melodies. Huge percussion and brass sections provide weight and colour, though the mood remains serene.Best of all Read more ...
David Nice
So the Proms ignored the Berlioz anniversary challenge to perform his Requiem and serve up four brass bands at the points of the Albert Hall compass. Yet at least last night in works of the 1920s and 1930s we got one offstage in the crazed baggy-monster original version of Varèse's Amériques and two in blazing antiphons on the platform, fanfaring both luxury and the celebrants of its overthrow in Walton's Belshazzar's Feast. With Simon Rattle in command of vast forces, it was mostly loud and brilliant, but it could have been even more focused in its ferocity.With two London orchestras showing Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As midsummer night’s dreams go, it would be hard to surpass the darkly enchanting collaboration between Sir Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars that will bring The Cunning Little Vixen to the Barbican again this evening and on Saturday. Janáček’s spellbinding vision of humans and animals caught up in the inexorable cycles of nature and time has its rough and scary side, of course. And you will probably hear and see gentler, more obviously charming, versions of the opera that in 1924 proclaimed Janáček’s late-life burst of untamed creativity.Sellars’s semi-staged production (originally mounted in Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The Barbican Hall hardly boasts the numinous acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral for which Vaughan Williams composed his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, but Sir Simon Rattle has long known how to build space into the architecture of what he conducts.No indulgences needed to be made for the students of the Guildhall School of Music next door. They slotted seamlessly within the ranks of the LSO to conjure a luminous halo of string sound, untroubled by the sense of loss which belongs to the piece in more lean and urgent performances. Their wind colleagues then filled the stage for Percy Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly 17 years ago, Simon Rattle inaugurated his era at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic with Mahler's Fifth Symphony. It couldn't hope to possess the thrill of discovery which had marked his Birmingham Mahler – after all, the Berliners had long enjoyed a more organic view of the composer with Claudio Abbado – but eventually the team gave us a supreme Proms performance of the Seventh Symphony, the one best suited to Rattle's curious form of micro-management. The London Symphony Orchestra, on the other hand, must be so relieved to be free of Gergiev's superficial Mahlerian glut, and while Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s a fair bet that more people now know Harmonielehre as the title of the 1985 orchestral blockbuster by John Adams than the composition manual written by Schoenberg in 1922. Even the title is “typically, ironically John”, as Sir Simon Rattle remarked in a pre-concert interview introducing the YouTube film of the concert. The piece has swallowed up its object of parody.Yet the composer’s old programme note, reprinted for this LSO concert, disavows ironic intent. Adams hides his well-chosen found objects of late Romanticism in plain sight – Mahler’s Tenth, Sibelius’s Fourth, Schoenberg’s own Read more ...
David Nice
Vibrant rustic dancing to conclude the first half, a heavenly barcarolle to cast a spell of silence at the end of the second: Bernard Haitink's 90th birthday celebrations of middle-European mastery wrought yet more magic in Dvořák and Mahler after his first concert of Mozart and Bruckner. He seemed perhaps a little more frail, less spiritually concentrated this time; but that wasn't going to get in the way of the phenomenal stick technique nor of the London Symphony Orchestra sounding, once again, more like its counterparts in Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna than ever before.It's possible that Read more ...
David Nice
So this is how Bruckner's Fourth Symphony should go. It's taken a master conductor just past his 90th birthday and an orchestra on top form to teach me. No doubt Claudio Abbado and Brucknermeister Gunter Wand could have done so, too, but I never heard them live in this, the "Romantic", and they are no longer with us. Bernard Haitink - he eschews the "Sir" with a typically self-deprecating shrug - evinced a tearful semi-secret rapture in performances of Schumann's Second and Beethoven's "Pastoral" with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe; that he should do it in three-quarters of this Bruckner Read more ...
David Nice
Would Verdi and Puccini have composed more non-operatic music, had they thrived in a musical culture different to Italy's? Hard to say. What we do know is that they both became absolute masters of orchestration – Puccini rather quicker than Verdi, living as he did in an entirely post-Wagnerian era. Verdi left us one great mass, the Requiem, Puccini a youthful and honest expression of the liturgy as well as other early pieces he mined for Manon Lescaut and La bohème. It made a pretty, occasionally stirring climax to an evening which could have done with an absolute masterpiece.One such, even Read more ...