Rattling voyage through Haydn’s eccentricities

Sir Simon Rattle is already putting his stamp on the LSO before his arrival as Music Director in September. His programmes always have an element of surprise in them, as if music is something he’s still exploring with naive delight.

Here the surprises came from Joseph Haydn, a composer who hid a fondness for witty musical games and jokes under a courtly surface. The core of this concert was ‘an imaginary orchestral voyage’ conceived by Rattle, which led us through some of Haydn’s more eccentric movements culled from his symphonies, oratorios and operas. Some of them, like the grandly mysterious Representation of Chaos that introduces The Creation were familiar, but most were obscure – as is most of Haydn.

Some of the pieces were truly outlandish, like the finale of Symphony No 60, where the players launch off, skitter to a halt when the violins realise they have to retune, and then try again. More telling were those quietly mysterious moments when Haydn subverted musical grammar, as in the slow movement of Symphony No 64. Here the last note of one phrase in the melody vanishes, and reappears as the first note of the next.

Everything unfolded with easy grace, which meant that the numerous solo passages in the Minuet from Symphony No 6 had space to breathe. A similar warm, humane glow pervaded the rest of the concert. The Prelude and Liebestod to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde had a surprisingly impetuous rhythmic quality.

Then came Bartok’s 2nd Piano Concerto. It’s a piece touched by the machine-age aesthetic of the 1920s, and its rhythms can sound harddriven. Rattle relaxed the tempos a touch, and mollified the onward rush with moments of flexibility. As well as being musically telling, it was tactful to pianist Denis Kozhukhin, who was standing in for Lang Lang at short notice. He overcame nerves to give a terrific performance that revelled in the neoclassical wit of the piece.