Simon Rattle’s season opens with a fanfare
Lso/rattle Barbican
The London Symphony Orchestra’s bold season - inaugurating programme was the sort of thing that would empty many halls. But that would be to reckon without the Simon Rattle factor, for it seems that audiences attend whatever he conducts. In a show of gratitude, the Barbican Centre and LSO jointly commissioned a thank-you present from Harrison Birtwistle to open this concert.
Donum Simoni MMXVIII (Simon’s Gift 2018) is a grand title for a short fanfare, but the venerable Birtwistle is not writing many long new works these days. Although he does still sometimes have fresh things to say, this sounded more like an offcut from one of his monolithic old scores. Like all self-respecting fanfares, it begins in the brass – though in their growling lowest range – and percussion and woodwind join to build powerfully before the music quickly burns itself out again, settling back in the low brass.
Rattle unpacked his present with relish, showing that easy mix of authority and adventurousness that endears him to audiences.
Slightly less new, but still in keeping with the concert’s “New Music Britain” theme, Mark-anthony Turnage’s 1995 concerto for two trumpets and orchestra, Dispelling the Fears, proved much more substantial. Indeed, it was a welcome reminder of the grittier style of a composer who has mellowed in recent years. An urban soundscape at first menacing and then melancholy, Turnage’s score speaks with expressionist intensity.
It was an inspired idea to link these with Egdon Heath, Holst’s homage to Thomas Hardy. Composed 91 years ago, and neither tonal nor atonal, this score still presents players and listeners with a challenge – evidence of Holst’s under-appreciated modernism. Eeriness is never far away, even when the composer of The Planets momentarily steps into view, and Rattle drew beautifully voiced, muted sounds from his orchestra.
After so much wintriness, Britten’s Spring Symphony cleared the air. Sitting somewhere between Mahler’s Song of the Earth and Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, this can be a cumbersome piece, but also fascinating when done with such conviction. Britten’s first large-scale choral work (1949) draws on poetry from across seven centuries, and is right up to date with Auden’s wartime “A Summer Night”, its strangeness sustained here by the mezzo Alice Coote and the London Symphony Chorus.
Allan Clayton’s free, easy tenor and superb diction made his contributions a highlight, but the soprano Elizabeth Watts and the children’s voices of the Tiffin Choirs also played their roles in this reawakening of the earth after winter.
Simon Rattle conducts the LSO tonight and tomorrow. Tickets lso.co.uk