Modern music supercharged with orchestral glitter

Royal Festival Hall

On Wednesday night, the London Philharmonic Orchestra launched its new season with three modern works and not a single crowd-pleaser – a bold move, rewarded with a handsomely full and wildly appreciative audience. It helped that two of the pieces – Symphony in Three Movements by Stravinsky, and the 3rd Symphony by Witold Lutosławski – were undoubted masterpieces, each supercharged with adrenal excitement and orchestral glitter. It also helped that on the podium was Thomas Adès, the 47-year-old virtuoso composer, conductor and pianist who has mesmerised the musical world through a combination of uncanny brilliance and a ubiquity that rivals Britten and Stravinsky in their prime.

The evening was almost a triumph, but at its heart was a problem, in the shape of Adès’s own Piano Concerto In Seven Days. As the title suggests, the piece was inspired by the Biblical creation myth, and at its premiere 10 years ago was accompanied by a video made by Tal Rosner, which traced in abstract imagery the emergence of light and dark, sea and sky and so forth. The combination of dancing, hyperactive music and imagery was just too much, and in most performances in recent years the video has been quietly dropped.

Alas, even without the images, the piece is still too much, as this performance proved. The soloist Kirill Gerstein did his best to find an expressive heart in all the whirl and glitter, giving a melting tenderness to the brief moment of calm in the fifth movement. But all the brilliance couldn’t hide the fact that the piece still feels over-muscled, every idea made to burgeon and accrete massively complex detail. The aural spectacle was mesmerising, but one couldn’t still a nagging doubt there was little genuine feeling behind it.

Thank goodness the performances of the other two pieces were so riveting. Symphony in Three Movements packed a powerful punch in the outer movements, but it was the lyrical delicacy in the pastoral idyll of the central movement that really struck home. Lutosławski’s symphony presents a special challenge, in the way it morphs from a static, playful kaleidoscope of fragments to an irresistible forward momentum, but Adès and the LPO made the narrative seem both thrilling and moving.