A night of enlightenment
London Philharmonic Orchestra
The LPO’s current series “Belief and Beyond Belief ” took a critical hammering even before it began. Some sneered at it for embracing anything and everything, in its attempt to explore the spiritual side of human existence. Others said the near-total absence of overtly Christian pieces was a capitulation to our morbidly oversensitive times.
Christianity is, after all, the motive force behind much of the great art and music of the West, and is surely the natural focus for a musical series devoted to mankind’s spirituality. But that might be perceived as “exclusive” by those determined to feel excluded.
For anyone inclined to fire sceptical broadsides, last night’s concert offered a big target. It was certainly an odd ragbag, on paper. There was a symphony by Haydn, which acquired a vaguely spiritual nickname, “The Philosopher”, only because the first movement has a stately Baroque air, which seemed antique and vaguely ‘philosophical’ to audiences at the time.
Then came Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, a risky and perverse choice. Risky, because the thundering “Gothic” opening has been used endlessly for horror films; perverse because Poulenc wrote some of the great religious music of the 20th century, which this series is studiously ignoring. Even more puzzling was
Atmosphères by the Hungarian modernist György Ligeti, which launched the concert’s second half. Granted, it’s a magically hushed play of sheer sound, which seems to turn the orchestra into a giant electronic synthesizer. But does that make it spiritual?
As for Richard Strauss’s huge, noisy extravaganza Also Sprach Zarathustra, it hymns the potential of man to become Superman, but, to many, that aspiration marks the total absence of spirituality. It’s man arrogantly putting himself in God’s place.
Faced with such a hubbub of world views, the only sensible course was to ignore them and focus on the music, in the hope that it would bring its own sort of enlightenment. Amazingly, that hope was fulfilled.
Much of the credit for this must go to Andrés Orozco-Estrada, the LPO’s principal guest conductor. He didn’t try to underline the moments of strenuous aspiration or hushed otherworldliness, to make the music fit the message. Instead he allowed everything to unfold with natural, unforced musicality, enlivened with numerous subtle touches.
In the first movement of Haydn’s symphony, he conjured a strange glassy tone, which made the music’s solemn tread seem aloof and remote, like a stately dance seen through frosted glass. The last movement had a real peasant rumbustiousness, which brought us back down to earth.
The sheer strangeness of Ligeti’s Atmosphères sent us aloft again. The LPO rendered the music’s flickering play of colours with immense subtlety, particularly those moments when, here and there, a cello or flute emerged from the mass of sound, and faded back into it.
If spirituality is a condition of floating free in some weightless realm, this wonderful performance offered a compelling image of it. If it’s about struggle and aspiration constantly renewed and constantly thwarted, the performance of Strauss offered an equally riveting musical metaphor. After that blazing opening, made famous in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, there comes a complex musical narrative of Zarathustra’s journey to spiritual enlightenment, which often loses momentum. This performance held us in a vice-like grip, right up to the spine-chilling ending.
Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, with its strange mixture of Gothic grandeur, neo-classical severity and café-concert sentimentality, seemed the odd one out in this company. But the music’s serenely beautiful ending, with the sound of violist Cyrille Mercier, cellist Pei-Jee Ng and organist James O’Donnell entwined in tender cantillation, was perhaps the most “spiritual” moment of all.
The next concert in the LPO’s ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ series is at the Royal Festival Hall on Feb 22; 020 7960 4200