Rattling good show had our toes tapping pretty much non-stop
London Symphony Orchestra
There’s no doubt about it – the LSO and Sir Simon Rattle, its star chief conductor, can certainly lay on a rattling good show. Thursday night’s concert was a riot of lusty folk melodies, sumptuous orchestral glitter, star pianists in spangled frocks, and jazzy excitement.
It was hard to discern the rationale behind the concert’s two-part form, with Eastern European folk-inspired music in the first half, and jazz-andlatin-drenched music in the second. But it meant that our toes were tapping pretty much non-stop, which I suppose at the (nearly) festive season is rationale enough.
Of the two folk-inspired pieces in the first half, Bartók’s Hungarian Peasant Songs seemed most genuinely close to the soil. The melodies had the waywardness and salty tang of speech, qualities that shone out in this affectionate, full-blooded performance.
Bartók was a real folk-song collector, who actually got his shoes muddy. Polish composer Karol Szymanowski was never less than exquisitely turned out, and the folk melodies in his ballet Harnasie gave the impression of a man surveying folk song at a safe distance and larding them with orientalist orchestral shimmer. Still, the performers did the piece proud. The London Symphony Chorus was on fabulous lusty form, as was the Lithuanian tenor Edgaras Montvidas as the Polish “highlander” who loses his girl to the dashing brigand.
Szymanowski’s piece felt indulgently over-extended, despite the ecstatic performance, but it seemed disciplined and concise compared with the double piano concerto Nazareno by Osvaldo Golijov, the cultishly popular Argentinian composer. It had those star piano-playing Labèque sisters giving their all, plus lots of breathless syncopated mambo-style rhythms, as well as two Latin American-style percussion soloists, one in a rakish hat, plus blatant steals from the Fifties hit Tequila. But all this couldn’t save the piece from feeling oddly slack and unexciting, because the harmonic patterns were so clichéd and the forms of each movement so mushily predictable.
Bookending Golijov’s piece, as if to show up its indulgence, were two models of taut conciseness. Stravinsky’s tiny Ebony Concerto, played with delicious lounge-lizard charm by solo clarinettist Chris Richards and a big band drawn from the LSO, worked by understatement, never rising above a side-of-themouth drawl.
Bernstein, being Bernstein, shouts at the top of his voice in his Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, also for big band. But what incredible invention and seat-of-the-pants excitement – all shown off to perfection in this fabulous performance.