At last the sound of a live concert... like finding water in the desert
London Symphony Orchestra LSO St Luke’s
Finally: a real, live orchestra of 67 playing for real, live people – 12, to be precise. The first concert in the London Symphony Orchestra’s new season wasn’t quite the first orchestral concert for a live audience anywhere in the UK. There have been one or two others (notably the Aurora Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Seventh this week in a semi-open space), but this was the first indoors affair with a full orchestra.
Of course it didn’t feel “normal”. The dozen of us there (critics and industry insiders), took our seats high above the orchestra in the balcony at the back of LSO St Luke’s. Looking down, one felt uncomfortably like an aristocrat of old, enjoying a private entertainment. It felt an enormous privilege as well as a thrill and also weirdly unfamiliar. Our applause was tentative at first, as if we’d forgotten how – but the music soon warmed us.
The economics of this were crazy and only possible for an organisation that can call on supporters with deep pockets. The concert was supported by a private individual, Yamaha Professional Audio and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne. The evening’s new piece, a memorial for the great conductor/composer Oliver Knussen by his friend and one time protégé Mark-anthony Turnage, was also sponsored by an individual. One wondered if this was a sign of things to come, a sharper divide in the arts world between the haves and have-nots.
Still, it was a wonderful, heartening event. Just to have one’s ears saturated with real live orchestral sound was like finding water in the desert.
The orchestra under Simon Rattle played their hearts out, and the programme was cleverly contrived, with Turnage’s piece placed between Knussen’s Songs and Sea Interludes and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings. You could feel affinities of nocturnal horn-drenched magic between Knussen’s piece and Britten’s, while Turnage’s Last Song for Olly made references to Knussen’s music plus, at its end, a fleeting homage to Knussen’s father, a double bassist in the LSO. Turnage has a gift for writing memorial pieces of gentle, blues-tinged melancholy, but after a gentle chorale, this was full of grandeur and radiance.
Knussen’s piece featured soprano Lucy Crowe as the naughty boy Max who is at first afraid of the Wild Things but eventually tames them. In the hall her pure-toned voice was overwhelmed by magical swooping horns, wind machine and thrumming harp, but on the broadcast she certainly holds her own. Both pieces were inevitably topped by Britten’s immortal Serenade. It benefited from the wonderful Allan Clayton, fast becoming the go-to tenor for Britten.
From his very first high note, inexpressibly gentle yet rock-solid, one knew he was going to be good, and across six poems of nocturnal magic and menace he summoned a tremendous range. No less wonderful was the solo horn player Richard Watkins, whose uncanny pinched stopped notes in Blake’s O rose, thou art sick, symbolising the “invisible worm” at the rose’s heart, made one’s skin prickle.