LSO / Pappano, Gerstein; Barbican – 12/10/23

Bartok, Divertimento for Strings; Adès, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; Beethoven, Symphony No 7. London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Antonio Pappano conductor, Kirill Gerstein piano

This was interestingly programmed – a polite way of saying that it seemed an unusual juxtaposition. My take on it is that both the Bartok and Ades pieces, while ‘modern’ in their different ways, used elements of past musical practice – the 18^th century concerto grosso in the case of Bartok, the 19^th century (plus Rachmaninov) piano concerto in Ades – while the Beethoven uses the symphonic format created by Haydn to produce something revolutionary and new (thus the process in reverse). Apparently, I later discovered, this concert was part of a sequence of LSO concerts all related to dance but the relationship of certainly the Bartok work to that theme seemed a bit tenuous.

This was a very enjoyable evening. I was sitting more or less in the front row and therefore able to hear and see at very close quarters the stunning, pin-point accuracy (but also warmth) of the LSO strings, the brilliance of the playing in the Ades, and the rhythmic accuracy in the Beethoven. Apart from a Mahler 1 at the Proms a few years ago with his St Cecilia orchestra, I have only seen Pappano conduct from the distance of an Amphitheatre seat at Covent Garden. He’s a very energetic conductor (banging and stamping on the podium), very intense in his focus on the players and obviously gets great playing from them.

The Bartok piece I have never heard before though I discovered afterwards I have a recording of it by Solti in my collection. Its three movements obviously mirror some of the musical practices of the Baroque – the soloist leaders of the different sections against the massed strings – and are quite different in character-  the first is quite light-hearted, the second tragic in feeling, the third much more obviously folk-tune based. It reminded me in a way of Tippett’s two big string pieces – the Corelli variations and the Double Orchestra piece

It’s a pity that this performance of the Ades came so soon after the one at the Proms by Gerstein (not brilliant scheduling)  – a few people might not have come to this concert who otherwise would have done, as a result. I have heard the Ades concerto a number of times, and enjoy it more as I listen to it more. I feel I am fully on top of the first two movements, but still getting there a bit with the third, though I love the ending – a wonky bonkers version of the conclusion of something like the Rachmaninov 2^nd concerto . There’s a dark and mysterious passage in the middle of the movement I can’t quite relate to what has gone before and what comes after.  But it’s all enormous fun to listen to. Quite what it amounts to I’m not sure, and I am sure there are lots of jokes within the piece that I don’t get, but it makes me smile! And I shall carry on listening to it and enjoying it and exploring it further. The composer came on at the end to considerable applause, and Gerstein played a beautiful piece by Ligeti – something about raindrops?

I am reading at present a great – and apparently a surprisingly very successful – book called “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self ” by Andrea Wulf. In the UK we tend to think of the great outburst of energy and new thinking about the world in the early Romantics through the constellation of the great poets emerging at the same time and influenced by the French Revolution and the need to escape the tyranny of rationalism – Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron. But there was something similar going on in Germany – in poetry but also philosophy and scientific thinking – focused on Jena and the university there Through its very accessible pages the book introduces readers to the Schlegel brothers, Fichte, Schiller, Caroline Schlegel and her lover Schelling, Hegel, the Humboldt brothers, Novalis, and hovering in the background the older Goethe – all of whom knew each other. You can see a very similar eruption of new energy and innovation in Beethoven, albeit with no other artists really able or trying to do what he did, and the Beethoven after the interval of this concert was quite something…….it was a fast, compelling reading, made more urgent by not having any pause between the 1^st and 2^nd movements, and the 3^rd and 4^th. Played with quite large forces, though with what sounded like hard timpani sticks, this was a life-enhancing performance – not really very subtle, perhaps, and with little opportunity for the woodwind to caress phrases in the 2^nd movement, but just so energetic and joyful, so propulsive, that you did indeed want to get up and dance, as Wagner long ago described. The audience rightly gave the performance a considerable ovation at the end. It sounds as though the LSO have made a great choice in their new chief conductor