No one could accuse the London Symphony Orchestra of underplaying the appointment of its new music director. Ever since it was confirmed in 2015, after months of rumours, that Simon Rattle would be returning to his native shore after 15 years as artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic (where he still has one more season in charge), the LSO and the Barbican Centre, where the orchestra has its London home, have been laying plans for his arrival in what increasingly seemed likely to be less of a straightforward inaugural concert than the musical equivalent of a coronation. So we have This Is Rattle, a 10-day festival that includes talks, exhibitions and specially commissioned art works as well as a series of concerts, launched with a full orchestral concert that was also relayed on a big screen in the Barbican’s sculpture court outside.
As far as the orchestra is concerned, the arrival of a new music director is certainly timely. Whether or not the new concert hall that is being planned as a long-term part of the Rattle package is ever likely to be built, the orchestra itself has been badly in need of someone to take hands-on charge of it for some years now.
Rattle’s predecessor, Valery Gergiev, who stepped down as chief conductor at the end of 2015, seemed to take a rather laissez-faire attitude to orchestral training and the sound it produced. In the handful of concerts that Rattle has conducted as a guest since his appointment was announced, there was already a huge improvement in many aspects of the LSO’s sound, a transparency and refinement which obviously were there already but waiting for the right conductor.
Though Rattle is also conducting both Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust and Stravinsky’s three great Russian ballets at the Barbican next week, there’s a particular emphasis on British music in this celebration. Four leading British composers, Oliver Knussen, Thomas Adès, Helen Grime and Harrison Birtwistle, have each been invited to curate a programme including their own music alongside other works they admire. Rattle also included a piece by each of them in this opening LSO programme, before ending with Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
Only one work was brand new: Grime’s Fanfare, which was not the brassy ceremonial piece the title might suggest but a fizzy little showpiece for all sections of the orchestra, which turns out to be part of a much bigger LSO commission that Rattle and the orchestra will premiere next spring. Two of the others were pieces that Rattle has known for a long time – he toured Knussen’s Third Symphony with the CBSO in the early 1980s and gave the first performance of Adès’ Asyla in Birmingham 20 years ago. Both are precocious works that wear wonderfully well: there’s the profundity of Knussen’s busy, compact score with its moments of stillness that seem to conjure up vast harmonic spaces, and the astonishing confidence and surety of Adès’s teeming, sometimes jaw-droppingly virtuosic instrumental writing.
If all three pieces do seem to map out a great deal of common ground in contemporary British music, then Birtwistle’s Violin Concerto, which was phenomenally well-played by Christian Tetzlaff, for whom it was written seven years ago, very much inhabits its own musical world, just as, in a very different sense, the Enigma Variations must have appeared to stand apart in British music at the end of the 19th century. Utterly different pieces but both superbly played by the LSO here, with everything placed so precisely by Rattle, even if occasional phrases in the Elgar seemed just a shade too manicured and self-consciously shaped. As a whole, though, the concert was hugely impressive; the start of this new era for the LSO could hardly have been more auspicious.
