Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic are including two substantial scores new to London in their three-concert residency at the Barbican. Their final programme will preface Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony with Andrew Norman’s Sustain, while the centrepiece of their opening concert was John Adams’s latest piano concerto, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?
Adams wrote the single-movement work for Yuja Wang, who was the dashing soloist here, too, her faultless fingers dealing effortlessly with a solo part that hardly gives her a moment’s rest. As the title suggests, it’s a Totentanz of sorts, though that diabolical element seems to get more diluted as the work goes on. The opening section is driven along effectively enough on an uneasy, asymmetrical division of its 9/8 metre, with the orchestra providing punctuation and the occasional snarling aside, but the central slow section quickly melts into directionless lyrical tracery, and even the easy-going finale only remembers that initial vehemence in the rather perfunctory closing pages.
If the orchestra has a subsidiary role in the concerto, its qualities were right to the fore in the works that Dudamel conducted on either side of it. Alberto Ginastera’s Variaciones Concertantes is effectively a concerto for orchestra, focusing on different departments in turn, which showed that the LA Philharmonic’s bright, forward sound never lapses into the look-at-us insistence of some of its east coast counterparts. And even in a thunderous performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which Dudamel unleashed with irresistible theatricality, it was the crisp, vivid detail that really told. With nothing done purely for effect, from the woodwind tangles in the introduction to the baleful processional that precedes the final Danse Sacrale, it was as if the listener was pressed right against its wall of sound.
After the Adams concerto, Wang played three solo encores – Tilson Thomas, Kapustin and a Liszt arrangement of a Schubert song – but at the end of the concert, Dudamel and his orchestra confined themselves to just one. Yet what can you play after The Rite of Spring? The answer was as delightful as it was unexpected – John Philip Sousa’s The Liberty Bell. No one would have predicted that.
• At Barbican, London, until 20 November.
