Reunited with the London Symphony Orchestra for a pair of concerts marking his 70th birthday this week, Simon Rattle opened the first with a salute to this year’s most significant anniversarian. The Barbican is marking Pierre Boulez’s centenary with tributes from the LSO and the BBC Symphony, the two London orchestras with which he worked most closely. Rattle’s contribution was a performance of Éclat from 1965, an exploration of lingering sonorities launched by an explosive piano cadenza. Boulez later expanded the eight-minute piece into the more substantial Éclat/Multiples and, in the Barbican’s acoustic, which could not sustain the shimmering resonances that should give continuity to its isolated sound events, it was easy to understand why – the unadorned original felt underpowered and schematic.
Brand new music provided the centrepieces to both concerts – two LSO commissions marking Rattle’s birthday. George Benjamin’s Interludes and Aria from Lessons in Love and Violence reworks orchestral extracts from his third opera, which was based on the life of Edward II. It’s a stage work in which the orchestral writing often seems to take charge of the drama, and Benjamin has extracted six of the interludes from the score and woven them into a seamless, richly scored sequence, with the aria for the king’s wife Isabel from the second scene forming its dramatic focus. The role was conceived for the soprano Barbara Hannigan, and she was the soloist here too, turning the vocally demanding set piece into a self-contained scena within the larger dramatic arc of the extracts.
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s guitar concerto, Sco, was the second world premiere. It was written for the jazz guitarist John Scofield, with whom Turnage first collaborated in the 1990s on the evening-long orchestral suite, Blood on the Floor that remains one of his finest achievements, and each of the concerto’s five movements is dedicated to members of the Scofield family. Much of the solo part is left open for the guitarist to improvise over an orchestral backdrop, which may be percussive and driven, or woven from sweetly lyrical instrumental lines. Scofield kept his contributions economical, often just confining them to a single melodic line, but the 30-minute work needed a bit more substance, and a bit more grit.
In fact in both concerts it was the symphonies with which Rattle ended that left the most lasting impressions. He had followed the Benjamin premiere with a wonderfully direct, almost fierce performance of Brahms’s Fourth, which grew steadily in insistence and was quite free of the over-manicured phrasing that has sometimes characterised his Brahms in the past. And having begun his second programme with a thrilling account of the Ritual Dances from Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage in which lyricism and athleticism were perfectly balanced, Rattle maintained the British theme with Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, the third movement Romanza and final Passacaglia more objective, less consoling than some conductors make them, but otherwise vivid, intense and, like everything in both concerts, wonderfully played by the LSO.
• The second concert, featuring music by Tippett, Turnage and Vaughan Williams, will be broadcast on Radio 3 on 20 January, and available after on BBC Sounds.
