LSO/Pappano review – new era begins with ghosts and great beauty

The opening concert of the London Symphony Orchestra season also marked the start of Antonio Pappano’s tenure as chief conductor, and you couldn’t escape the symbolic resonances of a programme carefully planned to usher in a new era. The main work, Sibelius’s First Symphony, took Pappano into almost uncharted territory – he has been little associated with Sibelius before. It was preceded by the world premiere of James MacMillan’s grandly virtuosic Concerto for Orchestra, and by Nielsen’s Helios Overture: inspired by sunlight on the Aegean during a Greek holiday that Nielsen took in 1903, it depicts a new dawn rising on a new day.
MacMillan’s Concerto is subtitled Ghosts, “as the music seems to be haunted by other, earlier musical spirits and memories”, as MacMillan puts it, the overt references being to Beethoven’s D Major Piano Trio, also nicknamed “Ghost”, and Debussy’s Trio for Flute, Viola and Harp. The work is also haunted, inevitably perhaps, by Bartók, whose own Concerto for Orchestra provides the effective model for the genre. But where Bartók plays games with instruments in pairs, MacMillan thinks in terms of multiples of three, as successive trios arise from the shifting orchestral textures. The slow section that forms the kernel of the single-movement structure is all delicate counterpoint in canon, and very, very beautiful. Elsewhere, MacMillan lets rip with pounding rhythms and ferocious orchestral writing reminiscent of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin at times. Pappano’s conducting was all furious energy and drama, the playing thrilling in its exactitude. It’s a remarkably effective showpiece.
That same energy informed his interpretation of the Sibelius, too, where the scherzo was all fierce articulation and drive, and the ricocheting theme that dominates the first movement sounded genuinely awesome in its monumentality. The Andante could perhaps have been tauter: Pappano was apt to linger over the yearning Tchaikovskyan melody that runs through it, though it sounded gorgeous as played by the LSO strings. The Helios Overture was beautiful too. For all its originality, there are echoes of both Wagner’s Rheingold and Strauss’s Zarathustra in the opening sunrise, which Pappano couldn’t or wouldn’t disguise, but the plush orchestral sound, with its warm, vibrant brass, was utterly beguiling throughout.