Tag Archives: London Philharmonic Orchestra

EIF: London Philharmonic/Gardner

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

In the year that the London Symphony Orchestra has a residency at the Festival under its new conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano, it is only realistic to suggest that a sell-out concert by the rival London Phil at the Usher Hall is probably down to the choice of repertoire and the popularity of conductor Edward Gardner, whose decade with the Bergen Philharmonic included acclaimed EIF appearances, including of opera in concert.

With a shared hinterland at Glyndebourne, Gardner and the London Philharmonic are a good fit, but the conductor continues to be based in Norway, where he is now music director of the national opera and ballet. Arguably the pre-eminent English conductor of his generation, the parallel with Pappano’s predecessor, Sir Simon Rattle, from the previous one, in finding life more conducive away from his homeland is interesting.

There was no opera music in this programme, but it featured some of the most colourful and popular orchestral music in the catalogue. Holst’s The Planets transcends its place as an early 20th century period piece – although it remains fascinatingly that as well in some of its thematic and musical detail – because it is packed with glorious melodic writing.

If everyone knows Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, the big tune at the heart of the suite, most also recognise the threatening five-time march of Mars, the Bringer of War, that opens it and probably the ethereal choir in Neptune, the Mystic at its end. The offstage voices in this performances were those of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, its rigorously-trained young people for once spared the discipline of uniform.

As its earliest critics complained, The Planets can be seen as a derivative musical selection box, but that surely accounts as much for its popularity, the flavours of Wagner, Berlioz, Elgar, Dukas and Debussy all to be savoured in Holst’s rich orchestral score. Gardner ensured that all of those details, and unusual combinations of instruments, were perfectly served, and the arc of the suite as immaculately presented, but the louder moments seemed to lack a little verve in a performance that was faithful to all the ingredients but never more than the sum of its parts.

The LPO’s programme had begun with a much newer showcase for orchestra, Judith Weir’s Forest, a 1995 piece that has become quite a popular concert-starter. It fitted that role perfectly here, the ear-grabbing solo viola opening expanding into an exploration of the sounds of every section, an object lesson in making a small amount of melodic material go a long pictorial way.

As that work is also scored for a large band, some considerable stage re-setting was efficiently dispatched to accommodate the concert grand for Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Soloist Beatrice Rana plays the same work at the Proms at the end of the week, but there was no sense of a preparatory run-through in her beautifully-measured performance. Nor was there any chance of her succumbing to the temptations of showboating that the work offers; this was “rhapsodic” playing in the best sense of that word, crisp and clean when required but also beguilingly languid and lyrical.

Keith Bruce

London Philharmonic Orchestra / Ticciati

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s Music Director Robin Ticciati is still best known in Scotland for his tenure of nearly a decade with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and that may well have been a crucial attraction for ticket buyers at Saturday’s concert in Glasgow. He has just ended a slightly shorter stint with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and, curiously, the figures replacing him on the podium in the German capital over the next few weeks include current RSNO Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn, previous RSNO Principal Guest Conductor Elim Chan and Ticciati’s successor as SCO Principal Conductor, Maxim Emelyanychev.

The hall may also have included a few fans of pianist Francesco Piemontesi, once a regular partner of the SCO, both live and on acclaimed recordings for Glasgow’s Linn record label, and more recently seen in concerts with the RSNO and its Music Director Thomas Sondergard.

There again, the sheer novelty of having a visiting orchestra in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, which used to boast entire seasons of international guest orchestras, may have been the draw. The London Phil, which will be back in Scotland for an Edinburgh International Festival appearance with the National Youth Choir of Scotland in August, has not played in Glasgow, or Scotland, since the year before Ticciati took up the baton at the SCO.

Just as likely, though, music-lovers were in their seats for the programme: Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony – works both closely associated with the women in the lives of the composers, Clara and Alma.

By the time Robert Schumann eventually completed his concerto, his wife was as busy bringing up his children (and looking after him) as pursuing her playing career, although she gave its first performances, which met with mixed responses.

It is much more recently that audiences have taken it to their hearts and Piemontesi gave a masterly account of the work, he and Ticciati leaving plenty of space in a reading that was sometimes languid but, at others, robustly rhythmic. The score is a true partnership between soloist and orchestra and the LPO’s wind principals and a rich, broad string sound to which the lower instruments made a crucial contribution, were as important as the soloist’s virtuosity.

The Adagietto fourth movement of Mahler 5 is the bit everyone knows, whether from the film Death in Venice or another funeral. That association may half-derive from the march at the start of the work, for which Ticciati again set out his strict-rhythm stall, and with which principal trumpet Paul Beniston was entirely onboard.

He and first horn John Ryan were the most prominent solo stars of the symphony, the latter delivering a kaleidoscope of tonal colour, but there was excellent playing everywhere and Ticciati was always faithful to the instructions on the score. That meant only the merest pause for breath after that Adagietto, which was certainly “very slow” but far from as glacial as Karajan’s 12 minutes.

Whether or not it was actually written for Alma, it was just one course in the full feast in this performance. The way the orchestra and conductor delivered the complex counterpoint of the preceding Scherzo and the equally rapid elaborations of the Rondo-Finale was just as impressive.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Robin Ticciati by Marco Borggreve

VOPERA: L’enfant et les sortileges

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London Philharmonic Orchestra

It has become a platitude to enthuse about how creatively artists have responded to the restrictions on their livelihood brought about the pandemic, but it is nonetheless undeniable. However, this production of Ravel’s short opera, a modernist parable to a libretto by Colette brought vibrantly up-to-date, raises the bar to new heights.

Director Rachael Hewer – with the help of somewhere around 100 other people – has made a version of a work that is a musical delight, if very much of its time in other ways, into a profound commentary on our times, at the end of which you may well find yourself choking back tears.

Objectively, it is an astonishing technical achievement. All the singers – and they range from well-known names (Karen Cargill is Maman) to youngsters in the early stages of their careers – recorded and filmed their parts at home, using the technology to hand. The 27 members of the LPO recorded the music in socially-distanced conditions, playing a reduced orchestration made by conductor Lee Reynolds.

Hewer and her technical team have taken the faces of their cast and chorus and put them into the animated world in which the production takes place, as seen from the perspective of the titular child, sung by Emily Edmonds and winningly performed on-screen by Amelie Turnage. On the bones of Colette’s French text, given fresh translation in subtitles by Hewer herself, much contemporary context is happily applied: the girl is unhappily home-schooling during lockdown, and the fantasy world she enters, through the screen of her laptop, includes a hospital ward with all the necessary PPE, a yoga class in the gym, a rolling news broadcast with subtitles becoming the headlines ticker-taping along the foot of the screen, and a Zoom meeting for the Dance of the Frogs, with all the now-familiar icons hand-drawn.

It is hard to believe that a full orchestra would serve Ravel’s highly-original score, with its elements of Broadway, cabaret and operetta, any better than the LPO musicians do here, and the singing is of a uniformly high standard, with brilliant solo turns (stratospheric stuff from Sarah Hayashi as The Fire) as well as the quite remarkable choral combination, given the way it came about.

Within those restrictions too, there is also some fine facial acting – Marcus Farnsworth’s child-hating armchair an early highlight, and Shuna Scott Sendall an animated gym-bunny cat.

Familiar London locations crop up in the animated world, but the film begins in a black and white version of the child’s domestic home, and ends, in glorious technicolour, in the world everyone involved wants to get back to, as a patchwork of gilded interiors of opera houses around the world fills the screen. All are empty, of course, with a single “ghost light” left burning.

To the closing choral lament, the animated characters begin to fill up the stalls, and L’enfant has the last word as she returns “home”, singing: “Maman!” It is at this point that strong men may well be reaching for their pocket square. Like I did.

Available on YouTube until December 16.
Keith Bruce