London Symphony Orchestra / Simon Rattle, Barbican, review: Hail the conquering hero

Rapturous reception for conductor and an exquisite performance from LSO
Warm welcome: Simon Rattle conducts soloist Krystian Zimerman performing Brahms’s First Piano Concerto
Nick Kimberley8 July 2015

When the London Symphony Orchestra announced Simon Rattle as its next music director from September 2017, it felt like Rattle’s homecoming after years of “exile” as the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal conductor.

No British conductor since Thomas Beecham has the kind of influence that Rattle wields. He also has a canny ability to say what the media like to hear: when he blithely announced that London needed a new, world-class concert hall, everyone, from George Osborne down, clamoured to offer support.

Like a football manager parading a new signing, the LSO booked Rattle for the final two concerts of its current season. For the second, next Sunday, he conducts the UK premiere of a new children’s opera by British composer Jonathan Dove. Last night the repertoire was more mainstream: Brahms and Dvorák, friends in real life, good companions in the concert hall.

Conducting without a score, Rattle chose to fill the second half of the concert with Dvorák. The Slavonic Dance No 4 was short, sharp and energetic but less effective than The Wild Dove and The Golden Spinning Wheel, both of which derive from poems that are violent, grim and Grimm-like.

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Rattle is never afraid to go for the grand gesture and the LSO players responded with playing that was exquisitely weighted and at times demonic to the point of being over-heated.

Mini-operas without words, the symphonic poems might have worked better coming before, rather than after Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, a majestic piece given a majestic performance.

The opening orchestral statement was thunderous; when soloist Krystian Zimerman joined the fray, it seemed at first that he might be overwhelmed. It was just a ruse. Zimerman’s playing had plenty of muscle but there was also a liquid lightness, and the musical space he creates for himself has an elasticity that kept Rattle on his toes.

Given the LSO’s characteristic blend of fragility and richness, of rasping fruitiness and haunting tenderness, the rapturous applause was inevitable: for Zimerman, of course, but at least as much for Rattle. As Handel put it, “See, the conqu’ring hero comes! Sound the trumpets, beat the drums!”

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