M.gin, I suspect, would prefer to hear the London Rattle Symphony Orchestra’s first concert in 2021 in a variety of settings. Recorded for the Barbican with a remote social audience, it was moved online after being locked up, and recorded in LSO St Lukes on the original concert date on January 7, days before the LSO suspended rehearsals and recording for a while and before Rattle announced his much-discussed decision to leave London and take over the lead director of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in 2023.
“We hope our music helps get rid of some of last year’s gloom,” Rattle announced ahead of the concert. I didn’t like it, although I was worried, even though it was extremely good. The program did not change – Leonidas Kavakos ‘s Berg Violin Concerto and Schubert’ s “Great” Symphony, No. 9 in C Major, D944 – the concert was dedicated, at the same time, to the two hundredth anniversary of the revolution. -out of Greece opposed Ottoman rule and the participation of British philhellenes within it, so the evening began with a Greek national anthem.
Berg’s concert was wonderfully performed. Written in 1935 after the death of polio Manon Gropius, the teenage daughter of Berg’s friend Alma Mahler and her second husband Walter Gropius, laments the loss of a premature life, and hears it through pandemic, perhaps inevitably, increased its impact and significance. Kavakos played with unmistakable lyricism and a surprisingly sweet tone: the final bars, in which the violin line goes up to heaven, seldom sound so calm or so beautiful. At the same time, Rattle’s behavior was intense and meticulous, very attentive to the dark dark hues of Berg’s orchestration.
At the same time, Schubert ‘s “Great” Symphony seemed to release the tension of the concerto in a noble, poignant, miraculous interpretation at the beginning and closing in a sense of brutal exile. Extremely played, too, the rich string tone throughout, the carpet sounding very warm, the all-important oboe and clarinet unions executed by an enthusiastic, ritual poise.