Simon Rattle and the LSO’s return to New York City was a masterclass in Mahlerian color, moving sonic worlds in and out of focus, and not shying away from the violence of some moments.
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A masterful display of tempo manipulation from Rattle created a virtuoso exercise in jamming together country dances and urban waltzes, and observing dispassionately what happens when they collide, with the kind of sharp-eyed melancholy we may imagine without much effort in the mind of the child Gustav, peering through the grimy windows at the low-life punters of his father’s down-at-heel tavern.
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The LSO, to this untrained ear, was in dazzling form and its new boss as dynamic and exciting to watch as when he first arrived in the city as a tousle-haired 25-year-old nearly four decades ago.
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The LSO’s violins gleamed and rippled with a liquid sheen, and fanfares of birdsong blazed: an old Messiaen hand, Rattle knows how to clarify or blend the different colours of even the most iridescent woodwind chord.
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Throughout the performance I’d been profoundly impressed by the playing of the LSO but in this long finale they seemed to move to an altogether higher plane...This was a performance of rare distinction and utterly compelling.
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Rattle has surely done nothing finer since his arrival at the LSO.
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What Rattle and the LSO gave us in Zurich was a generous gift.
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Rattle had the symphony internalised, conducting without a score, and the LSO were on inspired form. The variety of string tone and colour, in particular, seemed endless: ghostly, rich, shadowy, snarling and compassionate.
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Man (on this occasion) of the match goes to Chi Yu-Mo, who plays the small but powerful E flat clarinet. He hit his shrill, high notes with spot-on intonation, duetting effortlessly with violin or piccolo or flute, ranging in style from klezmer dance to bucolic shepherd to anarchic goat.
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The aspiring, string-rich lines and voluptuously bitter-sweet harmonies have an almost Mahlerian quality and provided a suitable complement to his Ninth Symphony.
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Rattle controlled the ending to perfection: we felt the composer’s breath fading away (Mahler never heard the work performed). I came away moved. A standing ovation said it all.
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A superb response from the LSO, not least the percussion with its defining role for rototoms, fairly set the seal on a reading that reaffirmed Tippett’s ultimate work as a defining one of the late-twentieth-century.
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