As music-making, it was electrifying. In half a century I have rarely heard any orchestra so obviously relishing being challenged to the limit of its virtuosity, rapport and stamina. Whether stonking through the pounding techno-beats of Thomas Adès’s Asyla or bringing the provincial Victorian characters of Enigma vividly to life, the LSO responded to its new guv’nor like a Derby winner to a master jockey.
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It glittered with vivid orchestral detail, delivered with a flickering, quicksilver subtlety that placed Schoenberg in the same stylistic universe as two other Rattle touchstones: Parsifal and Debussy’s Pelléas.
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Oliver Knussen’s Symphony No. 3 positively teems with humanity. The amplitude and richness of the score was realised superbly by the LSO on top form under Rattle.
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Enlivened by the technical and interpretive challenge, the LSO players were tirelessly responsive to the gestures of their incoming music director.
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[Asyla] is a remarkable piece and was especially so here; Rattle led an urgent and intense account, revealing fully the music’s discombobulating eeriness, macabre marches and scathing trumpet tattoos.
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Performances are understandably rare, but few venues are better suited to accommodating them than the Royal Albert Hall, making this Prom a spectacular highlight of the season and an obvious draw.
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But it was in the following work, Oliver Knussen’s Symphony No 3, that we could most fully appreciate the finesse of the Rattle-meets-LSO machine. The work’s transparent textures and luminous orchestration could not have been served much better.
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Simon Rattle and his magnificent massed ranks of musicians – the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus plus the CBSO Chorus and Orfeó Català – indeed seemed to shake the celestial vaults here, though miraculously there was still something in reserve for the work’s apotheosis.
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In a time when there isn't much good news around, this exciting evening suggested that this potentially epochal combination of conductor and orchestra is at least one reason to be cheerful.
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Combined choruses from London, Birmingham and Barcelona gave their collective all, while the London Symphony Orchestra responded with an energy though also dexterity that bodes well for when Rattle becomes Music Director next month.
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But Rattle’s master-stroke was to conclude with a performance of the Enigma Variations which had such visceral excitement that it felt absolutely new-minted. Welcome home, maestro.
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But the real strength of this performance was the way that Rattle managed to meld the work’s disparate elements into a cohesive whole, so that the choral climaxes felt like a natural consequence of all that had preceded them.But the real strength of this performance was the way that Rattle managed to meld the work’s disparate elements into a cohesive whole, so that the choral climaxes felt like a natural consequence of all that had preceded them.
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