Susanna Mälkki and the London Symphony Orchestra bring their A game to Impressionism

Susanna Mälkki is a mesmerising conductor to watch. Her technique starts with pure arm speed: marking of time is fast and precise in big movements amplified by using a long baton, with a crispness that makes every move delightfully easy to follow. Overlaid is a balletic sway of the upper body, legs flexing to tiptoe or even becoming airborne to incarnate the shape of the music, with unmatched fluidity and grace.

Whether or not because of this mesmeric effect, the London Symphony Orchestra brought their A game to all three piece in their Barbican concert of Impressionist music: Debussy and Ravel widely considered to be the aural equivalent of Impressionist painting, followed by music by Scriabin, a synesthete who perceived colour as part of his hearing process. These were all works filled with individual chances for instrumentalists to shine clearly through a dense orchestral texture; every opportunity was grasped with enthusiasm and real quality.

Debussy’s three Nocturnes exemplified the sheer breadth of colour palette that could be extracted from this orchestra, with warmth of strings, horns blending in at just the right level, present but not overpowering, harps providing clean punctuation, a gathering storm from double basses and timpani. The music is said to be inspired by the paintings of Whistler. The first movement, Nuages, contained the only moments of jarring colour, overly loud woodwinds in the early bars sounding far too bright against the beautifully judged pianissimi from the strings. Fêtes looked to be Mälkki’s favourite music of the evening, with the joy of the parade radiant on her face and in the playing of her musicians, with glorious brass fanfares and snare drum phrases which anticipate Boléro. The third movement, Sirènes, featured wordless singing from a 60 strong soprano/alto contingent from the London Symphony Chorus. Uncertain dynamics at the start settled down into a vivid depiction of distant voices calling out to homesick sailors.

Starting with a celebration of the low register instruments and moving on to more blazing brass fanfare, with the trombones on the very top of their form, the LSO took on Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand with exuberant enthusiasm, broadcasting a sense of unbridled festivity. Disappointingly, I can’t say the same about Kirill Gerstein’s piano playing. One has to admire any pianist who can take on this exceptionally demanding music, and particularly one who can play with quite as much accuracy and aplomb as Gerstein, but the overwhelming emotion I detected was respect for Ravel’s music rather than warmth and joy at playing it. Where Gerstein excelled was in the moments of intricate tracery where piano and orchestra are playing together (as he points out in his video introduction, these form a surprisingly low fraction of the overall work, in which piano and orchestra are mostly separate).

Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy is so full of colour from every combination of instruments that it makes for a fairly trippy experience, all the more so when the conductor is conjuring such vividness and vivacity from a very large orchestra (21 brass players, half a dozen percussionists), carrying you bodily above a surging flow of music. The final pair of climaxes, with a perfectly judged tacet between them, were devastating. Too loud? I loved every moment.