After a two-decade tenure in the pit at Covent Garden, Antonio Pappano officially took over the podium of the London Symphony Orchestra last fall. One of his first official acts as leader was to schedule a short tour of the United States, which concluded at Carnegie Hall. It proved a poignant capstone for two reasons: it was the LSO’s first appearance there in more than 20 years, and it represented a homecoming for Sir Tony to the city where he cut his teeth as a young répétiteur, before becoming an international conducting superstar. He came determined to show the New York audience what they’d been missing.
The first concert of the outfit’s two-night stand fused one of Pappano’s specialties, the music of American composers, with a classic of the Austro-German repertoire favored by his LSO predecessor, Simon Rattle. The prolific, long-lived George Walker (1922-2018) completed Sinfonia no. 5, “Visions” in 2016, his last major contribution before his death at age 96. The 15-minute work features many of Walker’s hallmarks, including dense tone clusters for the piano (the composer himself being a renowned soloist), artful reworking of spiritual melodies and complex themes that fuse together rather than resolve. The piece’s insistent tone seems to reflect Walker’s feelings of mortality and his anguish over the murder of Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Church in 2015, which weighed heavily on his mind during its composition.
Under Pappano’s propulsive direction, the LSO players gave voice to the gravity of Walker’s agitated musical world. A thick bed of strings underpinned the zestful solo contributions from brass, woodwind and percussion sections. The insistent rhythms of xylophone, marimba and timpani infused the work with a feeling of unbroken tension, and bright blasts from trumpet and horn mimicked anguished cries in the dark. Still, the peaceful visions evoked by the piece’s title emerged here and there: a lovely solo passage for flute, a gentle harmony traded among the violin and lower strings. The LSO masterfully handled the dichotomy between hopefulness and resignation embedded in the music, working up relentlessly to the conclusion.
Janine Jansen joined the orchestra to close the concert’s first half with Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium”. The soloist begins the work unaccompanied and hardly stops playing over the course of 30 minutes; a reduced complement of strings, harp and percussion gradually layer and surround her. The title’s literary reference suggests a dialogue, but in practice, Jansen’s supremacy was never in question. Fast or slow, high or low, she dominated the proceedings, though she never sacrificed elegance or beauty of tone in favor of volume. The LSO strings sounded lovely in quieter, more Romantic passages, turning a touch attenuated in the stormy Agathon movement. The Serenade is clearly a favorite of Jansen and Pappano – they’ve performed it together before – but it remains a hard work for an audience to love.
In contrast, Mahler’s Symphony no. 1 in D major makes instant friends. It certainly did in Pappano’s rip-roaring interpretation, which leaned into the Stern Auditorium’s glistening, brilliant acoustic to create an aural onslaught. The opening movement took some time to come together, its divergent themes brushing up against one another, but the playing remained striking and committed throughout. Pappano favored generous tempos that provided an air of gravity to a symphony sometimes dismissed as a youthful work, and he infused a sardonic edge into Mahler’s repurposing of a children’s tune in the third movement that presaged the composer’s lifelong fascination with high and low art. By the time the six horn players stood up to bring the piece to its conclusion, the crowd had been sufficiently dazzled. Let’s not wait another two decades for these superb musicians to cross the pond.
