Sheer glee wreathed the face of Sir Antonio Pappano as he bounced to the podium on Sunday night for this, third in the series of opening fanfares for his tenure as Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. The Roman Carnival overture proved the perfect curtain-raiser for this consummate musical storyteller who, with great éclat, brought all Berlioz’s theatrical flamboyance and bustle to sparkling life with a rendition at once fabulously detailed and rip-roaringly exuberant. While the rich lyricism of the LSO’s strings set the gloriously unfettered romantic tone for the evening, there’s nothing like a Berlioz percussion section to really get the party started.
Yuja Wang arrived to serve up Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto and, as ever, her virtuosity was astonishing. She makes covering the Russian’s enormous spans of notes look like a spot of fancy dusting. However, her detached appearance, wearing enormous dark glasses, struck an uncomfortable note; a reminder that soloists of Wang’s calibre bring so much more of themselves to the concert hall than flawless technique. Wang’s physicality is formidable – has anyone, excepting the composer himself, ever hit the keys harder in the opening bars? But it’s her emotional range that is truly breathtaking. In the Adagio, the impatient ambition of the 17-year-old Rachmaninov gives way to a miracle of vulnerability and introspection which belies the status often accorded this work as ‘immature’, and it was in this bittersweet, nostalgic moment of melting tenderness that Wang seemed most at home.
Anna Lapwood was in her element for Saint-Saëns’ mighty Symphony no. 3 in C minor, playing at the organ console hidden in the bass section. And who wouldn’t want a front-facing seat for such exhilarating drama that Pappano kept so thrillingly on a tightrope throughout. Once again, the lushest of string sounds complemented the pinpoint clarity of the woodwinds, and the celebratory expansiveness of brass. The beautifully consolatory duet between orchestra and organ in the Adagio proved the highlight everyone forgets to look forward to; that first chord was heart-stopping, a moment of quiet, reverent awe before the phrases lengthen again and the aria rises from the orchestral texture.
Neither did the more famously anticipated Big Moment disappoint. With the houselights only partially dimmed in this surprisingly intimate auditorium, it was possible to see rows after row of beaming faces as Pappano, the LSO and Lapwood launched jubilantly into Saint-Saëns’ glorious big number. In the programme notes for this series, Pappano describes his new job as “a gift from heaven”. Amen to that.
