Made in America: Susanna Mälkki, Leila Josefowicz and the LSO in a fine showcase

This London Symphony Orchestra programme featured two Europeans who were both exiles, although while Bartók wrote his work in the USA, of which he was then a citizen, Stravinsky wrote his concerto in Nice and did not settle in the USA until 1939. Julia Perry (1924-1979) was born in the USA, and was yet another American to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Her A Short Piece for Orchestra of 1952 is much more inventive than its title. From its bold attention-grabbing first flourishes, with broken rhythms and shrieking orchestration, via its lyrical flute-led passages to its final race to the line, it says a lot in eight minutes. A well-established prize-winner in her career, deploying elements both of her African-American background and her European schooling, Perry has been neglected since. Conductor Susanna Mälkki is clearly one champion though, and the LSO played as if they too believed in the piece. There is much Perry still to be discovered it seems – a Symphony in One Movement for just violas and double basses, anyone?

Stravinsky told us a lot about the genesis of his fine Violin Concerto in D major, a work he was initially reluctant to undertake. Not being a string player he asked Hindemith (a violist) if that would be a problem and was told it would be an advantage as he would “avoid a routine technique” and ideas suggested only “by the familiar movements of the fingers”. This became clear at the outset when Stravinsky showed the violinist Samuel Dushkin, who was to play the premiere, the opening chord. Dushkin paled at the “enormous stretch from the E to the top A” and said it could not be played. He then found that it could, and the composer made this chord his “passport” to the concerto, opening in different guises each of its four movements.

Leila Josefowicz seemed quite untroubled by any such technical hurdles in her highly accomplished reading, drawing applause from the Barbican audience after each movement. She was athletic in the neoclassical jog-trot of the opening movement, lyrical in both the central Aria movements, if insufficiently poignant in Aria 2, and dashing in the Presto coda of the finale. Her tone was pure when necessary, but there was an agreeable rasp to the frequent double-stopped sections. Mälkki and the LSO – whose Conductor Emeritus Sir Simon Rattle called the best Stravinsky orchestra in the world – navigated their own metrical challenges with aplomb.

Bartók said his 1945 five-movement Concerto for Orchestra was thus titled for its “tendency to treat the single instruments or instrument groups in a ‘concertant’ or soloistic manner”. Thus it is an ideal work for a virtuoso orchestra like the LSO to display its skill, and each section rose to the challenge that the composer gave them. The brass were brilliantly brazen in the fugato sections of the first movement, the strings athletic and precise in the scurrying perpetuum mobile parts of the finale – as well as phrasing persuasively in that movement’s popular song derived big tune. The second movement Presentando le coppie presents couples in the form of a sequence of pairs of the same wind instruments, of which on this occasion the chirruping oboe couple had particular charm, but all the winds were delightful here. The finale – a fanfare, a loud chord and we were off on the one of the orchestral repertoire’s roller-coaster rides – was intended by Bartók to be life-affirming, as indeed it was here.