In a late addition to the programme, we first heard a suite from a 1952 film score by David Raksin, The Bad and the Beautiful. Leaving aside any cheap jibe on that title, this was uneven in inspiration. The opening movement Love is for the Very Young made a good impression, approaching the best that we associate with medium in that era. But nothing in the following three movements quite matched that, except perhaps for the clarinet solo in the closing Nocturne and Scene, beautifully played by Sérgio Pires.
At more than the listed 15 minutes, the score outstayed its welcome, though it was fun in the soaring passages to hear the London Symphony Orchestra, no strangers to the idiom, bowing and blowing in their best Hollywood manner, shamelessly encouraged by conductor Sir Antonio Pappano. Another time, how about something from one of André Previn’s award-winning scores as a nod to the LSO’s 1970s Chief Conductor?
Bertrand Chamayou was the soloist in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, and played it with idiomatic flair. The opening swift solo passages were rather too hectic, more speed than sparkle. And like every pianist, he slows down for the second subject, although that is not in the score, and Ravel was fastidious about artists observing just what he had written. In the lovely Adagio assai Chamayou, achieved the ideal atmosphere of Ravelian tendresse, subtly chastened by the cross-rhythmic tug of accompaniment against melody. Augustin Gorisse was no less eloquent in his long cor anglais solo. In the closing Presto Chamayou and Pappano found the right speed from the outset, swift enough to be dazzling, but the pulse always present and cumulative in its effect, enabling several LSO principals to seize the opportunities the composer gives them. Chamayou’s encore was understandably not a dazzling showpiece, but the simplest of Debussy’s preludes, The girl with the flaxen hair.
From Ravel we went to one of his more unlikely pupils, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and his Fifth Symphony, with at least some of its roots deep in the English soil and a close kinship to John Bunyan. Like that author’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the opera on which Vaughan Williams worked on for so long, there is a strong sense of a spiritual journey. Pappano found a serene mood at the start, but also one that was questing, as the music moved purposefully forward to a terrific climax, steadily and stirringly approached and executed by the conductor and his players. The dexterity of the LSO’s playing was impressive in the fleeting fast music of the Scherzo, its central hymn-like passage restoring the sense of the spiritual, but still troubled by fragments of the Scherzo. This movement can often seem elusive compared to its neighbours, but Pappano’s insight made it an essential part of the symphony’s narrative.
The Romanza is one of the high-water marks of the composer’s whole oeuvre, and was played with the dedication it demands, the conductor scrupulous in achieving the dynamic gradations that hold the attention. This became deeply absorbing, and ultimately moving. The finale is a Passacagalia, a form honoured earlier by Purcell and later by Britten, and Vaughan Williams too provides the sense of inevitability implied by the form’s repeated bass, and with a growth towards the journey’s end, returning to the serenity of the symphony’s opening. This account of the Fifth was a superb achievement by Pappano and the LSO, and it is good news that it will form part of a cycle on the LSO Live label.
