Bartók knew a thing or two about rhythm. And a good deal about the infectious appeal of dance music. As did Beethoven before him. The same applies to the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra by Thomas Adès. Over long stretches it does sound very American to my ears, with its high-octane passages recalling Gershwin. Yet the expressively crystalline individual notes and chords of the slow movement also take the listener into a garden of Ravelian imagination. To top it, the concluding Allegro giojoso has more than a hint of the high jinks which Bartók and Prokofiev conveyed through their own writing for the piano.
Such musings might be seen as implying that this work by Adès, written only five years ago, is largely derivative. That would be to ignore the organising genius behind it all. One of the strengths of this performance by Kirill Gerstein and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano, is that the many links with the past married very satisfyingly with the fecundity of musical ideas Adès serves up on a gleaming platter. Much of the first movement had a nervous twitching energy to it, encompassing cascades of notes from Gerstein delivered with scorching virtuosity, but also an ear-teasing delicacy in the many brief interludes where the spotlight falls on the soloist alone or in duetting with small instrumental groups. Adès’ command of colour and texture was evident throughout in the whooping sense of fun from the high horns and cheeky yawns from the lower brass.
In the central slow movement I was struck by an aching sense of nostalgia in the soft, ruminative trills and arpeggio sequences across the entire keyboard, down to its ghostly ending. And after a concentrated package of power and propulsion in the Finale, Gerstein made a superb link between this almost classically inspired close and his chosen encore, one of Ligeti’s Études. This was not only a fitting tribute to the Hungarian composer in the year of his birth, but also echoed much of Adès’ writing in its markings Andante con eleganza, with swing through to the concluding quasi niente.
For the whole programme Pappano used the same string complement, shorn of the back desks. This didn’t always work to his advantage in the opening Divertimento for Strings by Bartók. In his score the composer specified a minimum number of 22 players; the LSO sported 49. The work can be seen as a display vehicle for the virtuosity of a string section, as was the case here, down to the perfectly placed series of pizzicatos as the Allegro assai draws to a close. A divertimento, however, even in its re-imagined neoclassical vein, is supposed to be light, entertaining party music, taking its cue from the Italian divertire (to amuse). The expansive, often juggernaut-like quality of the playing, without much impishness, did little to set the scene for what was to follow.
Nor was I entirely won over by Pappano’s approach in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. He took all the repeats, oversaw clean, lean lines from his strings, using minimum vibrato, and aided by the antiphonal positioning of the violins. However, the over-emphatic timpani ultimately became counter-productive, and big, searing contributions from the trumpets in the third movement contributed to an overall sense of harshness. Little attention was paid to the importance of horns in this work, and as so often these days the conductor made no distinction between the Presto marking of the Scherzo and the Allegro con brio of the Finale. The performance certainly had rhythm but in the final analysis it all became far too mechanical.
