Even in the week of radio presenter Steve Hewlett’s very public passing, death is still often the last taboo. Vladimir Jurowski’s latest themed concert with the London Philharmonic looked the grim reaper straight in the eye from start to finish. It consisted of three works, all written in death’s shadow and all of which are tempting to read in the light of their composers’ deaths soon afterwards.
Jurowski started with the least familiar, Edison Denisov’s second symphony, composed in 1996, his final year. The symphony, in two movements played without a break and much influenced by modernist aesthetics, begins with translucent liquidity in the winds that is gradually overwhelmed by more emphatic writing, so that it seems almost like a journey from light into darkness.
No such thing could be said about Shostakovich’s 15th and last symphony, which ended the concert and whose underlying seriousness – the piece feels haunted by the composer’s long withdrawn fourth symphony – is belied by its relentless quirkiness and its quotations from Rossini and Wagner. The LPO played both pieces with unremitting intensity, with the flute and cello principals outstanding in their solos in the Shostakovich.
In between came a wondrous account of Berg’s violin concerto, written both to mark a death and in the year that Berg himself died. Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s account was fragile, eloquent and never portentous. Her playing captured this heartbreaking music with just the right mixture of tenderness and transcendence. All praise to her, also, for not playing an encore, for this is a piece that demands to be followed only by silence.
