We have grown so used to the London Symphony Orchestra being encouraged to play the Russian repertoire as loudly and brazenly as possible in recent years, that to hear it deliver a considered and carefully shaped account of a Tchaikovsky symphony takes a bit of getting used to. Mark Elder ended his guest appearance with the orchestra with the Pathétique, neither wringing every last drop of drama and pathos from the score, nor keeping it at arm’s length.
Elder’s approach won’t have been to all tastes – the way in which he kept things in check in the third-movement march, and didn’t make the finale a huge catharsis but allowed the music to preserve its dignity, might have disappointed some. But perhaps such a performance, full of carefully chiselled detail, made the case for the symphony as one of the great achievements of late Romanticism far better than any more histrionic one might have done.
Before it, Susan Graham’s interpretation of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’Été also came across as deliberate and considered. Graham’s voice has a steely edge now; phrases are less honeyed than they once were, and though her control of dynamics was outstanding, with wonderful pianissimos in the final verse of Absence, there was not much evidence of spontaneity. The songs in the cycle are predominantly slow, but in the finest performances that doesn’t matter; here it did, just a little bit too much.
The concert had begun with the premiere of the latest commission to come out of the LSO’s Panufnik composers’ scheme. Patrick Brennan’s Ballabile packs a great deal of incident into eight minutes – a gradually accumulating slow introduction full of striking colours and teasing harmonies, leading via a brief reworking of Mendelssohn into a glittering scherzo-like outburst of energy, which also finds the space to change its pace and direction several times. It’s an impressive short piece.
