This was Valery Gergiev’s last Barbican concert as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra: he formally bows out at New York’s Lincoln Centre on 25 October, at the end of the orchestra’s brief US tour. His eight-year tenure has divided opinion, with concerns raised about fluctuating conducting standards and a frequently predictable choice of repertory, a lack of dynamic, hands-on artistic leadership, and his controversial closeness to Putin’s government in Russia. His recent work in the UK has certainly been variable. He was, however, on fine form on this occasion.
The concert was the last in a series pairing Bartók with Stravinsky, composers Gergiev has always done well. He opened with the suite from Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, interpreted less as a study of urban hell than an exercise in morbid sensuality, its dark sonorities and rhythmic complexities superbly judged.
Stravinsky’s Le Chant du Rossignol followed. The piece, distilled from the opera The Nightingale, is oddly shapeless, but Gergiev’s way with its stylised chinoiserie inflections and kaleidoscopic colours proved utterly beguiling. The LSO were at their considerable best here, and the playing, all scrupulously honed brass and woodwind solos, was extraordinary in its pristine beauty.
After the interval, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra got off to a low-key start, only gaining the requisite bite in the virtuosic Game of Pairs that forms its scherzo. The elegy had a reined-in intensity of feeling, while the finale, with its whirling strings, admirably dissolved the preceding tensions with its elegant bravado. There was a brief presentation: Gergiev beamed silently as LSO chairman Lennox Mackenzie handed him a handsome-looking piece of silverware. The single encore, Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No 1, was greeted, as one might expect, by a standing ovation.
