Alan Gilbert is no stranger to orchestras trading in bold, bright sound – he is the New York Philharmonic’s music director – but this was, surprisingly, his London Symphony Orchestra debut. The first of two concerts opened sunnily with the overture to Nielsen’s opera Masquerade, Gilbert balancing the sound rewardingly and finessing it down to an arrestingly quiet pianissimo in the middle.
That pianissimo trick came out again in Sibelius’s Third Symphony, twice – but we hear really quiet playing so rarely from even our best orchestras that the law of diminishing returns does not apply. The performance captured, in the first and third movements, the music’s sense of speeding and slowing to arrive at something massive and monumental. But it missed the leavening effect of the middle movement, whose endlessly repeated tune was mostly absorbed into the rest of the texture, sustaining the weightiness of the outer movements rather than putting their density into relief.
Anders Hillborg has heard Gilbert conduct his piece Exquisite Corpse before – he gave the premiere in 2002 – but I doubt he has heard it quite so loud. In a week when a case involving an orchestra’s responsibility for its players’ hearing looks set to be tested in court, one noticed the musicians sat in front of the bass drum fiddling with their earplugs as the glowing layers of strings got hammered into the background by the percussion’s stomping rhythms.
In Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, however, the volume was back under control in support of Joshua Bell’s sustained, silky and well-argued violin playing. At its best, the orchestra was snappy enough for him to bounce off, but there was the odd scrappy moment. Was the LSO – accustomed to conductors using a stick, even if it’s tiny as a toothpick – still getting used to Gilbert’s batonless technique? Perhaps, but it didn’t matter at the end, when Gilbert drew out a barnstorming crescendo that set Bell up for an adrenaline-rush finish.
