Photograph: Mark Allan
Last year conductor Antonio Pappano celebrated 20 years as music director at the Royal Opera House. That long tenure has sealed his close association for UK audiences with Italian opera – Rossini, Verdi and Puccini above all. So much so that you’d be forgiven for overlooking his parallel existence in the symphonic world with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome (where he’s been music director since 2005) and others, with a discography that stretches from Tchaikovsky to Peter Maxwell Davies and an acclaimed recent recording of two Vaughan Williams symphonies.
But the time has come to update our address books. Next year, Pappano takes over as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. As if to help us adjust, his only outing with the LSO this year served up big-boned late-romantic symphonism: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A minor and two sprawling tone poems, Liszt’s Die Ideale and Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were cheers for Pappano before he’d even raised his baton – rather more, in fact, than at the end of the first half. Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade began energetically, with just a hint of bite. But in Pappano’s hands, the work was all late-Victorian sentimentality, albeit clothed in the sleekest possible garb (satin-finish violins, wonderfully rounded-out brass). The showcase of orchestral sound quality continued with the Liszt, its opening solo woodwind statements beautifully shaped, the massed violins ferociously neat and incisive. It’s hard to imagine this piece better played – yet it still felt too long, too directionless, too dull.
There was no such problem in the second half. Pappano launched into the gleaming swagger of Strauss’s A Hero’s Life before the applause had stopped and controlled its pace with the finesse of a master storyteller – at times stepping right back, elsewhere cleaving deep incisions into the air in front of him. The work’s battery of horns (“always a yardstick of heroism”, Strauss thought) are crucial and there was superb solo and tutti horn playing throughout in this performance. But there was also harsh, raucous woodwind; a brief, cataclysmically noisy climax in the piece’s “battle” scene; and, most memorably, quiet passages of exquisite tenderness.
