Antonio Pappano’s evangelical embrace of British music continued apace in a concert featuring a welcome rarity by Thea Musgrave, William Walton’s strangely neglected Viola Concerto, and the latest in his ongoing Vaughan Williams cycle, the evocative A London Symphony.
Musgrave, still composing at 97, wrote Phoenix Rising in 1997 for the late Andrew Davis, to whom Pappano dedicated this concert. A 23-minute rollercoaster, it pits a blackguardly timpanist and his stick-wielding allies against a devil-may-care hornist and his brassy backup band. The horn player enters from off stage, the timpanist stalks off in a huff, and somewhere in the middle, for no immediately discernible reason, a phoenix soars aloft in an iridescent haze of tuned percussion. Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra gave it a thorough workout with marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, xylophone and tubular bells creating a magical aura. The musicians certainly revelled in its prickly harmonies, though the theatrical elements might have been pushed further.
Walton’s Viola Concerto was premiered in 1929 by Hindemith, no less, and something of the German composer-violist’s taste for brittle counterpoint and sardonic humour lurks beneath its lyrical charm. Antoine Tamestit was the instinctual soloist here, his limber tone and expressive finger work casting a soulful spell over the pensive opening movement with its dramatic orchestral outbursts. The syncopated scherzo encouraged him to release his inner Puck, but it was the finale – romantic, bracing and tender by turns – that found the sensitive Frenchman at his richest and most expressive.
A London Symphony, as Vaughan Williams called his second essay in symphonic form, is an affectionate portrait of the city he knew and loved: a teeming metropolis glimpsed through the mists and fogs that regularly enveloped it. While never short on drama, it was that impressionistic quality that Pappano regularly brought to the fore, drawing parallels throughout with Debussy and, perhaps more surprisingly, Respighi. The breathtaking weightlessness of the opening strings, the haunting street cries, and the bustle of the Embankment at night led inexorably to the vast, aching finale with its palpable aura of fading empire. Superbly played and incisively conducted, this was music at its most soul stirring.
