Simon Rattle’s burgeoning relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra is about more than just the orchestra and the conductor getting to know what each can expect from the other. There’s the LSO’s home hall in the Barbican to be considered as well, but the evidence of Rattle’s latest concert (he’ll be back there next month with the Berlin Philharmonic, too) suggests that he can cope very well with its acoustics. It’s some time since I’ve heard the LSO play with the refinement, transparency and wide dynamic range that they produced for this all-20th-century programme; even the biggest climaxes in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which ended the concert, brought the sense that they were being sustained by the concert hall rather than fighting against it.
Rattle does keep the Rite at arm’s length, though, making more a well-oiled machine than a demonstration of primitive, feral power, and impressive though much of it was, it was the least involving part of the programme. He’d had begun with an immaculate account of Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces Op 6, every phrase perfectly sculpted, every texture exquisitely balanced; even an outbreak of audience coughing in the fourth-movement funeral march couldn’t entirely break its spell.
Between the pair of early modernist masterpieces the soprano Barbara Hannigan presented a brilliant showcase of her dramatic talents. Her voice may not be ideal for the role of Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck, which really needs a heftier, steelier timbre, but she was still compelling in the three Fragments that Berg extracted from the score, with Rattle ensuring that the climax from the opera’s final interlude was suitably overwhelming.
And, after a swift change into a St Trinians-style outfit, complete with knee-high socks and the shortest of short skirts, Hannigan brought the house down with her vocal and histrionic daring in Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, a brief potpourri of music and nonsense text from his only opera. Rattle got embroiled in her theatrics, too, but didn’t seem to mind too much.
