Debussy’s ballet Jeux starts almost inaudibly, demanding featherweight, superfine delicacy from vast forces. It’s a daring opener. But conductor François-Xavier Roth seems to thrive on bold leaps and musical extremes. Appearing with the London Symphony Orchestra (now for the first time as its next principal guest conductor), Roth was often uncompromising in his pursuit of high-energy perfection.
Under his baton-free lead, Debussy’s games twitched between salon-ready politesse and all-out neurosis. These Jeux weren’t fun. But from the eight double basses to the all-inclusive wind section, Roth manoeuvred an LSO-XL through the score, performing it as an exquisite miniature on a massive scale. Only occasional ripples – in ensemble and tuning, magnified by hyper-accuracy elsewhere – disturbed the polished surface.
For Bartòk’s Piano Concerto No 3, the LSO (slimmed down to five basses) was joined by Simon Trpčeski. From the extreme desiccation of his first entry, via the second movement’s heavy stasis, to his evident timpani-envy in the piano’s magnificent intrusions in the contrapuntal finale, articulation was crucial. And even Trpčeski’s fleeting slides towards impressionistic murk seemed calculated amid the constantly shifting sounds drawn from the LSO by Roth.
The highlight, however, was Mahler’s Symphony No 1. The first movement boasted expansiveness without loss of momentum; the second oozed personality, its woodwind solos rudely carnivalesque, while the third was a vigorous display of Mahler the colourist (think Hockney, not Farrow & Ball). The finale was often loud. Very loud. But it, too, remained finely delineated, its closing brass apotheosis a thrilling, ecstatic release from Roth’s spell.
