How many full-time symphony orchestras are there based in London? Five, of course: the London Symphony, the BBC Symphony, the London Philharmonic, Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic. Easy! But that’s not quite the whole truth: two of the finest orchestras in the city are the orchestras of English National Opera and the Royal Opera House. On Monday 4 May, after a long struggle to release them from the pit, Antonio Pappano will conduct his Royal Opera House musicians in a symphonic concert in which they will take centre stage at Covent Garden for a programme of Chausson, Bernstein, Scriabin and Ravel.
The ROH players do occasionally have the chance to emerge from the gloom to reveal the faces behind the opera house’s musical brilliance, above all on their visits to the Proms, but Pappano wants to make this symphonic concert a regular fixture of the Covent Garden calendar – and quite right, too. His orchestral players are the unsung heroes of the Royal Opera’s success over the 12 seasons of Pappano’s time in charge, and they have the potential, I think, to challenge the country’s orchestral hierarchy on the concert platform as well as in their underground operatic lair. After all, the ensemble known as the Vienna Philharmonic plays, for most of the year, as the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera, and Daniel Barenboim’s Staatskapelle Berlin is really his orchestra of the Berliner Staatsoper.
As Pappano pointed out when he launched the Royal Opera’s 2015-16 season last week, the ROH orchestra is, of course, also a dance orchestra, playing for the Royal Ballet as well, and Monday’s programme reflects their rhythmic prowess in Bernstein’s Fancy Free. But the rest of the programme is cunningly designed to reflect and amplify the fantastical, orgiastic soundworld of the score of Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s opera King Roger, which Covent Garden is staging for the first time this month (it opens tonight).
There’s a close connection between Szymanowski and Ravel and Scriabin, and Pappano said that he wants to continue the symbiosis between the concert programme and their operatic work next year, with a programme of Russian music to complement their production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov already announced for 2016’s concert.
These are projects that mean a lot to Pappano, who wants to show off the all-round magnificence of his musicians. The coming concert could well prove to be the moment when the ROH Orchestra began its journey to become recognised as a great symphonic as well as operatic ensemble.
