3 hours ago
5
By this point in October there is no escaping the shorter days, lower light and autumn drizzle, but this concert by London Symphony Orchestra – the first in a short series of LSO programmes this season and next curated by the composer and conductor Thomas Adès – seemed calculated to dispel any seasonal gloom, its intense burst of vivid orchestral colours and effervescent noisiness functioning as the musical equivalent of a Sad lamp.
The UK premiere of Alex Paxton’s World Builder, Creature set the tone from the glittering musical box of its opening, as upper woodwind flitted and skimmed the surface and lower brass ambled around the depths. The score’s intricate textures were almost miraculously lucid. Muted trumpets seemed to have escaped from a big band, a piano splashed around anarchically amid the strings and moreish rhythmic grooves emerged only to be abruptly halted. At one point an elephantine tuba blared into one of these sudden stoppages before a whole new cluster of ideas emerged, bright and delightfully bonkers, as Adès leapt around gamely on the podium.
Poul Ruders’ Paganini Variations for Guitar and Orchestra (Guitar Concerto No 2) involves a similar knowingness – Paganini’s famous theme occasionally surfaces through Ruders’ altogether spikier musical language – but less obvious humour. Sean Shibe made light work of the virtuosic solo passages but shone above all in sparser textures, where his tender, vibrato-laden melodic lines had space to breathe. Elsewhere the guitar was periodically swallowed by the orchestra despite amplification.
Both Paxton and Ruders were in the audience and stayed put for the second half, at which point this concert’s masterclass in programming truly took off. In Sibelius’s Symphony No 3, horns cut through string agitations like beams of light, pizzicato were mellow and timpani strokes elemental, the orchestral coordination absolute throughout. The finale surged euphorically towards its closing C major triads. Those came to seem all the more luminous when followed by Adès’s own Aquifer, which rolls and rumbles, thunders and subsides in waves of constant, polychrome orchestral motion. In this flamboyantly high-definition performance, it was an exhilarating send-off.
