Review

Nicola Benedetti and Antonio Pappano’s on-stage introduction to the concert at 7.30pm felt like a simple innovation that gets around the inherent challenges of staging a pre-performance talk. Pappano could easily make reading the dullest of user manuals an exciting proposition with his softly spoken energy and enthusiasm. In touching on elements of both works, he wasn’t so much annotating them as setting the symphonies in the context of the Festival theme – The Truth We Seek – deepening the listening experience before it had even begun. At times, it felt as though he was rehearsing the audience, preparing us for our role in the concert.

The beginning of Beethoven’s 5th got off to a lumpy start, although the subsequent development exuded a good deal more grace. Muscular strings gave a hint of delights to come, though by and large the movement’s tutti fortissimos tended to be bottom-heavy, muddy, and in need of more clarity.

Pappano’s earlier expressed intent of approaching the second movement as a love story paid off, with a sense of courtly elegance that concluded with charm, poise, and tenderness. Here the sound was more balanced, with seductively smooth legatos in the strings and woodwind, stark and precise pianissimos, and dry articulation in the strings creating unassailable character.

A similar sense of delicacy was evident in the third movement, notably in the frequent modest shifts in speed at the ends of phrases. This gain was slightly overshadowed when emphasis seemed to be lost in the bass solos towards the end, creating a sense that we were losing our way in Beethoven’s all-consuming material. This continued in the final movement where the muddy feel persisted in the fortissimos, and some tutti sections felt overworked.

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Pappano can, without doubt, summon the kind of grand Beethovenian sound that matches the image we hold in our mind’s eye. His modest direction and easy warmth make him an empowering presence on the podium. Yet this performance didn’t always carry me with it; in places, detail was swallowed by fortissimos that occasionally felt too big for the space, and the more abstract, architecturally argued Fifth invited a freer, more spontaneous approach that sometimes risked clarity and focus.

The second half brought a dramatic shift. In the first movement of Shostakovich’s Tenth, the score’s programmatic leanings and sharply etched changes of mood demanded clearer, more exact direction. The storytelling thread seemed to lock players into the precision and focus the music requires. There was a more self-assured sense from the Shostakovich that elevated the stakes. The LSO responded in kind with exquisite, velvety padded legatos in the strings, and, when the movement-long slow simmer broke out into a rapid boil, trumpet cues that seemed to split the building in two. Later, chocolatey legatos from the clarinets cemented the storytelling; unison strings screamed the unified voice of a defiant population. A cut-glass oboe solo in the final movement commanded and sustained attention amid the tumultuous rising up.

It wasn’t all plain sailing. The terrifying menace that characterises the second movement seemed to get off to an ill-governed start, suggesting that the oppressor might possibly have risked being toppled simply by virtue of being caught off guard. Whilst the material lacked power (meaning the snare drum dominated) earlier on, the attack returned when the string counter-melody cut in. Screeching woodwind doubling fierce strings made this a blood-curdling scream on an epic scale.

The sardonic third movement had a steely determination in its slow, deliberate, and unrelenting repeated motif. Ever-persistent strings, with dry, papery articulation, added an edge of irony. The horn section blazed through the Usher Hall with an emphatic statement of resilience and defiance, before a finely drawn-out conclusion complete with devastating diminuendo brought the potent movement to a close.

Profound scene setting at the opening of the final movement from that cut-glass oboe line mentioned earlier provided respite from the horrors and terrors. As the conclusion approached, the characteristic precision came to the fore in executing a hard-earned Shostakovich triumph rattled through with brilliance, sparkle, and one last sucker punch for the people from the timpani.