London Philharmonic Orchestra shows that the symphony is still in vibrant health — review

Only a couple of weeks remain before the start of this summer’s country-house opera season in the UK. With only one main concert left at the Southbank Centre — a performance of Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass — the London Philharmonic Orchestra has been making the most of its last dates before it sets off to play in the pit at Glyndebourne.

This penultimate concert came with multiple points of interest. It seems unlikely we will be seeing a great deal of hotshot young conductor Klaus Mäkelä in London, at least for the next few years. He is already juggling three orchestras, in Oslo, Paris and Amsterdam, so a fleeting visit was worth catching.

That was doubly so, as he had come with an enterprising programme. In between Shostakovich and Mahler came Thomas Larcher’s Symphony No 2, Kenotaph, only heard once before in the UK, at the BBC Proms in 2016, the year of its premiere.

Tense, dynamic, always on the move, this is a symphony that has made a big impact. In case it seemed that the form of the symphony was defunct, Larcher proves otherwise, setting up an undercurrent of driving rhythms, of the kind that propels Beethoven’s symphonies, while a desolate slow movement walks the same scorched earth as the symphonies of Shostakovich.

What makes Larcher indisputably a composer of today is his sound-world, its shrieking high frequencies straining through the upper atmosphere, a tinkling of harp, piano or vibraphone echoing in the void. This London Philharmonic performance sounded more confident, more varied in timbre, than the symphony’s recording, made a few years back in Finland.

It was preceded by playing of exceptional, hushed intensity from Julian Rachlin in Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No 1. The opening movement of Mahler’s Symphony No 10, completed before the composer’s death, was given a rich lyricism in Mäkelä’s hands.

★★★★☆

southbankcentre.co.uk

A recital by the Sacconi Quartet at London’s Kings Place also offered a nearly new work, the first UK performance of Robin Holloway’s Quintet for Horn and Strings (2020). Like Larcher, Holloway is a composer who is reactive to the long tradition of music that has preceded him.

He says the request for a horn quintet came from a Czech horn-player who wanted something more to play than Mozart’s Horn Quintet, the best-known example of the genre. Holloway’s answer is an attractively genial work, lyrical in mood, light in its touch, often because the players are only being heard in twos or threes. In the last movement the tone turns deeper when a 17th-century poem by Edward Herbert is set wordlessly to music, the solo horn, beautifully played here by Ben Goldscheider, tracing the pattern of the words.

It made a fine counterpart to the Mozart Quintet, which is more of a showpiece for the horn. The Sacconi Quartet, so responsive to the different characters of each, widened their range of colours further for a Rachmaninov Romance and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet, tenderness and passion alive in every sound.

★★★★☆

kingsplace.co.uk