London Symphony Orchestra/LSO St Luke's, review: when the audience is outnumbered by five to one...
Finally a real live orchestra, playing for real live people. The first concert in the London Symphony Orchestra’s new season wasn’t quite the first orchestral concert for a live audience anywhere in the UK. There have been one or two others (notably the Aurora Orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony earlier this week in a semi-open space), but this was the first proper indoors affair with a full orchestra: 67 to be precise, with an audience of just 12.
Of course it didn’t feel at all “normal”. The dozen of us who were invited (an audience of critics and industry insiders), were shepherded carefully by LSO staff to our seats perched high above the orchestra in the little balcony at the back of LSO St. Lukes. Looking down at the players below one felt uncomfortably like an aristocrat of old, enjoying a private entertainment. It felt an enormous privilege, sitting there in our masks, as well as a thrill--and also weirdly unfamiliar. Our applause was a bit tentative at first, as if we'd forgotten how to do it, but the music soon warmed us.
The economics of this set-up were completely crazy, and only possible for an organisation that can call on supporters with deep pockets. The concert was supported by a private individual, Yamaha Professional Audio and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, and the evening’s new piece, a memorial for the great conductor/composer Oliver Knussen by his friend and one time protégé Mark-Anthony Turnage was also supported by an individual. One wondered whether this was a sign of things to come—a much sharper divide in the arts world between the have and have-nots.
Still, it was a wonderful heartening event. Just to have one’s ears saturated with real live orchestral sound was like finding water in the desert. The orchestra under Simon Rattle played their hearts out, and the programme was cleverly contrived, with Turnage’s piece placed between Oliver Knussen’s Songs and Sea Interludes drawn from his fantasy opera Where the Wild Things Are (based on Maurice Sendak's famous children's book) and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings.
You could feel affinities of nocturnal horn-drenched magic between Knussen’s piece and Britten’s, while Turnage’s “Last Song for Olly” made half-hidden references to Knussen’s music—plus at its end a tiny fleeting homage to Knussen’s own father, who was a double-bass player in the London Symphony Orchestra. Turnage has a gift for writing memorial pieces of gentle, blues-tinged melancholy, but this (after a gentle chorale) was full of grandeur and radiance.
Knussen’s own piece featured soprano Lucy Crowe as the naughty boy Max who is at first afraid of the Wild Things but eventually tames them. In the hall her leaping, pure-toned voice was overwhelmed by Knussen’s magical swooping horns and wind machine and thrumming harp, but on the broadcast she certainly holds her own. Both pieces were inevitably topped by Britten’s immortal Serenade.
It benefited from that wonderful tenor Allan Clayton, who is fast becoming the “go-to” tenor for Britten. From his very first high note, inexpressibly gentle yet rock-solid, one knew he was going to be wonderful, and across the following six poems of nocturnal magic and menace he summoned a tremendous range of tone. No less wonderful was solo horn player Richard Watkins. His uncanny pinched stopped notes in Blake’s ‘O rose, thou art sick’, symbolising the ‘invisible worm’ at the rose’s heart made one’s skin prickle with a sense of the uncanny.
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