tepping into the shoes of Sir Simon Rattle is an unenviable task, but with that maestro now ensconced in Munich with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, his position at the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra has gone to Sir Antonio Pappano, now in his last season at Covent Garden. Pappano has conducted the LSO on and off over the years, but this was his first concert as chief conductor designate.
Rattle was able to create a unique soundworld and stylistic integrity by his empathy with the players in marked contrast to that of his predecessor, Valery Gergiev. Pappano will need time to forge his own relationship with the orchestra, and this was a challenging way to start: the premiere of a contemporary work, a demonic firecracker from Liszt, and Strauss’s Nietzschean hymn to the Superman, Also sprach Zarathustra.
Hannah Kendall is a now well-established composer of the younger generation, so much so that even the LSO has been queueing up for her. The title of her O Flower of Fire refers to the creator of the world in the ancient teachings of the Chaldean religion and Kendall has said that questions of faith and worship were uppermost in her mind as she conceived her score.
But this is not, as one might expect, a piece of calm meditation. On the contrary it alternates passages of a threatening nature with others that are ethereal, all the more elusive for her evocative deployment of sounding objects from other traditions, including metal dreadlock cuffs and Afro picks.
Kendall herself was born in London to Guyanese parents, and traces of her own ancestral homeland are subtly woven into the fabric of the piece referencing the clash of cultures during the centuries of colonisation. There’s a satisfying circularity too in the way the ritualistic sonorities of the opening return to conclude the piece. It’s an intriguing, and skilfully crafted work whose virtues will doubtless become increasingly evident on repeated hearings.
Liszt’s Totentanz, on the other hand, a witches’ brew of Dies Irae chanting and fiendish virtuosity, gains all too little from frequent iterations. Yet one had to admire both the macabre aura and the delicate touches of this performance, while the culmination of it all, with Alice Sara Ott’s improvised filling-in of the blank piano part, was suitably spine-tingling.
The LSO and its brass did justice to the uplifting musical sunrise that opens Also sprach, even if the sound was inevitably compromised by the unyielding acoustic of the Barbican and the feeble electronic organ. It was also an engagingly dramatic reading throughout. But to find out what form the new special relationship between Pappano and the LSO will take, we will have to be patient.