In Maestro, last year’s Oscar-nominated biopic of Leonard Bernstein, there is a re-creation of part of the conductor’s now legendary, televised performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 2 at Ely Cathedral. Broadcast in 1973, it captured Bernstein at his most charismatic, performing a composer he championed throughout his life.
Now, a generation on, here we were watching his protégé, Michael Tilson Thomas, conducting the same symphony with the same orchestra, the London Symphony, in a celebratory concert at the Barbican in London. The event marked both Tilson Thomas’s forthcoming 80th birthday in December and his relationship with the LSO, which goes back half a century.
It is remarkable to think how Mahler’s reputation has changed during Tilson Thomas’s lifetime. A composer largely neglected in 1950 now enjoys almost saturation coverage across the musical world — a change in which Bernstein, and subsequently Tilson Thomas, have each played a part.
Since his return to conducting after a diagnosis of brain cancer, Tilson Thomas has focused on the symphonies. His Mahler was always different from Bernstein’s, less mannered, some might say less exaggerated, focused on detail. Now it is different again, as it has gained hugely in weight and mass, drawing deep, dense, resonant sounds from the LSO’s admirable players.
This performance of the Symphony No 2, “Resurrection”, unfolded on a monumental scale. Although the speeds were more conventional than when he was here in the summer for the Symphony No 3, it felt as if the priority was solidity rather than dynamism.
The opening funeral march set out with grandeur of utterance, its initial motif imposingly announced, not a violent upheaval as it can be. The next two movements made up in richness of tone what they lacked in quickness of response. Then came Alice Coote as a mezzo soloist of extreme intensity, better suited perhaps to a different type of performance, joined subsequently by soprano Siobhan Stagg and the London Symphony Chorus, all supporting Tilson Thomas in a finale of resplendent power.
★★★★☆
Across the Thames, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Benjamin Grosvenor Quartet appeared as part of a short international tour. The four prestigious young musicians — Hyeyoon Park (violin), Timothy Ridout (viola), Kian Soltani (cello) and Grosvenor (piano) — had already taken in Luxembourg and Spain, and this London date came towards the end.
Their programme paired Strauss’s early Piano Quartet in C Minor with Brahms’s Piano Quartet No 3 in the same key — high Romanticism at its most vehement. Both these works have featured in the quartet’s recitals before, so the players were entirely inside the music, releasing its wellspring of passion in full flood without ever seeming to push the music too hard.
Grosvenor makes an ideal chamber music pianist, always present, but restraining any temptation to dominate. Of the other three, Ridout was the most captivating performer, finding new tone colours to light up each phrase, so that the centre of the musical texture seemed to hold the most potent expressive impulse. There is so much more repertoire for this fine young quartet to explore.
★★★★☆
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