NAPLES, Fla. – In his first season as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Pappano is emphasizing homegrown music, programming works of Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Walton, Bax, and other British composers. In September, his tenure began at the Barbican Centre in London with a program featuring the world premiere of a concerto for orchestra by Scottish composer James MacMillan.
The British theme has also been in the forefront of the LSO’s U.S. tour of California and Florida, leading up to concerts at Carnegie Hall March 5-6. Its Feb. 27 program in Naples combined Walton’s Symphony No. 1, one of the most important pieces of 20th-century British music, and two American works, Bernstein’s Serenade, with violin soloist Janine Jansen, and George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5. A pair of classics took up the Feb. 28 program: Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and that most English of orchestral works, Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The two sold-out concerts were at the 1,477-seat Hayes Hall, part of the Artis-Naples complex, which also includes the Baker Museum.
Pappano, mainly known for his 22 years as music director of London’s Royal Opera House, seemed a somewhat unlikely choice to lead the LSO, and he has a tough act to follow. His predecessor was the revered Simon Rattle, who left to become chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich. Nevertheless, the musician-run LSO has long been a resourceful organization, and its relationship with Pappano goes back to 1996, when he conducted the orchestra in a studio recording of Puccini’s La rondine with Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna.
As a young musician, Pappano worked for years as a répétiteur for opera companies in the U.S. and Europe, playing piano for rehearsals and coaching singers, before he became music director of opera houses in Oslo and Brussels, as well as the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome. The career arc from répétiteur to conducting used to be a well-trod path for the legendary likes of Toscanini, Karajan, and Solti, but it faded as managements and marketers turned conductors into stars at a younger age and steered them into focusing on either opera or symphonic music.
In an interview before the tour, Pappano discussed what a conductor steeped in theatrical music can bring to a symphony orchestra. “I think it’s the idea of narrative,” he told me on a Zoom call from London. “So much of music, certainly from the 20th century onward, is linked to some sort of literary source. Storytelling is paramount in so much symphonic repertoire, and I feel very comfortable in those waters. The experience in the opera house teaches you about the different types of communication in music. It’s more nuanced. It’s not only about color, it’s about words, and if there are no words, it’s about the implication in the music, that somehow there’s an idea behind it. My experience has really helped me to be always thinking that way, even in abstract music.”
As Pappano suggested in remarks from the podium before the first concert in Naples, a narrative of sorts was behind each of the three works on the agenda that night. Walker, whose Sinfonia No. 5 opened the program, was the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, for the orchestra song cycle Lilacs, in 1996. The sinfonia, subtitled Visions, was his last completed work. At 94 years old, he wrote it in response to the 2015 Charleston church massacre, in which nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church were gunned down by a white supremacist. Walker died in 2018, and his work’s posthumous premiere was given the next year by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Dausgaard.
There is a lot of sound and fury in Visions, and it was a treat to hear such an unabashedly modernist score played by a luxury liner of an orchestra like the LSO, but the 16-minute, single-movement work lacked coherence. Whatever momentum it had seemed to stop and start over and over, in sections ranging from violent blasts of dissonance in the brass, to ominously sumptuous strings, to robust percussion, to deft phrases in the woodwinds. Before turning to composition and teaching, Walker was a fine concert pianist, and a repeated piano passage, punchily played by Elizabeth Burley, provided a gesture toward structural unity. The LSO deserves credit for including this work in eight of the tour’s 13 concerts, but there may be a case to be made for another version concocted by Walker that includes spoken text and a multimedia presentation of images from Charleston related to the slave trade.
Bernstein conducted the LSO often, and his Serenade for solo violin, string orchestra, harp, and percussion seems made for the orchestra’s glamorous personality. The concerto is loaded with narrative drama, not least in its lyrical evocations of the composer’s West Side Story, Candide, and other musicals. The five movements were inspired by the philosophical dialogue in praise of love (which essentially meant gay love in the original Greek) in Plato’s Symposium, and all the virtuosic demands on the soloist were brilliantly met by Jansen. She is indeed one of the world’s great violinists. Her keening, silvery passagework in the Adagio was positively regal in its tonal security. In the finale, she shared a lovely duo-cadenza with cellist Rebecca Gilliver, one of the many orchestra players to rise to the occasion when called upon to step into the spotlight during the concerts.
In his pre-performance commentary, Pappano said that Walton’s First Symphony told the story of “a six-year love affair that went very wrong” for the composer, and the LSO’s passionate, wrenching performance proved the point. The sheer loudness of the brass was on display in the opening movement. The Scherzo raced by in a streak as Pappano put in a physically strenuous workout, busily guiding the musicians’ offhand brilliance in the triple time of the movement marked “con malizia” – with malice. The slow movement featured suitably lyrical play by the winds. Only the finale, which was problematic in Walton’s tormented completion of the work in 1935, came across as overdone, with all the brass fanfare and a pair of timpani pounding away. On the plus side, with seating of the violins split to each side of the conductor, the shimmering contrapuntal effect paid emphatic dividends.
Playing off the idea that Walton was influenced by Sibelius in the writing of the First Symphony, Pappano led an encore of the Finnish master’s lilting, bittersweet Valse triste. It was the perfect ending.
For the Feb. 28 program, unlike his preamble at the previous concert, Pappano had nothing to say beforehand, apparently content to let Elgar and Mahler speak for themselves. In some ways, it seemed as if the concert was more of an obligation to play the greatest hits rather than an effort to engage in something like the more exploratory experience of the night before.
Elgar’s Enigma Variations is a staple of the LSO repertoire, and it was a thrill to hear it, but for all the knowing excellence at work, the performance never really took off. Even the trademark “Nimrod” variation was strangely subdued. Pappano himself looked relatively laid back, perhaps just letting the musicians play the familiar music.
Mahler was a different story. The LSO has been playing his First Symphony frequently in Pappano’s debut season, on an Asian tour and in London, as well as on the current tour, so it has undoubtedly benefited from a fresh approach by him, such as tempos being a bit quicker than usual. And the orchestra delivered the goods in generous, if not amazing, fashion.
Surprisingly, the second-movement Ländler kind of lost its way under the normally detail-oriented Pappano, falling prey to a certain raggedness in the intricate phrasing. Otherwise, there were wonderful episodes to savor. In the first movement, it was clear that the horn section was in top form, and Mihajlo Bulajić contributed rich solos throughout the symphony. The third movement’s “Frère Jacques” funeral march was like a surreal dream in the account of principal double bass Rodrigo Moro Martín, with the minor-key tune then recycling through the orchestra in many a variation over the next 10 minutes. The finale wound up with the eight horns standing up to play from the back of the orchestra in glorious sound, and the audience responded with a standing ovation.
The LSO tour concludes with the performances at Carnegie Hall in the same repertoire as in Naples except that the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2, with soloist Yunchan Lim, replaces the Enigma Variations on March 6. That concert will be broadcast on WQXR’s Carnegie Hall Live series.
