Simon Rattle, at 70, continues to exhibit a boundless passion for music, evident in his series of birthday concerts featuring new works and classics performed with exceptional precision. The London Symphony Orchestra, his artistic home, marked this milestone with performances in London, Paris, and Luxembourg.
If science ever finds a way of giving us eternal life, we could do worse than look to conductors to see how best to use the time to advantage. As his 70th birthday approaches later this week, Simon Rattle — curly locks now snowy white — seems to remain in a perpetual state of self-renewal. The London Symphony Orchestra , where he is conductor emeritus for life, is marking the occasion with a series of concerts in London, Paris and Luxembourg.
They all feature new music, a life-long Rattle enthusiasm and a sure way of keeping one’s artistic profile up with the youngsters. It was a neat idea to kick off with two anniversaries in one. As well as being Rattle’s 70th, this year marks Pierre Boulez’s centenary and Rattle’s first concert also formed the opening of the Barbican’s Boulez 100 celebrations. A performance of the brief Éclat for 15 instruments combined Rattle’s vitality, precision playing by members of the LSO and Boulez’s legendary ear for sound, pinpointing the contrasting timbres of guitar, tubular bells and cimbalom, among others. Aside from that, the big draw in each of these two concerts was the premiere of a new work by a leading English composer. It is seven years since George Benjamin’s second full-length opera was first seen at the Royal Opera House and he has now fashioned from it a suite called Interludes and Aria from “Lessons in Love and Violence”. The result is reminiscent of Berg’s suite from Lulu, both for being drawn from an opera and in its potent sense of suppressed danger ready to snuff out any fleeting spark of true love. Each also features a solo for high soprano, in this case Barbara Hannigan reprising her role as Isabel with her customary vocal panache. Away from the opera house, Benjamin’s music sounds just as concentrated as before, compelling and expressive at every turn. How clever, too, to follow the Boulez with another, rare classical score that features a cimbalom. The premiere at the second concert was Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Sco, a guitar concerto commissioned expressly to mark Rattle’s birthday. The title Sco refers to American guitarist and friend John Scofield, whose life and artistry have long been an inspiration to Turnage, giving us Silent Cities, Scorched for jazz trio and orchestra, and more. In Sco, Turnage has given him a full-scale, five-movement, half-hour concerto. It starts and ends with rhythmic, upbeat movements — “Sco Train” and “Sco Funk” — bearing Scofield’s musical fingerprints. The heart of the work, though, lies in the lyrical “Aria”, where the orchestra creates an overcast landscape, shadowed by feelings of loss, against which the soloist largely improvises. A lot of the solo part is left to Scofield’s on-the-spot embellishments. Appropriate though this may be for a concerto, it was Turnage’s orchestra that more consistently held the attention here. The first concert concluded with a weighty performance of Brahms’s Symphony No 4. With strings digging deep and the textures unrelievedly thick and rich, this was a suffocating kind of Brahms, at least in the Barbican acoustic. One longed for somebody to open a window and let in some fresh air. By contrast, the second concert featured two visionary works — Tippett’s “Ritual Dances” from The Midsummer Marriage and Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No 5 — that found Rattle in his element. Few conductors can rival his ability to conjure another world of numinous marvels and the London Symphony Orchestra rewarded him with first-class playing, a birthday present worth having.
Simon Rattle London Symphony Orchestra Birthday Concerts New Music Classical Music Pierre Boulez George Benjamin Mark-Anthony Turnage Brahms Tippett Vaughan Williams
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