Review LSO/Treviño/ Kopatchinskaja – Running using coiled spring muscles | classical music

forIn 2017, a little-known American, Robert Treviño, stepped in at short notice to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Third Symphony – the most important in the repertoire – for the first time. It was a very exciting start. The following year, Treviño staged a similar coup in Zurich, establishing a career that has since caught fire across Europe. It has taken nearly a decade, but Treviño — announced this week as the new principal conductor of the George Enescu Orchestra in Bucharest — is finally returning to the LSO. It was worth the wait.

Treviño is not a flashy figure on the podium; His rhythm is tidy, and his gestures are deceptive. But there is a coiled muscularity and authority to his delivery that translated across the repertoire in this strangely programmed sequence. Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 was the second half that attracted audiences, but before that it was a great symphony from the 20th century and something even more exotic from the 21st.

Lost during World War II, Messiaen’s 1932 hymn has been “reconstructed” from memory by the composer. How accurately? Nobody knows. Eucharistic rituals in sound, it’s a mystical and essential affair, but Treviño ensured we never lost sight of the cathedral’s skeletal columns with clouds of incense billowing from the LSO’s strings and distant woodwinds.

Marton Ellis’s 2019 Vont-tér is not so much a violin concerto as its antithesis. Composed for soloist Patricia Kopaciskaja – seen here in the second of three performances of Portrait of the Artist – it strips form of virtuosity and lyricism, turning expectations upside down in its sustained solo movement. Kopatchinskaja sold it with vigor and keen, playful precision, turning the room-sized LSO into a compositional dance haunted by shudders, creaks and cracks (I missed the veil of polystyrene sheets). But what did you have to say to Messiaen or Rachmaninoff, other than a musical raise of two fingers?

By softening the monumentality of the Second Symphony with plenty of pacing and vertical transparency, Treviño gave us a cinematic Rachmaninoff: the tunes are always moving, always looking forward or looking back in this integrated web of action. It’s a piece that could get quite heavy, but here we go with the explosive finale already in sight, running towards the end, with Valhalla in sight.