Review of LSO/Frang/Pappano – The tragic and dramatic Shostakovich and the silky and prickly Korngold | classical music

pThe ersephone, written by Imogen Holst as a student in 1929, sounds so familiar that you might think you’d wandered into a concert of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe by mistake. But so what? The music that follows that opening section of eerily undulating woodwinds is a delicious 12-minute tone poem that showcases a composer with her own ideas about texture, color and tone, as well as the myth itself.

Holst tells a story of rebirth, building toward a glowering climax that signals the music of the beginning. In the middle there is no depiction of lustful abduction, but darker music takes over, the strings working their way into an uneasy fugue, and muted brass playing varying chords that are then played by the entire orchestra. Holst may have been listening to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as well as Daphnis, but you can’t argue with those as models for the student composer in 1929 – or indeed at any time since.

Persephone opened with a lively mid-twentieth-century program from the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano, which continued with Korngold’s 1945 Violin Concerto. Feldfrang’s interpretation reminded us that the Vienna from which Korngold fled was not only a city of sachertorte and gold leaf, but also a home of musical expression. Not that it shortened Korngold’s melody. On the contrary, she wove those long melodic lines with silky density. But there were times, especially in the slow movement, where she dispensed with the vibrato and brought out the strangeness and suspense of the music – elements that we often don’t realize are there.

Pappano kept the first movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony on his toes, building tension with barely noticeable but relentless increases in speed. The second movement began with an angry din of cello and bass, then swayed its way through: a ponderous dance of inelegant men in very tight uniforms. By contrast, the slow movement was of tragic and romantic proportions: just when you thought the sound of the string was at its greatest, Pappano would reach out and pull some more. All of this can only end with a huge culmination, which the orchestra achieved in an exciting, ear-splitting manner.