Daniel Harding is clearly a gifted conductor, and the LSO of course a fantastic orchestra. The opportunity that this concert presented to see them combine in an outwardly diverse and enticing programme was tantalising enough. But their performance last night at the Barbican was merely solid, with only the powerful soprano Sally Matthews' appearance in the Messiaen providing any real sense of musical exhilaration, and focused achievement.
The first problem seemed to be one of scale. In contrast to the two twentieth century works' economical approach to time, Bruckner's lengthy symphony seemed in this performance a touch turgid, as if its epic scale was there to compensate for subtlety of effect and design. This was especially apparent in the scherzo, where the interminable repeats of the solo horn call followed by sweeping tutti in the second half were not settled into a grand movement towards a dramatic pinnacle of recognition, but rather given as slightly fruitless reruns of the same material.
The orchestra was as much at fault in this as Harding. The secondary theme in the slow movement for example, where the violas have a warm, calming theme, is accompanied by plucked string chords. But these group pizzicatos never hit the spot - they were loose in execution, and almost lackadaisical in effect. Despite Harding's large gestures at points such as this, some musicians kept sagging behind the beat their colleagues sat atop. Elsewhere as well there seemed to be a large disparity between the conductors demonstrative appeals towards certain nuances of phrasing, dynamics, and balance, and the actual sounding result in the performance. Too often climaxes were not as potent as they should have been, and broad movement hampered by lack of unified purpose.
The performance was not without merit though. The playful vicissitudes of the first movement's development section, and the following recapitulation's creative patterning of thematic tension and release, were all given with a verve for the dramatic force of the material. The finale, too, contained much to marvel at; despite its rambling form, there was a convincing vigour in the playing, with the brass especially offering a thrillingly potent major-key triumph at the end. Harding also brought a unique sense of space to the shaping of the phrases in the slow movement particularly that at least generated some sense of formal definition and purpose. The symphony, though, never appeared in this performance as anything more than a poorly paced, quite bloated in form, dinosaur.
Boulez's Livre pour cordes is a concentrated reworking, done in 1968, for large string orchestra of some of the music from his youthful, inimitably dense, string quartet Livre pour quator. It is a reasonably docile work for Boulez, being best described in terms of a fervid Bartok or even a colour-driven Debussy than it is in terms of anything more modern. The performance here never took off, though it was competent enough, with the rich string colours of the writing coming through as alternately shimmering, spiky, and deeply sonorous. The piece plays out an interesting tension between sustained discontinuity, and an ever-present drive towards development and integration, and this performance at least highlighted some of that tension.
The highpoint of the evening came just before the break, with an expressive, searching run through of Messiaen's typically ardent song cycle Poémes pour Mi
(Mi being his pet name for his wife). The cycle, on texts written by the composer himself, dwells upon the similitude between earthly love and the love of Christ for God in a series of passionate and expressively immediate songs.
Harding showed himself a capable partner for Matthews, delivering resounding bells and dancing tambourines alongside sinuous strings and buoyant birdcalls, but it was really all about the singer, dominant as she is through much of the score. And Sally Matthews shone. Her passionate and versatile voice was a tolling, yearning presence at times, at others a smooth flirtatious lure, at others still a hectoring and antic force exploiting all the variety of her low range and her special way with hard consonants (especially in Les deux guerriers). Matthews could always be clearly heard above the remonstrations of the orchestra (to hers and to Harding's credit of course), and the conviction with which she moved through the broad emotional range of her role was astonishing to witness. The religious sensuousness of the music found a nice partner in her vivid characterisation, which was ably assisted by the clearly energised Harding. It is a relatively condensed cycle, and the beguiling effect of the performance lent a sort of compressed intensity to its overall arc. The final Prière exaucée, though, gave a feeling of majestic abatement after all the fury and tempest proffered earlier.
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