LSO CO/Martín - Mozart, 29 March 2026

LSO St Luke’s

Bassoon Concerto in B-flat major, KV 191/186e
Horn Concerto no.3 in E-flat major, KV 447
Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra, KV 364

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)

Eivind Ringstad (viola)

Daniel Jemison (bassoon)

Timothy Jones (horn)

LSO Chamber Orchestra

Jaime Martín (conductor)

Images: Mark Allan

On the one hand, there can never be enough Mozart, whether that refer to works or performances; on the other, there can readily be more than enough, should the performances not at least come close to perfection. This LSO Chamber Orchestra concert oddly fell somewhere in the middle: a pleasant enough way to spend an hour and a quarter on a Sunday afternoon, lacking in the grotesqueries that disfigure most contemporary Mozart orchestral performances, yet also lacking in much to enable one to answer quite what the point of the concert had been, beyond giving LSO principals a chance to perform the works in question. All too often, what we heard sounded more like an accomplished run-through, skating on the Mozartian surface rather than plumbing its depths.   

Performances of the Bassoon Concerto – the only one that has survived, though Mozart may have written four more – are thin enough on the ground that this offered its own justification. There was much more than that: sensible tempi, clean, well phrased and articulated playing from soloist Daniel Jemison, and a largely cultivated sound from the orchestra. Here, it is probably fair to say that there are fewer depths for a conductor to plumb, and Jaime Martín offered decent enough leadership, though I could not help but think a little more insight might have been shown at his end. In the minuet-rondo finale in particular, less slow than sluggish, the orchestra sounded a touch reticent, even non-committal. Jamison’s playing was nonetheless excellent. Moreover, the opening Allegro sounded properly poised on the Rococo-Classical cusp; the slow movement enabled Jamison to show beguiling command of the long Mozart line. 

The Third Horn Concerto with Timothy Jones told a not dissimilar story, though its greater musical substance – not to diminish the Bassoon Concerto, but to elevate this – made relatively minor shortcomings more obvious, more keenly felt. Again, tempi were well chosen, and it was a relief to be spared fashionable ‘period’ mannerisms. Mozart needs more, though, and certainly here. He often received it, Martín and the orchestra pointing a syncopation here or a modulation there early on to good effect. A necessary sense of development was indeed strongest in the first movement. The slow movement unfolded without fuss, if occasionally with slight blandness, Jones’s lyrical playing not always matched by the orchestra. Still, one sensed Mozart’s tonal mastery, every inch the equal of Haydn and Beethoven’s. Jones’s navigation of the balance between hunting ebullience and subtle sorrow was sound in the finale, but alas Martín’s direction of the orchestra proved rather listless. Mozart, alas, is very difficult to get right; there is nowhere to hide, and sometimes it showed. 

The Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola is, of course, the acknowledged masterpiece of the trio. Here, expectations were highest. Although there was nothing especially wrong with the performance, again aspects of the orchestral direction in particular once again fell short enough to provoke slight disappointment. Violinist Benjamin Marquise Gilmore and violist Eivind Ringstad were excellent throughout, as was much orchestral playing, although there were some frays at the edges and a few too many phrases and paragraphs that did not tug the heartstrings as they might. The first movement started promisingly, Martín’s direction having regained the direction it had lost in the finale of the previous concerto. The great crescendo spoke for itself. solo playing was warm, lyrical, and wonderfully responsive. If there were a few instances of pulling the music round, emphasising the end of a phrase a little too much, we have all heard worse, far worse. The slow movement flowed nicely, but amiably; here, above all, we need to hear a grave, tragic beauty that flickered only intermittently. A bright, well-shaped collegial finale arguably offered greater tenderness, though the sense of loss related too much to what had preceded it rather than to emotional depths. If few Mozart performances offer the perfection Sir Colin Davis brought to the composer not so very long ago, with this orchestra and others, ultimately they should.

LSO Chamber Ensemble et al./Pascal - Boulez, 27 January 2025

Milton Court

Initiale
Messagesquisse
Dérive 1
Sonatine for flute and piano
Anthèmes 2 for violin and live electronics

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)

David Cohen (cello)

Gareth Davies (flute)

Joseph Horvat (piano)

Sound Intermedia

LSO Chamber Ensemble

Guildhall School Cellos

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

The Boulez centenary celebrations are underway. If London’s – and much of the rest of the world’s – response so far looks more muted than one might have hoped, something is better than nothing and there is all the more reason to cherish what we have. Following an afternoon symposium (oddly timed on a Monday, when most of us must work) the Barbican Centre offered an excellent chamber concert of five works, from LSO musicians and friends, directed where appropriate by Maxime Pascal.

What could have been better as an opening than the 1987 brass fanfare Initiale, which I had last heard at the opening of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal thirty years later? Although Milton Court lacks a ready possibility – at least unless electronics are employed – for the Gabrieli-like spatial element deployed in Frank Gehry’s Berlin hall, the LSO players’ balcony elevation nonetheless signalled development of our concert expectations beyond Boulez’s ‘museum’ of the musical past. Metrical complexity, rubato implied through exactitude, was there from the off. More kaleidoscopic and varied in mood than your typical fanfare, its cascading, proliferating echoes of Répons helped establish aural expectations for what was to come.

Messagesquisse was given by David Cohen and six cellists from the Guildhall School (Gabriel Francis-Deqhani, Kosta Popovic, Nathaniel Horton, James Conway, Theo Bently Curtin, and Seth Collin), conducted by Pascal with properly Boulezian precision and commitment. I was again intrigued and delighted by the tricks music could play on my perception—or perhaps the other way round. Initially, I could have sworn one cello was not playing, only to see and then hear that it was, at a pitch I had mistakenly thought another was: a smaller-scale sense, perhaps, of that sense of spatial magic squares that would so inform a later masterwork such as sur Incises (via, perhaps, common inspiration ultimately in Les Noces). Brimming with melody, impassioned of mood, harmonically compelling: it was everything Boulez is, and everything his detractors would say his music is not. Dynamic contrasts and all manner of other post-Beethovenian dialectics abounded in ‘organised delirium’. Contagious proliferation of a single line suggested at times a very French inheritance in the music of the clavecinistes. At times, I even thought of Nono. And what performances these were, reminding any who might need it of the crucial role of performance in Boulez’s music.

The shifting transformations of Dérive 1 proved an similar yet different delight, music spiralling before our ears in a mesmerising tour of aural pleasure. The temptation was to ask for more, which of course we should eventually have in its successor, Dérive 2. This music, though, spoke for itself, no mere precursor but a masterwork of proliferation in its own right.

The Sonatine for flute and piano received an outstanding and confounding performance from Gareth Davies and Joseph Havlet. No one would dispute the work’s allure, yet the array of elements in its first movement that might – just might – have to them something of the more neoclassical Schoenberg (and Debussy) seemed more than ever to rejoice in the necessity of internal and eternal explosion and destruction. It might not sound quite ‘like’ the Second Piano Sonata, but the Sonatine’s progress suggested ever closer kinship, emotionally and intellectually. Here, it felt, was instantiated a post-Notations world of infinite possibility.

Last up was Benjamin Maruise Gilmore with Ian Dearden and Jonathan Green of Sound Intermedia in Anthèmes 2. Its world of violin and electronics sounded, like much else, both old and new: not so very different from Messagesquisse or other works with solo and double/shadow, and yet… Echoes expected and unexpected beguiled and surprised as music from plainchant to Messiaen and beyond ricocheted around us. Indeed, an unsuspected harmonic sweetness suggested what remain less acknowledged lessons learned from Boulez’s teacher. As waves of sound lapped upon our consciousnesses, it was Debussy’s La Mer, endlessly transformed, that next suggested itself as fons et origo; that and, of course, the composer’s own endless imagination. The museum lives and develops; so do music and performance history of Boulez, one of its newer recruits.

‘Salonen: The Finale’: Uchida/Philharmonia - Bach, Salonen, and Beethoven, 10 June 2021

Royal Festival Hall

Bach (attrib.), arr. Klemperer: Bist du bei mir, BWV 528
Bach, arr. Webern: A Musical Offering, BWV 1079: Fuga (2. Ricercata) a 6 voci
Bach, arr. Berio: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080: Contrapunctus XIX
Bach: Partita no.3 in E major for solo violin: Prelude
Salonen: Fog (world premiere of orchestral version)
Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor, op.37

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)

Philharmonia Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

Images: Luca Migliore

It should have been a bitter-sweet moment: the Philharmonia returning to live performance, yet also its farewell to Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of thirteen years, Esa-Pekka Salonen. It doubtless was in some ways, but there was a feeling of hope here too. Hope may be the cruellest of gifts: it dies last, as Donald Tusk was wont to remind us. In one of the many outstanding performances I heard from the orchestra and Salonen during his tenure, Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, the Beethovenian message of Fidelio was, after all, decisively turned on its head for the twentieth (and twenty-first) century: ‘La speranza … l’ultima tortura’.


And yet, Beethoven, notwithstanding banishment during the clash of anniversary year and pandemic, is still with us. So is the partnership of Salonen and Philharmonia, as he becomes the orchestra’s Conductor Laureate. And so too is that orchestra’s great history, which, to quote Salonen (responding to a spoken and filmed tribute from the orchestra), seems to learn its ‘tradition … through osmosis … like a biological process, certainly beyond words’. That too was how he had connected with his illustrious predecessors: Strauss, Furtwängler, Karajan, and of course ‘Dr Klemperer’. But that in itself could never have been enough, for ‘communal experience has been missing.’ For many of us, as for Salonen, the Internet ‘doesn’t quite work’ in this way. ‘It has to be this moment. You, and us, and the distinction between you and us disappearing.’ It was the return of that experience, ultimately, that gave us hope, not torture.


We opened with Bach, whom Salonen likened to Shakespeare, every generation having taken its own look at this music, interpreting and even mutilating it. First came Klemperer’s orchestral transcription—or should it be arrangement? We could spill endless ink over that alone—of Bist du bei mir, thought at the time to be Bach’s, now known to have been composed by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel for his opera Diomedes and merely collected by Bach for Anna Magdalena’s celebrated Notebook. Salonen had heard it once on the radio and had been determined to get his hands on the score: a difficult task since it was owned by a private collector. We make, find, and invent our own Bach—constantly. This string version, made for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, flowed with grace, beauty, and enormous clarity. There was nobility too, not least in, dare I suggest, the almost Elgarian sound of the Philharmonia’s cellos. Somehow it seemed all the more fitting that this was not Bach, but something he cherished and enabled us to cherish. There is hope in that.


The celebrated Webern transcription—I am tempted to say re-composition—from the Musical Offering followed without a break. As Salonen had said earlier, notes sounded like stars in the sky: connected, yet separate. How they are connected is the thing—or rather, one of the things. The closer one listens, the more one discerns. Players must join the dots: and they did, music ricocheting across the stage, connecting itself, the players, and us. Again, the flow was measured and increasingly flexible, gathering pace and falling back—as in Salonen’s recording with the LA Philharmonic. It is a flexibility we may call ‘Romantic’, yet which is in truth as much Bach’s, Webern’s, Salonen’s, or music’s.

Berio’s version of the unfinished fugue from the Art of Fugue sounded darker, at least for much of its progress. It sounded both ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ too, less radically interventionist, so much so that the sound of a saxophone came as quite a shock. (Klemperer substituted saxophone for trumpet in an early, pre-Philharmonia recording of the Second Brandenburg Concerto.) There was a feeling of that starry sky opening up to reveal the very music of the spheres, Bach’s music growing—being grown—with all the patience in the world and beyond. And then it began to turn, to take off, to suggest the air of more than one other planet. As Bach was left behind, music became something else entirely: dependent and independent of ‘tradition’, whatever that may be.


The Prelude to Bach’s E major Partita was heard from above (the Royal Box): given to the stage as much as to the audience by concert-master Benjamin Marquise Gilmore. Once more, we heard something of the essence of Bach: flexible and regular, balanced and directed, simple and complex, sung and instrumental—in work and performance. Salonen’s Fog responded. Initially composed for ensemble for Frank O. Gehry’s (title derived from initials) ninetieth birthday, and now expanded for orchestra, it recalls the first music ever heard in Disney Hall. It was a moment Salonen had wanted to ‘embellish upon’. And how—in a fantastical recreation, slightly sinister and unquestionably magical, poised between mechanism and the spontaneously woven. Were those ghosts in the machine, or machines in the ghosts? The general answer seemed to be: why choose? Bach rarely did. There was overt process to be heard—post-Ligetian as much as post-minimalist?—that felt somehow oppressed, indeed as if by the fog of the title. Surely all those many years of experience as conductor as well as composer—in this case, from Salonen’s celebrated 1983 debut with the Philharmonia in Mahler’s Third Symphony—made their way, lightly and without fuss, into this performance. Descriptions of events may sound incongruous: a piano cadenza came seemingly out of nowhere, yet also out of somewhere, inciting a wash of well-nigh post-impressionist sound; unexpected orchestral riffs with hand drum beats; solo violin and flute duetting. And yet, they did not feel so. All the time, the clouds rained Bach, more or less explicitly. Like Bach’s music, work, performance, and our listening seemed to grow both in simplicity and complexity, and in connexion.

 

Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto had been the first piece Salonen and Mitsuko Uchida played together. It made for a fitting finale here. The first Classical music we heard—all the more Classically Mozartian given forces necessitated by social distancing—sounded, if you will forgive the cliché, newly minted. That fabled, almost Boulezian clarity was once again present, likewise the Philharmonia’s cultivation of orchestral tradition. There was plenty of hushed mystery as well as wide-eyed awe. Post-Mozartian sadness turned to post-Mozartian vehemence: the tragedy of modernity, that we want Mozartian perfection yet cannot reach it. (We even begin to wonder whether Mozart did.) It was all the more tragic for being softly spoken. And then Uchida’s entry: defiant yet soon sad too. This was to be chamber music writ large, in an unhurried, flexible performance of great wisdom from all concerned. It was music-making to give no option other than to listen, to remind us why we were there. At its heart, of course, stood the Beethovenian humanity we have so longed for, and been denied, these past fifteen months. There was Klemperian orchestral granite too, as well as many of the virtues the elderly Klemperer admired in the young(ish) Boulez. Uchida’s shaping of phrases assumed the mantle of inevitability, though only in retrospect; for looking—listening—forward, all was to play for. That, literally, was hope, in an almost Newtonian tonal cosmos that may no longer be ours, but which can still immediately speak to us. I fancied at one point that the cadenza might metamorphose into the Emperor; but no, not every beautifully voiced E-flat chord leads there. Beethoven’s C minor daemon possessed the coda: this was the real thing, no doubt.


In the slow movement, we heard the rapt voice of experience—and once more of hope. The sincerity of orchestral response to that piano opening took on an almost religious—versicle and response—quality. New vistas were opened up by solo woodwind. The music flowed like a great river, yet was most revelatory in its whispered confidences, no matter from whom. It was rounded off beautifully, preparing for the next chapter, yet offering a lingering look back too. Sometimes, Orpheus gets to keep Euridice. Returning to C minor for the finale, we heard a Klemperian doggedness that knew not all dances are light, and that persistence is not the least quality in bringing forth joy. It was persistence in the return of the rondo theme, in fascinating, dialectical combination with the onward tread, hop, and skip of the Philharmonia bass, that drove this movement. It was quite unlike any other performance I have heard: perhaps not for every day, perhaps not to be repeated, but is that not what performance is truly about?


As an encore, ‘what Esa-Pekka wanted’, Uchida treated us to the second of Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, op.19. Here, persistence again paid off, the resistance of that repeated major third (G-B) compelling music ‘itself’ both to ravish and dissolve—and yet remain. There is hope in that too; there must be.