LSO/Pappano review – big, bold and filled with blazing conviction

Barbican Hall, London
Bernstein’s Symphony No 3 evoked the Cuban missile crisis before Copland’s Third Symphony lifted us on a tide of postwar optimism

This felt like a very LSO way for the London Symphony Orchestra to open its season: two 20th-century American symphonies, both of them big, bold showpieces with something to say about the time in which they were written. Bernstein’s Symphony No 3 has a huge role for a narrator who speaks words written by Bernstein himself, against a choral backdrop of the Jewish Kaddish prayer, sung in Hebrew and Aramaic. Composed either side of the Cuban missile crisis and dedicated to the memory of John F Kennedy, it is unmistakably a product of the anxieties of the early 1960s. But have those anxieties ever really gone away?

Thanks to the blazing conviction of Antonio Pappano’s conducting it didn’t feel at all dated here. The playing was bright and precise, the London Symphony Chorus equally responsive in a piece full of challenges: at one point half a dozen of them had to become conductors, each directing a sub-group of their colleagues as they sang in different tempos and rhythmic patterns. The Tiffin Boys’ Choir proclaimed their first entry through cupped hands so as to cut through the heft of the orchestra, before joining in the dancing rhythms of the finale. At the work’s centre, the soprano soloist Katharina Konradi sang a serene lullaby.