Simon Rattle’s all-American night with the London Symphony Orchestra was dominated by George Gershwin. Boisterous, brassy performances of two of Gershwin’s overtures, to Let ’Em Eat Cake and Strike Up the Band, in orchestral preparations by Don Rose, topped and tailed the live performance, whereas Kirill Gerstein was the usually deft soloist within the generally rambling Piano Concerto in F, including an much more agile account of Earl Wild’s paraphrase of I Received Rhythm as his encore. However there have been additionally two a lot much less acquainted items within the programme, one in every of them completely new and the opposite very not often carried out (on this aspect of the Atlantic no less than).
The premiere got here from John Adams. Commissioned by the LSO and devoted to Rattle, Frenzy is an 18-minute orchestral exercise, Adams’s most substantial since Metropolis Noir in 2009. Steadily constructing in depth within the method of items similar to Quick Experience in a Quick Machine, it takes a theme from his most up-to-date opera, Antony and Cleopatra, as its start line, and the supply of all of the musical materials that follows. Adams describes it as a “type of ‘brief symphony’, encompassing in a comparatively transient length a variegated but unified symphonic construction”, but on first listening to it appeared extra showpiece than symphony, and one which Rattle and his orchestra introduced fairly brilliantly.
The programme’s different novelty, although, was indisputably a “brief symphony”, and an actual discovery – the third of Roy Harris’s 18 symphonies. It’s a strikingly authentic piece from 1939 whose steady five-section construction appears to be modelled on that of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony (whereas including a contact of the unclouded modal string writing that opens his Sixth Symphony, too), but is unmistakably American in its rangy themes with their tinge of craving new deal optimism. It’s a taut, muscular and fiercely concentrated work; although its length could also be precisely that of Adams’s Frenzy, as Rattle’s excellent efficiency confirmed, Harris’s Third packs in a lot extra.
