Total Liszt was the title of Antonio Pappano’s latest concert with the London Symphony Orchestra, an exciting, thoughtfully programmed evening that placed careful emphasis on the innovatory qualities of Liszt’s music, the connoisseurship of art and literature that so often fired his imagination, and his influence on composers down to the present day.
The opening work was Salvatore Sciarrino’s orchestration of Sposalizio, originally written for piano in 1839, and inspired by Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin in the Brera Gallery in Milan. Sciarrino scores the work for post-Romantic forces, stressing the sensuousness that frequently characterises Liszt’s approach to religious subject matter. The opening theme is quietly picked out by piccolo and bass clarinet, octaves apart, and the main melody, meditative yet ecstatic, hovers first on clarinet, then trumpet, over warm strings and brass. Pappano and the LSO probed the complex textures with subtle elegance in a performance that was refined and rapt in its beauty.
Totentanz, which followed, inhabits very different territory. Inspired by Holbein’s The Dance of Death, and completed in 1864, it’s a vast set of variations on the Dies Irae for piano and orchestra that finds Liszt at his most progressive and extreme, battering at the limits both of harmony and pianistic technique. It’s devastating when done as well as this. Alice Sara Ott played with thrilling accuracy and involvement, whether hammering out the grinding dissonances of the opening, or deploying a filigree lightness of tone for the Bach-like fugue that forms the work’s single moment of reflection at its centre. Pappano was similarly in his element with the work’s furious energy and drama. Ott offered Chopin’s C Sharp Minor Nocturne as an encore – as exquisite as Totentanz was ferocious, and providing some much needed emotional relief.
The Faust Symphony, Liszt’s remarkable response to Goethe’s magnum opus, came after the interval. Pappano’s slow, lingering approach to the central Gretchen episode allowed us to appreciate the often extraordinary way Liszt turns his orchestra into a chamber ensemble, though some of the dramatic momentum was lost in the process. But the opening movement, depicting Faust’s restless arrogance and alienation, was magnificent in its loftiness and control, while Mephistopheles’ scherzo had a glinting, sinister brilliance. The men of London Symphony Chorus sounded majestic in the finale: tenor Brenden Gunnell was fervent in his contemplation of “the eternal feminine” at the close.
