Is all the hype justified? It’s looking that way. If the London Symphony Orchestra’s 10-day festival heralding the arrival of its new music director, This Is Rattle, is a kind of coronation, then its second main event, Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, ended as a sort of hallowing. The house lights rose slightly and a spotlit Simon Rattle turned to face the audience, nominally to conduct the seraphim chorus – AKA the children of Tiffin School, who had just trooped quietly in down the aisles – but also so that we could all bathe in the Rattle glow, seeing him conduct head on. Impressionable viewers may have imagined a halo around his head – one that is only being polished by these concerts.
Rattle’s rapport with his new colleagues is something you can hear as well as see. It’s not that he is necessarily drawing anything new from the LSO’s players, but he does seem to be getting them all to play at peak form simultaneously; moreover, he is harnessing the orchestra’s existing brightness and coupling it with a scrupulous care for texture and balance. That came over time and again here. Berlioz, the arch colourist of Romantic-era music, provided plenty of orchestral showing-off material in his “dramatic legend” on the Faust story, an opera in all but name. Does the orchestra yet have a pianissimo that’s as mousy-quiet as Rattle would like? Perhaps not – but that will come. The velvety flow of the opening minutes, the electrifying buoyancy of the soldiers’ marches in Part 1, the throbbing double-bass heartbeats underlying Marguerite’s lament – the performance was full of memorable cameos, joining together seamlessly to form a rich and vivid picture.
The soldiers were the men of the London Symphony Chorus, and when Bryan Hymel, singing Faust, turned around to watch them during the first chorus it could have been a bit of low-key stage business, but it could also have been genuine astonishment at their precision and the quality of their sound. The LSC women and the children’s choruses had less of a starring role but were also first-rate.
Hymel led a cast of principals that could hardly have been bettered. His tenor, huge and yet malleable, sailed across even the lushest orchestral moments, its timbre penetrating and silvery. Baritone Christopher Purves was a late stand-in as Méphistophélès, but an ideal one – his devil was all charm, honeyed tones and veiled thuggishness, and every glance and gesture told. Karen Cargill’s beautifully centred, silky-sounding singing brought out all Marguerite’s vulnerability and her stillness at the centre of this story. Brander, who gallops through a nasty song about a rat in the Tavern Scene, is an ungrateful role but Gábor Bretz sang it nimbly. This was the second of two performances, with no noticeable scrapes of the kind the principal oboist had to navigate the first time, and everyone involved seemed to sense they were part of something special.
But Rattle can’t be everywhere, every day. Four of the festival’s concerts don’t involve him but are programmed by one of the composers who were represented in the opening event last week. Saturday’s had featured Oliver Knussen conducting the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in works chosen or written by the composer. Monday’s, performed by students from the Guildhall School of Music conducted by Richard Baker, was programmed by Thomas Adès – but the elusive composer, working in the US, was nowhere to be seen, and indeed was heard only via his arrangement of someone else’s music – his spiky, gleeful 1995 version of Madness’s 1981 hit Cardiac Arrest.
That closed a programme that had included instrumental pieces by Per Nørgård – Hut Ab! (Hats Off), an upbeat opener for two clarinets – and György Kurtág, whose Életút (Life Course) sounded initially anarchic thanks to the use of two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, but gradually settled into something almost calm before abruptly disappearing with typically Kurtágish deadpan humour. There was also A Farewell, a tautly written trio by John Woolrich, in which Ausiàs Garrigós Morant’s clarinet, Matthew Jones’s viola and Dylan Perez’s piano reinforced and coloured each other’s notes.
Otherwise, we heard a succession of songs for soprano, among which Harriet Burns shone in The Alps, Judith Weir’s cool and succinct setting of words by Emily Dickinson, and Patricia Auchterlonie was especially impressive in Harrison Birtwistle’s Nine Settings of Celan; Maw, Castiglioni and Golijov were also represented. Any of these works would have been striking in a more varied context, but the programme remained stubbornly piecemeal, thanks also to the long and barely necessary stage shifts between each work. All of the student singers still had something to learn about selling a piece to the audience; but at least with Rattle around they will be able to watch a master make his pitch.
• This Is Rattle festival is at Barbican, London, until 24 September. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
