Back in 2017 a little-known young American, Robert Treviño, stepped in at short notice to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Third Symphony – the most substantial in the repertoire – for the first time. It was a seriously exciting debut. The year after, Treviño pulled off a similar coup in Zurich, establishing a career that has since caught fire across Europe. It has taken nearly a decade, but Treviño – this week announced as the new principal conductor of Bucharest’s George Enescu Philharmonic – is finally back with the LSO. It was worth the wait.
Treviño isn’t a flamboyant figure on the podium; his beat is tidy, his gestures deceptively contained. But there’s a coiled-spring muscularity and authority to his delivery that translated across the repertoire in this bizarrely programmed sequence. Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No 2 was the crowd-pulling second half, but before that a magnificent 20th-century oddity and something even odder from the 21st.
Lost during the second world war, Messiaen’s 1932 Hymne was later “reconstructed” from memory by the composer. How accurately? No one knows. A Eucharist-ritual in sound, it’s a mystical, immanent affair, but Treviño ensured we never lost sight of the structural cathedral pillars through the clouds of incense billowing from the LSO strings and the woodwind’s distant organ.
Márton Illés’s 2019 Vont-tér is less a violin concerto than its antithesis. Composed for maverick soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja – appearing here in the second of three Artist Portrait performances – it strips the form of virtuosity and lyricism, turning expectations inside-out in its single continuous movement. Kopatchinskaja sold it hard, fiercely precise and playful, leading a chamber-sized LSO in a haunted textural dance of shudders, creaks and cracks (I missed the cameo for polystyrene plates). But what did it have to say to Messiaen or Rachmaninoff, beyond raising two musical fingers?
Tempering the monumentality of the second symphony with plenty of pace and vertical translucency, Treviño gave us cinematic Rachmaninoff: melodies always on the move, always glancing forwards or harking back in this integrated web of a work. It’s a piece that can get top-heavy, but here we set off with the eruptive finale already in our sights, galloping to a close, brass with Valhalla in their sights.
