★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Can anyone out-Shakespeare Shakespeare? Berlioz came close, rolling up the passions and agonies of the Montagues and Capulets into a bundle of gut-shredding theatricality. It was a shame that the London Symphony Orchestra couldn’t finish its Shakespeare400 concert series with the full meat and 17-veg edition of the complete work, which includes a chorus and operatic soloists in addition to the deluxe orchestration. Gianandrea Noseda’s selection instead attempted to streamline the storyline around the eponymous lovers, finishing with the sad droop of an oboe as Juliet expired in her tomb, without the thunderous epilogue that is supposed to follow.
What survived from the cull was the extraordinary way in which the composer sees the action through the eyes of his protagonists. Romeo Alone casts the hero in a fever-dream of a Capulet ball, not just lost in the dance but lost in his dreams of Juliet; the Love Scene quickly leaves the Verona balcony behind as murmuring strings hit transcendental ecstasies. The peppery Queen Mab scherzo doesn’t so much clear the air as waft in another kind of fantastical miasma.
Noseda has just been announced as the LSO’s new principal guest conductor, cementing a dynamic relationship. The orchestra played the Berlioz hungrily for him, with some of the sharper, weirder accents in the scoring occasionally overlooked in the red-blooded chase.
Individual sections, particularly the horns and bassoons, slithered more subtly around Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No 2, a brilliant foil to Janine Jansen’s turbulent virtuosity in the solo part. Jansen turned its enigmatic swerves into a Shakespearean drama of her own, with the three daunting cadenzas her soul-searching soliloquies — all ferociously thrilling.