Simon Rattle’s relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra hit the rocks as soon as it started. But that was more than 30 years ago. To judge from this gloriously impassioned performance of Bruckner’s massive, unfinished Ninth Symphony, all is forgiven if not forgotten.
Indeed, one fascination of this gripping performance was its palpable tension. Rattle conducted the three vast movements from memory, as if determined to show that these slowly unfolding Austro-German epics — once thought alien to his mercurial temperament — are now embedded in his soul. He may not have convinced all the Berlin critics of that but he certainly convinced me.
The music ebbed and flowed, beseeched and snarled, with a surging freedom. Rarely has Bruckner’s swansong seemed so less like a sepulchral threnody and so much like a fevered, anguished and often violent rage against the dying of the light.
For its part the LSO, an orchestra that never accepts that it is second-best to anyone, even Rattle’s band in Berlin, played with superlative concentration and energy. The strings, in particular, mustered the kind of rich, deep-seated sonorities that are more usually associated with German ensembles.
It wasn’t technically perfect. Rattle’s years in Berlin seem to be turning him into a latterday Furtwängler: a conductor operating on such elevated spiritual heights that the basic business of getting people to play together by issuing the odd unambiguous downbeat is sometimes overlooked. I wondered, too, whether his unusual layout requirements — fiddles left and right, double basses strung out along the back, horns and Wagner tubas far apart from trumpets and trombones — slightly unsettled the LSO’s usually impeccable rapport.
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But who except a music critic would quibble about small imprecisions, when orchestra and conductor gave the huge paragraphs such compelling shape and momentum? A Bruckner performance without longueurs or languors? Such miracles happen.
It was clearly a tribute night to fervent Catholics who wrote monumental music, because earlier we were assaulted by the screaming wind band, deafening gongs, portentous bells and interminable chants of Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. This dated Sixties mumbo-jumbo was superbly executed. But if this is the soundtrack that Christians expect in the afterlife, I’m opting for atheistic extinction.