Anyone who has ever accused Esa-Pekka Salonen of being cool or clinical should have been at the South Bank on Sunday. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was pounding away. The chap behind me was kicking the back of my chair The twitchy guy in front was practically jumping up and down. Who needed Nijinsky? When this Rite was at its fiercest, Salonen looked as if he was in the grip of a trance, as if the music was being hot-wired directly from his ear into his nervous system. And we responded in kind.
You can imagine this ballet score being played more theatrically. The bass clarinets, whose stuttering lines kick off the final frenzy, signed off without their customary post-coital exhaustion; the mystic opening passages were played cleanly and spaciously, with no picturesque haze to lull you in gently.
But then Salonen isn’t interested in playing dressing-up games. Instead, he peered behind the canvas and laid bare the ferocious inevitability of Stravinsky’s crunching dissonances, never pandering to effect over lucid exposition and piercing clarity.
Stravinsky wasn’t supposed to be the reason why such a large and enthusiastic crowd had gathered in SE1. The centrepiece of the programme was the latest in the Philharmonia’s Messiaen series, a performance of the his Oiseaux Exotiques. No hiding from Messiaen’s avian id?e fixe in this one - it all comes from transcribing birdsong, and the composer’s thorny language doesn’t mollify nature’s elemental, ungraspable wildness.
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But what this piece does do is shape and guide the squawks and coos into a taut piece of musical drama. At its centre, the pianist Tamara Stefanovich guided us through the thicket of percussion and woodwind, amiably reflective even as she was charging up and down the keyboard. Salonen’s admirably precise baton did the rest.
Only the night’s rarity disappointed. Intriguing as it was to hear Andr? Jolivet’s Stravinsky-infused Cinq danses rituelles, these exotically orchestrated but rather lumbering hymns failed on one basic count: despite their title, none of them sounded like music to dance to.