Read my review for Santa Barbara arts weekly, VOICE magazine, of the March 24 2022 performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle conducting

Sir Simon Rattle conjures privateers, prostitutes, the subconscious, and the demise of the waltz - in one evening

Santa Barbara, home to the internationally famous Music Academy of the West, and host to concerts by the great orchestras of the world for over a century under the aegis of Community Arts Music Association (CAMA), is a bit spoiled for its population demographic. Still, last week’s mini residency here by the London Symphony Orchestra - part of its partnership with the Music Academy since 2018 which continues through this coming summer - confirmed at several levels, the orchestra is clearly among the top half dozen in the world.
Music Director Simon Rattle kicked off the first act of an extended weekend of special events celebrating the Music Academy’s 75th birthday, by conducting a program at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara on March 24th that defied a certain elemental logic about biting off more than one can chew. Berlioz’ treatise on string virtuosity, Overture: Le corsair; Hannah Kendall’s The Spark Catchers; Sibelius’ stunningly complex Symphony No. 7; Bartók’s equally daunting Miraculous Mandarin Suite, and for dessert, Ravel’s La Valse, which a critic at its premiere in 1920 described as a piece that, “plots the birth, decay, and destruction of a musical genre,” were dispatched as mortals might chow down a Big Mac. The evening flew by with the speed of fast food, yet at the musical level of Le Cordon Bleu.
Last Thursday’s program is locked into the London Symphony’s North American touring repertoire, thus was thoroughly prepared. Yet the breathtaking speed of unison string passage work, the uncanny balance of wind and brass choirs, the apparent immortality of Simon Rattle’s energy, and his insistence on the powers of dynamic contrast, made this meaty, nearly overweight program levitate with technical perfection and artistic savoir faire. World class, alright.
Opening the concert with flash/bang, the LSO’s performance of Berlioz’ Le Corsaire (1844/1852) represented one of those glorious experiences where one sees the players movements, hears the sounds rushing by at breakneck speed, and wonders, is that possible? Rattle, conducting alternately in two and four, depending on the sweep and flow of the music, clarified a thousand details of harmonic structure and orchestration, while also demanding dynamic and rhythmic subtleties seldom heard in other virtuoso performances of the piece.
British composer Hannah Kendall’s 2017 composition, The Spark Catchers, takes inspiration from Lemn Sissay’s poem by the same name, which he wrote for the 2012 London Olympics. A single, continuous compositional structure, the work nevertheless has distinct, and distinctly colored, sections: Sparks and Strikes, Molten Madness, Beneath the Stars/In the Silver Sheen, and The Matchgirls’ March. Edgy, repetitive patterns, jagged musical fragments, and moody colors, all in a nimbus of nervous energy, conjured the ghost memory of the Bryant and May match factory that once stood on the 2012 Olympics site, and the nerve-wracking vigilance required of the women who worked there, to avoid the accident of a catastrophic spark. Interesting subject, fascinating realization.
The two largest works on the LSO program last Thursday, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s enigmatic Symphony No. 7 (1924) and a suite from Béla Bartók’s music for a risqué pantomime ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin (1918-1924), would, in and of themselves, be considered the principal major work of most orchestral programs. Together on the same concert, they represented, as mentioned earlier, the world class technical, intellectual, and ensemble capabilities of the London Symphony.
Conducting both massive works from memory, Simon Rattle pulled no punches. His Sibelius was properly Nordic, fog-drenched sonically and psychologically, lush, mysterious, and moody. Rattle’s Bartók, also through-composed with section titles describing the various seductions of the Miraculous Mandarin story, was a feast of cubist chaos. Both works featured various soloists - an orchestra of chamber musicians.
Perhaps to take the edge off a bit, Ravel’s super-lush La Valse (1919-20), brought the printed program full circle, followed by Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance No. 3, as a jolly encore. Simon Rattle’s conducting throughout - a masterclass.

Daniel Kepl/Performing Arts Review