Nearly 30 years after Michael Tippett’s death aged 93, the composer’s music still divides opinion. Sitting on one side of me during the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance of Tippett’s Second Symphony was a man who headbanged appreciatively through the loudest parts. On the other sat a man muttering furiously, who left loudly declaring the performance “a complete waste of time”.
It’s certainly not a symphony on the venerable Beethovenian model. Blocks of material overlap jarringly; the orchestral texture sometimes seems to harbour a rogue agent, as if a musical line has been imported accidentally from another piece; movements end with weird ambivalence. Under the LPO’s principal conductor Edward Gardner, Tippett’s most extravagantly bitonal passages were brash (think multicoloured crazy-paving in sound), the elegiac portions warm and silken. From the incisive chugging of the opening to the finicky busyness elsewhere, Gardner kept this potentially unwieldy score under exquisitely taut control.
Substantial as Tippett’s symphony is, it wasn’t the main event. Nor, inevitably, was the opening item, Wagner’s Prelude from Parsifal, which was tender and poised, though lacking the as-one ensemble needed for those spare, hushed entries. No: this capacity audience had turned out above all for South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho a fact obvious from the whooping as he entered, not to mention the rather emptier auditorium after the interval.
That pre-emptive enthusiasm was richly rewarded. This performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto unfolded gradually, to exceptionally compelling effect. Cho’s opening phrase was plain to the point of understatement, answered by wonderfully aerated orchestral playing. In what followed, Cho’s acclaimed virtuosity was clear, his passagework gleamingly precise, his sound ranging from staggering softness to luminous Steinway shine. But it was his musical dialogue with Gardner and the LPO that was irresistible. Gardner conjured translucent textures in which Cho’s right hand provided glinting filigree. The slow movement’s game of high contrasts allowed flashes of arch-Romantic flamboyance from Cho yet ended in an orchestral whisper. The finale was both playful and utterly exact, exploding into colourful, joyous release as Cho and Gardner bounced the natty rondo theme to and fro with all the easy generosity of chamber music-making.
