The London Philharmonic’s new season opened with Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, superbly conducted by Edward Gardner, and finely sung. Pivoting between post-Romantic excess and modernist experimentation, it’s a work that in many ways suits Gardner down to the ground, and throughout he was marvellously alert to the complexities of its soundworld, yet all the while focused on its dramatic momentum and metaphysical grandeur.
Sensuous textures dominated the opening, as the affair between Waldemar (David Butt Philip) and Tove (Lise Lindstrom) encompassed both an acute awareness of transience and the insistent nature of a desire capable of transcending the grave. The clatter and decibels of the later spectral ride were utterly thrilling, though Gardner’s ear for detail also allowed us to appreciate Schoenberg’s musical argument at this point rather than let the passage degenerate into racket. The Wild Hunt of the Summer Wind, meanwhile, in which the Romantic sonic panoplies fade and fragment as dawn rises, was marvellous in its translucent evocation of a new musical world.
