Photograph: Mark Allan
Last year conductor Antonio Pappano celebrated 20 years as music director at the Royal Opera House. That long tenure has sealed his close association for UK audiences with Italian opera – Rossini, Verdi and Puccini above all. So much so that you’d be forgiven for overlooking his parallel existence in the symphonic world with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome (where he’s been music director since 2005) and others, with a discography that stretches from Tchaikovsky to Peter Maxwell Davies and an acclaimed recent recording of two Vaughan Williams symphonies.
But the time has come to update our address books. Next year, Pappano takes over as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. As if to help us adjust, his only outing with the LSO this year served up big-boned late-romantic symphonism: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A minor and two sprawling tone poems, Liszt’s Die Ideale and Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.
