Reunited with the London Symphony Orchestra for a pair of concerts marking his 70th birthday this week, Simon Rattle opened the first with a salute to this year’s most significant anniversarian. The Barbican is marking Pierre Boulez’s centenary with tributes from the LSO and the BBC Symphony, the two London orchestras with which he worked most closely. Rattle’s contribution was a performance of Éclat from 1965, an exploration of lingering sonorities launched by an explosive piano cadenza. Boulez later expanded the eight-minute piece into the more substantial Éclat/Multiples and, in the Barbican’s acoustic, which could not sustain the shimmering resonances that should give continuity to its isolated sound events, it was easy to understand why – the unadorned original felt underpowered and schematic.
Brand new music provided the centrepieces to both concerts – two LSO commissions marking Rattle’s birthday. George Benjamin’s Interludes and Aria from Lessons in Love and Violence reworks orchestral extracts from his third opera, which was based on the life of Edward II. It’s a stage work in which the orchestral writing often seems to take charge of the drama, and Benjamin has extracted six of the interludes from the score and woven them into a seamless, richly scored sequence, with the aria for the king’s wife Isabel from the second scene forming its dramatic focus. The role was conceived for the soprano Barbara Hannigan, and she was the soloist here too, turning the vocally demanding set piece into a self-contained scena within the larger dramatic arc of the extracts.
