François-Xavier Roth conducted the latest concert in the London Symphony Orchestra’s Futures series. With the ballast in his programme provided by accounts of two of Richard Strauss’s symphonic poems – a racy performance of Till Eulenspiegel and an edgy, almost histrionic one of Death and Transfiguration, both delivered with full-spectrum brilliance by the LSO - there were three premieres, two of them from composers who had previously been part of the orchestra’s Panufnik scheme for encouraging young talent.
Finnish composer Joel Järventausta was a member of the scheme just three years ago. His Sunfall, inspired by a vivid 19th-century painting of a sunset, and by Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, seemed an exceptionally assured piece of orchestral writing. It’s a fiercely concentrated, 10-minute tone poem, in which violent outbursts of brass alternate with more consoling instrumental lines, and uneasy passages of stasis.
