Back in 2017 a little-known young American, Robert Treviño, stepped in at short notice to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Third Symphony – the most substantial in the repertoire – for the first time. It was a seriously exciting debut. The year after, Treviño pulled off a similar coup in Zurich, establishing a career that has since caught fire across Europe. It has taken nearly a decade, but Treviño – this week announced as the new principal conductor of Bucharest’s George Enescu Philharmonic – is finally back with the LSO. It was worth the wait.
Treviño isn’t a flamboyant figure on the podium; his beat is tidy, his gestures deceptively contained. But there’s a coiled-spring muscularity and authority to his delivery that translated across the repertoire in this bizarrely programmed sequence. Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No 2 was the crowd-pulling second half, but before that a magnificent 20th-century oddity and something even odder from the 21st.
