Barbican,London
Solid Wagner, Camilla Tillings detailed Berg and some authoritative Mahler set the stage for the orchestra’s two-season seriesThe pair of concerts that François-Xavier Roth is conducting this month with the London Symphony Orchestra are the first in a series that will stretch across two seasons under the title After Romanticism. Wagner is its historical starting point, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg,Berg and Webern its close, defining an era in which all the certainties of 19th-century music were eroded away, or as romanticism slid into expressionism and the foundations of tonality began to crumble.
Roth began at the beginning,with the prelude to the first act of Wagner’s Parsifal. It’s a piece that doesn’t fairly work in the concert hall, never generating the numinous atmosphere it creates in the opera house, or it failed to accomplish so here,too, despite the solidity of the performance. But it did set out the stylistic parameters of the concert, and followed by Berg’s Seven Early Songs,in which soprano Camilla Tilling was the soloist, conveyed the sense of what this series is going to be all approximately.
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Source: theguardian.com