Persephone, which Imogen Holst wrote as a student in 1929, starts off sounding so familiar that you might think you have wandered into a concert of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé by mistake. But so what? The music that follows that opening passage of suspiciously evocative rippling woodwinds is a delectable 12-minute tone poem showcasing a composer with her own ideas about texture, colour and tonality, as well as the myth itself.
Holst tells a story of rebirth, building towards a glowing culmination that references the music of the beginning. In between there’s no depiction of lustful kidnap, but a darker music takes over, the strings feeling their way into an uneasy fugue, the muted brass playing clustered chords that are then pounded out by the whole orchestra. Perhaps Holst had been listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as well as Daphnis, but you can’t argue with those as models for a student composer in 1929 – or in fact at any time since.
Persephone opened an exuberant mid-20th-century programme from the London Symphony Orchestraand Antonio Pappano, which continued with Korngold’s 1945 Violin Concerto. Vilde Frang’s interpretation reminded us that the Vienna from which Korngold had escaped was not only a city of sachertorte and gold leaf but also the home of musical expressionism. Not that she shortchanged Korngold’s melodiousness; on the contrary, she spun out those long melodic lines with silky intensity. But there were times in the slow movement especially where she dispensed with vibrato and brought forward the music’s strangeness and spikiness – elements we don’t often realise are there.
Pappano kept the first movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony on its toes, whipping up tension with barely perceptible but relentless increases in speed. The second movement began in a gruff, angry fluster of cellos and basses, then swung on its way: a heavy-footed dance for inelegant men in too-tight uniforms. The slow movement, by contrast, was a thing of tragic, romantic dimensions: just when you thought the string sound was at its fullest, Pappano would reach in and draw out some more. It could all end only in a huge culmination, which the orchestra reached in thrillingly ear-ringing style.
