This was a concert rich in contrasts, from Sasha Scott’s eerie exploration of the borderland between sleep and waking to Pierre Boulez’s juxtaposition of directed music with freeform improvisation. It was LSO Futures at its best, with three world premieres – two of them commissioned by the far-sighted Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers’ Scheme, now in its 20th year – and featuring South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho as part of his LSO Artist Portrait series.
Taking its name from the Hebrew for “carvings”, Omri Kochavi’s Gilufim is a likable work, its limber profile hewn from a denser original. Discordant orchestral slabs were whittled away by the insistent tap, tap, tap of an effervescent marimba. A nut shaker representing a crackling fire did the rest, the music emerging from the flames with a newfound harmonic solidity. Scott’s unsettling Sly featured woozy wodges of sound interrupted by sinister slitherings and a panicky orchestral nightmare before a vibraphone chimed in triggering an uneasy state of awareness. On the podium, Maxime Pascal was the most unflappable of guides.
Donghoon Shin’s arresting new Piano Concerto featured an astonishing range of orchestral effects, its split-personality opening movement paying homage to Schumann’s famously divergent musical alter egos. Cho, a human dynamo, was all over the keyboard, his virtuoso display depicting the wrestling match between Florestan, the impulsive extrovert and Eusebius, his polar opposite. The slow movement, a crushing funeral march, showed off his muscularity and manual dexterity, while the capering finale cast the soloist as willing protagonist in a surreal orchestral farce.
The programme concluded with the grand finale to the LSO’s Boulez centenary celebrations. Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna is an intricate masterpiece in which seven verses and seven responses are played out by eight spatially separated ensembles of different sizes. Backed by an immense array of Chinese funeral gongs, Pascal, who worked closely with Boulez, directed the instrumental groups with the assurance of a traffic cop. A sad work, yes, but with its extraordinary palette of colour and light it was a fitting and compelling tribute to a deeply respected artist.
