Page 36 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

11 September 2020

London Symphony Orchestra/LSO St Luke's,

review: when the audience is outnumbered by

five to one...

****
It's wonderful to see a full orchestra play indoors again – but the economics don't add up
ByIvan Hewett, CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC10 September 2020 • 2:46pm

It didn’t feel at all 'normal': Simon Rattle conducts the London Symphony Orchestra CREDIT:
Mark Allan

Finally a real live orchestra, playing for real live people. The first concert in the London Symphony
Orchestra’s new season wasn’t quite the first orchestral concert for a live audience anywhere in the
UK. There have been one or two others (notably the Aurora Orchestra’s performance of
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony earlier this week in a semi-open space), but this was the first
proper indoors affair with a full orchestra: 67 to be precise, with an audience of just 12.

Of course it didn’t feel at all “normal”. The dozen of us who were invited (an audience of critics and
industry insiders), were shepherded carefully by LSO staff to our seats perched high above the
orchestra in the little balcony at the back of LSO St. Lukes. Looking down at the players below one
felt uncomfortably like an aristocrat of old, enjoying a private entertainment. It felt an enormous
privilege, sitting there in our masks, as well as a thrill--and also weirdly unfamiliar. Our applause
was a bit tentative at first, as if we'd forgotten how to do it, but the music soon warmed us.

The economics of this set-up were completely crazy, and only possible for an organisation that can
call on supporters with deep pockets. The concert was supported by a private individual, Yamaha
Professional Audio and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, and the evening’s new piece, a
memorial for the great conductor/composer Oliver Knussen by his friend and one time
protégé Mark-Anthony Turnage was also supported by an individual. One wondered whether this
was a sign of things to come—a much sharper divide in the arts world between the have and have-
nots.

Still, it was a wonderful heartening event. Just to have one’s ears saturated with real live
orchestral sound was like finding water in the desert. The orchestra under Simon Rattle played
their hearts out, and the programme was cleverly contrived, with Turnage’s piece placed
between Oliver Knussen’s Songs and Sea Interludes drawn from his fantasy opera Where the Wild
Things Are (based on Maurice Sendak's famous children's book) and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade
for Tenor Horn and Strings.

You could feel affinities of nocturnal horn-drenched magic between Knussen’s piece and Britten’s,
while Turnage’s “Last Song for Olly” made half-hidden references to Knussen’s music—plus at its
end a tiny fleeting homage to Knussen’s own father, who was a double-bass player in the London
Symphony Orchestra. Turnage has a gift for writing memorial pieces of gentle, blues-tinged
melancholy, but this (after a gentle chorale) was full of grandeur and radiance.