Page 185 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

miracle of Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, aka Variations and
Fugue on a Theme of Purcell. Later we were stunned by the range of sounds viola

player supreme Antoine Tamestit can make in Walton’s Violin Concerto, (the soloist
pictured below by Mark Allen with some of the players) followed by a fascinating
interpretation of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony (even better, I’m told, in the Barbican
after a short tour than in LSO St Luke’s, where I heard this invigorating double bill).

Ticciati had the bold idea of making the London Philharmonic centre-stage at
Glyndebourne, in very special programmes incorporating an element of theatricality:
my first swoon of the year came in the performance there of Mahler’s Fourth
Symphony after a first half of Purcell, Birtwistle and Vaughan Williams. Boyd
Tonkin was lucky to be at the LPO’s end-of-year flourish on the South Bank, the
revelation of James MacMilan’s new Christmas Oratorio. “I still don’t quite know how
MacMillan – who scavenges so gleefully across six centuries of the musical past –
avoids mere high-grade pastiche. But the Oratorio, gloriously performed by the LPO
and its Choir under Mark Elder with soloists Lucy Crowe and Roderick Williams,
made me deeply grateful for his own mysterious gifts.”

The biggest statement of all came at the start of the Philharmonia’s 2021-2 season in the Royal
Festival Hall. It was crazy of the chief conductor the players seem to love, Finn Santtu-Matias
Rouvali, to offer two Richard Strauss extravaganzas in one programme. The Also sprach
Zarathustra only really sprang out of the impersonal with the duetting of the orchestra’s two
leaders on the front desk, Zsolt-Tihamér Vistontay and Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, in the high