Barbican, London
The London Symphony Orchestra’s Conductor Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas celebrated his 80th birthday with an authoritative but restrained account of Mahler’s Second with soloists Alice Coote and Siobhan Stagg
Three years ago, when Michael Tilson Thomas announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, few thought that he would be back at the LSO to celebrate his 80th birthday. And yet he has kept returning to his orchestras – his association with the LSO goes back more than five decades – and has continued to conduct Mahler symphonies. In May, leading the LSO through the Third, he had seemed frail and, before the last movement, disoriented. Returning now for the Second, he seemed to want to banish that impression, even joking with the orchestra before the start. His conducting was solid, his movements robust; there was someone to help him up the steps, and a chair on the podium, but he needed neither.
This is the Resurrection Symphony. It was impossible to ignore the significance of its theme in the context, and yet that did not weigh the performance down. There was a juggernaut force behind the first movement as a whole, but leaner textures were to the fore: the opening cello and bass theme sounded dry and belligerent, the rising violin theme silvery and shimmering. The second movement was imbued with nostalgia: steady but genial, the kind of dance that would be played towards the end of a long evening, with the oldest couple in the room taking the centre of the floor.
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