Review | London Calling, Symphonically and in Chamber Mode

We’ve grown accustomed to their faces, and mighty symphonic sound. But with the end of a six-year partnership with the Music Academy of the West, the bold and important London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) will likely not have such a regular presence on Santa Barbara stages as it has in the past several years. LSO encounters in S.B. have been thankfully plentiful, providing a live beacon of orchestral culture near its zenith.

As a kind of grand (and intimate) celebratory send-off — for now — the LSO appeared locally in two different incarnations early last week. On Monday night at Hahn Hall, select LSO principles performed alongside and as a foundation for Music Academy alumni soloists, as part of MAW’s “Mariposa Series.” On Tuesday, the LSO in its full regalia performed at the Granada Theatre, a night co-sponsored by MAW and CAMA, and featuring the engrossing Dutch violinist Janine Jansen — on Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) — and LSO music director of the day, Sir Antonio Pappano, taking the charge on Mahler’s “Titan” Symphony. (For the record, the list of past LSO conductors at the Granada includes Michael Tilson Thomas and Sir Simon Rattle).

With the benefit of these two distinctly different musical evenings, we got a sweeping micro and macro overview of what makes the orchestra among the finest in the world, between the assured musicality of its individual players and the sum of its orchestral parts. 

Monday’s musical offering was a tidy and enjoyable chamber music affair, sandwiching Ravel’s Introduction and Allegra with the framing of Mozart works. The opening Flute Quartet in D showcased the impressive Academy alum flutist Elissa Brown, now based in Philadelphia, and alum clarinetist Katelyn Waffer Poetker, showed precision and nuance in the spotlight of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A. Harpist alum Kaitlin Miller commanded the focus in the Ravel work, a lovely and dreamy work from the earliest annals of chromatic harp usage.

And on Tuesday night, they showed the full LSO plumage and legacy at the Granada. This was the first stop of a current U.S. tour, with a program managing to touch both standard repertoire safety zone — the warmer, cozier early Mahler of his first symphony — and some accessibly venturesome 20th-century nudging in the Bernstein. 

In Bernstein’s five-movement 1954 Serenade, we can detect shades of influence by his friend Aaron Copland as well as and the salty sass of the soon-to-be unveiled West Side Story (especially in the final “Socrates” movement). The sometimes-formidable task faced by the violin soloist — and a task beautifully acquitted by Jansen — is to adapt to the innately varied voices, emotional colors, and musical styles of each movement. Jansen produced softly alluring gleam when needed, while rising to more fervent demands when called for, and without showboating.

A similar equipoise of intensity and restraint prevailed after intermission, as Pappano marshalled the LSO forces on the familiar turf of the “Titan,” with its generally genial demeanor and the klezmer adjacent character of its third movement. Peaceably meditative and somehow pastoral sections, heard in the opening and recast in the finale, suggest the influence of Wagner in his more atmospheric mood, while hints of the meatier Mahler-ian manners to come in his later symphonic writing sneak into the mix, but in relatively bite-sized portions.

In the LSO’s reading, the “Titan” achieved a rich and fulfilling grandeur, a symphonic statement at once detailed and suitably lavish. The overall confidence in delivery and execution embodied the ideal of musicians bringing a definitive “this is how it goes” quality to a composer’s vision.

Santa Barbara has been lucky to have the LSO become repeat visitors in our town, a gift not to be taken for granted. The welcome mat is out for more returns of nights of orchestral glory.