LPO / Edward Gardner, Royal Festival Hall, review: a post-lockdown corner is invigoratingly turned

Hallelujah! An orchestra has appeared at the Royal Festival Hall, for the first time in more than six months. The London Philharmonic Orchestra had the honour, though the Southbank Centre’s other resident orchestras will soon follow. And to lend a nice touch of symbolism, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that paean of praise to humanity’s indomitable spirit, was on the programme – just as it had been at the last concert in the Festival Hall before lockdown, on March 15.

So a great moment, but tinged with frustration because of course there was no audience. Although the screen premiere of the LPO’s performance took place on Wednesday evening, the video-recording was actually made a week ago, with only cameramen and sound engineers present – plus a few critics including myself. No precaution had been overlooked to make conditions safe, and the performance look good. The hall was bathed in two kinds of steam beforehand, one to clean the surfaces, the other to create an atmospheric haze. The hall was lit in a way which looked odd from inside – too much dramatic-looking red – but on the screen looks beautiful.

As for the programme of this concert entitled “Tragedy and Triumph”, it cleverly combined symmetry with an invigorating progression from dark to light, launching with what sounded like two thoroughly Beethovenian chords. But this fist-shaking gesture immediately collapsed into toneless string rustlings, flute whistlings and percussive crepitations. It wasn’t Beethoven after all, but an entertaining and brilliantly written concert overture by contemporary German composer Jörg Widmann entitled “Con Brio”.

The piece was commissioned (by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, in 2008) to be performed alongside Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies, and Widmann makes sly references to them as well as the other symphonies. One of the pleasures of the piece was the way it teased us, almost quoting Beethoven but not quite, and then morphing suddenly into those “modern music” sounds while keeping the driving energy, as if Beethoven’s spirit were coursing through those clatterings and grinding discords. The orchestra and conductor Edward Gardner played up the contrasts for all they were worth, and evidently enjoyed themselves in the process – not a trivial consideration, when the cameras so often went close-up.

Then came six songs by Jean Sibelius. The subject-matter seemed quintessentially romantic – lonely nights, nature, the mythical denizens of the Finnish forest – but Sibelius’s musical language was often startlingly modern, made more so by the iron-grey, silver-flecked orchestral arrangements by Sibelius’s compatriot Einojuhani Rautavaara. Just as one was getting used to this, the songs would disconcertingly revert to ripe romanticism. The threat of stylistic confusion hovered, but the noble voice of Canadian baritone Gerald Finley reached into the poetic heart of each song, and made everything cohere.

Finally came Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in a performance that was energised without being hectic, beautifully lyrical in the slow movement, and paced by Gardner in a way that made the final triumph seem inevitable. We’re still a long way from “normal” musical life, but this concert made me feel as if a corner has been turned.

Now available to stream at marquee.tv/lpo, as part of Southbank Centre’s “Inside Out” series