Jansen, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - profound and bracing emotional workouts

Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra last seared us in Britten’s amazing Violin Concerto, with Vilde Frang as soloist, on the very eve of lockdown in 2020. The work’s dying fall then was echoed by the spectral drift ending Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony. This time Frang’s equal as the greatest of violinists, Janine Jansen, faced the daunting solo role fearlessly, and the riproaring end of  Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony proved that this team is here to stay. 

There were telling links with Thursday’s concert, too. Britten’s emotional demands are as challenging as Prokofiev’s in the Second Piano Concerto, impressively face by Seong-Jin Cho last week. And Pappano’s singular way with Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony paved the way for the longer-term challenges of the Tenth; in the earlier work, the woodwind soloists went to extremes of desolation and quiet dynamics in a second movement which became an Adagio. Last night Pappano must have persuaded them that there's no end to the work you can do on emotional articulation, because it seemed impossible to do more, to go deeper.

Attribute a certain post-Britten exhaustion to the fact that I admired the incredibly detailed phrasing and unerring shape, always moving forward without over-urging, of Shostakovich's massive first movement at a slight distance. But a great interpretation can always recharge you, and from the digging deep of those ever more extraordinary LSO strings in the whirlwind scherzo onwards, I felt deep inside the music. Its purgatorial successor somehow managed to turn the emotional screw still further, from the horn call trying to assert a bigger world onwards. As on Thursday, Pappano fielded a mostly different woodwind team from the first half, though Gareth Davies' flute was there again to intensify Juliana Koch's plaintive oboe solo. The evening's leader, Benjamin Gilmore, managed to register a spectral klezmer solo before Pappano took us straight on to further desolation in the finale, offering no jolt in the turn to jolly but short-lived relief. Commenters often want to insist that this finale, like those in Mahler's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, is ironic, but you should feel an immense if frenetic exultation in the final bars; after all, though he typically didn't expect things to suddenly become much better, Shostakovich clearly felt new life with the death of Stalin in 1953.

The Tenth felt like a vigilant grey wolf, colourwise, after Britten's variegated creature in the Violin Concerto. It sounds like he knew Shostakovich's more audaciously scored Fourth Symphony, though that of course had to wait until the 1960s for its premiere (was there a score around in the 1930s, I wonder?) The moment where upper wind twitter and a tuba stalks up from the depths is a unique moment that still wouldn't have been possible without Shostakovich's example. But Britten's mastery is there from the start in the timpani rhythm and cymbal clashes subject to so many different treatments in the preludial but theme-rich first movement. Jansen, always watching and listening to her orchestral colleagues, kicked off the heightened tension levels with the central cadenza linking scherzo and finale, looking back also to the first idea, and the orchestra responded in the early passacaglia/chaconne variations, exploiting rising and falling scales with total originality, spine-chillingly so as trumpet soloist Imogen Whitehead turned another screw. What an originally and perfectly constructed masterpiece this is, easily up there with the 20th century's greatest specimens by Sibelius, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, down to the extended epilogue where Jansen, like Frang before here, took us on a further emotional journey towards the unknown regions. Her encore, the Sarabande from Bach's Partita No. 2, played like everything else to an impressively, intensely quiet audience, was simply perfect: this is the artist I want to hear play the complete Bach solo music for violin live. 

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