Third Symphonies are often major and transformative works – think Beethoven’s Eroica or Mahler’s Third, in which an established composer strikes out in new and important directions. This is certainly the case in these two works by Bernstein and Copland. However, neither work is as well known or often performed as it should be, and this served to make the LSO’s opening concert of the season at the Barbican under its chief conductor notable on a number of counts.
It is easy to overlook Bernstein’s work as a symphonist, given all his contributions to so many musical genres, but this part of his output lay at the serious heart of his work as a composer, and no more so than in this complex, uneasy and troubled work written in 1963 at the height of the Cold War and dedicated to the memory of recently assassinated JFK. The ‘Kaddish’ symphony brings together a full orchestra, two choirs, a soprano soloist and the dominant figure of a narrator, whose anguished dialogue with God, written by Bernstein himself, wrestles with large questions of justice and truth and how a religious viewpoint, filtered through his own experience of Judaism, can be squared with the anguish and anxiety of the modern world. While these are typical questions of the 1960s, they are even more salient and thought-provoking in our own uneasy times.
The music is written in two different styles – a jagged, twelve-tone influenced edginess, often built around fugal structures, contrasted with the big-hearted, melodic embrace of musical theatre inflected with jazz rhythms. This is home territory for Pappano and the LSO who relish the virtuosic opportunities. Likewise, the choirs, whether adult or teenage, are fully equal to the tough demands of the score. They and the soprano soloist, Katharina Konradi, sensitively explore the different moods contained in the incantation of the Kaddish text, from desolation to celebration. But it is the narrator, Felicity Palmer, who controls the emotional tone and dramatic impact. I last heard her at the Barbican as a fearsome Clytemnestra over a decade ago, and she brings her characteristic incisive handling of text and its meaning to this role in abundance. Looking now like a reincarnation of Queen Mary, she transcends her years to deliver the complex text with an incisive, yet emotionally varied, declamation of such clarity and precise definition you need neither surtitles nor programme to follow it. An altogether astonishing and masterful performance.
The orchestra as a whole had a chance to shine in Copland’s Third Symphony which followed the interval. At the end Pappano rightly allowed each of the sections to take a separate bow to recognise their separate but equal achievements. This is an accessible yet tightly constructed piece that celebrated the ‘euphoric spirit’ of the USA at the end of World War Two. It is full of those typical unrolling melodies that evoke spacious broad landscapes and actually incorporates and develops his Fanfare for the Common Man in the final movement. There are moments of huge exuberance in which the blistering brass of this orchestra strut their stuff. But there were also episodes of rare delicacy, especially in the third movement where the fine-spun lines for strings and harp evoked the most tender and rarified moments of his ballet scores.
The fresh, tight ensemble of the LSO under Pappano’s empathetic direction suggest that this will be a season with many orchestral treats in store.
London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus with Tiffin Boys’ Choir
Conductor: Antonio Pappano
Narrator & Soloist: Felicity Palmer & Katharina Konradi
14 September 2025
2 hrs with interval
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