The centrepiece of Antonio Pappano’s most recent London Symphony Orchestra concert was the Violin Concerto “1001 Nights in the Harem” by the Turkish pianist-composer Fazil Say. It was premiered in 2008 by Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Say’s recital partner in works for violin and piano, and she played it here. Loosely based on The Thousand and One Nights, it self-consciously evokes comparisons with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, which likewise casts a solo violinist as a teller of tales, though the differences between the two works are greater than their similarities.
Rimsky, the Orientalist, focuses on the narratives themselves. Say, more concerned with the narrator and the world in which she moves, effectively re-models the conventional concerto as an east-west fusion of considerable brilliance. Middle Eastern folk music forms the basis of the thematic material, while Turkish and north African percussion – kudüm, bendir, darbuka – dictate the rhythmic patterning and drive the work forwards. Yet we’re also conscious of modernist and classical tradition closer to home in the Bartókian perpetuum mobile of the second movement and the variations on a Turkish song in the third. Terrific fun, it’s atrociously difficult for the soloist, and was an absolute tour de force for Kopatchinskaja, who was exacting in her negotiation of Say’s rhythmic complexities and ravishing in moments of lyricism, living the music as is her wont, and dancing her way through it at times. The LSO played with exhilarating precision for Pappano, who seemed to relish the innate theatricality of it all.
Its companion pieces were Ravel’s La Valse and Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. Ravel’s depiction of a decadent world whirling out of control was done with great attention to detail. The string portamenti near the start could have perhaps been more suggestive, though the extraordinary ending, where the music seemingly implodes as chaos and catastrophe loom, genuinely unnerved. Symphonic Dances was beautifully played and shaped, the textures sometimes sparse, the melancholy mood dominating the sorrowing woodwind of the first movement and the uneasy, introspective waltz at the work’s centre before we reached the finale, superb in its tension and dramatic power.
