Three years ago, when Michael Tilson Thomas announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, few thought that he would be back at the LSO to celebrate his 80th birthday. And yet he has kept returning to his orchestras – his association with the LSO goes back more than five decades – and has continued to conduct Mahler symphonies. In May, leading the LSO through the Third, he had seemed frail and, before the last movement, disoriented. Returning now for the Second, he seemed to want to banish that impression, even joking with the orchestra before the start. His conducting was solid, his movements robust; there was someone to help him up the steps, and a chair on the podium, but he needed neither.
This is the Resurrection Symphony. It was impossible to ignore the significance of its theme in the context, and yet that did not weigh the performance down. There was a juggernaut force behind the first movement as a whole, but leaner textures were to the fore: the opening cello and bass theme sounded dry and belligerent, the rising violin theme silvery and shimmering. The second movement was imbued with nostalgia: steady but genial, the kind of dance that would be played towards the end of a long evening, with the oldest couple in the room taking the centre of the floor.
The third movement whirled by in a kaleidoscope of dark flute and screeching clarinet, winding up to the symphony’s crisis point – but was there enough of a cataclysm truly to make the clouds part? Thus far the performance had a certain coolness. It was with Alice Coote’s incisive, forward singing of the fourth movement, on the edge of vulnerability, that the performance found its emotional depth, reinforced by the affirmations from the London Symphony Chorus, with Siobhan Stagg’s soprano lines gleaming above, as the work drew to its close. This was not a conductor fighting demons on stage, but someone who had already sized them up and would be able to lead us to the other side. It felt like an acceptance of mortality, yes – but not necessarily a farewell.
