There is a sense that every concert the London Symphony Orchestra gets to give with its conductor laureate, Michael Tilson Thomas, is now a gift – this evening of Brahms came a little over a year after the announcement that he was being treated for an aggressive form of brain cancer. Yet if Tilson Thomas’s own dynamic energy now needs to be husbanded to some extent, this did not translate into any loss of momentum or intensity in the orchestra’s performance: small gestures – a lean towards the cellos here, a shimmy of the fingers to fade out the brass there – were enough to shape the music into the kind of long, elastic lines that make Brahms’s notes glow.
Besides, he had an energy generator beside him for the Violin Concerto. This was one of a series of LSO concerts this year featuring the violinist Christian Tetzlaff, who is never one to wallow in music like this: from his very first entry he was pushing forwards as if there was no time to lose, and this sense of urgency underpinned the colossal first movement until the final minutes, when the violin’s beatific recall of the opening melody gave the feeling that something momentous had been wrangled with and resolved. Nor was there any sense of complacency in the second movement; among the long, soaring melodies came moments where Tetzlaff almost let the violin’s sound dissolve into nothing. The finale was a rollercoaster, Tetzlaff bringing a fiddler’s energy to the main tune. His Bach encore danced too, but elegantly, serving as a gentle wind-down.
Tilson Thomas took a more conventionally spacious approach to the Serenade No 1, Brahms’s earliest orchestral work, but the six movements still flew by, the orchestra weaving thick textures but never letting the sound become too heavy. In a performance peppered with characterful wind and horn solos, the orchestra was on fine form, coming together in the finale to round off the evening with one last glowing crescendo.
