London Philharmonic Orchestra review: A sense of statuesque spectacle

Stretching across the back wall, the Festival Hall organ resembles a giant ventilation system. Capable of the most delicate sound, it can also erupt mightily. Gerard Barry’s Organ Concerto favours the eruptive over the delicate.

At first, a lone trumpet stabbed away as if searching for a tune. Orchestra (the London Philharmonic under conductor Thomas Adès) and soloist Thomas Trotter soon offered support, Trotter sometimes creating a sonic underlay, sometimes riding roughshod over everything.

All the while we glimpsed half-forgotten melodies: offstage bells, an ensemble of metronomes. By the end, the LPO had become a gigantic toy orchestra, winding down towards silence, while Trotter wrestled his instrument into submission.

The concerto’s daft logic clearly appeals to Adès, a composer before he’s a conductor. He opened with the orchestral suite made from his 1995 opera, Powder Her Face. In this form, the music’s woozy parodies of 1930s dance bands, stuttering rhythms, multiple slides and pratfalls still raise a smile.

Few smiles in Stravinsky’s opaque drama Perséphone. Kristin Scott Thomas delivered Perséphone’s spoken narration in icy, impeccably accented French, Toby Spence made the most of the unforgiving vocal lines, while Adès secured the required sense of statuesque, if not quite monumental, spectacle.