Antonio Pappano on farewell tour in Frankfurt
IThe Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia has held a special position in Italy since it was founded in 1908, as it is the oldest orchestra to use predominantly symphonic repertoire in the country of opera. Over the past 18 years, the London-born conductor Antonio Pappano, who comes from an Italian family, has conducted the orchestra, which resides in Rome, and has repeatedly given guest performances in the Alte Oper, which was now one of the stops on a farewell tour. All three works of the concentrated program come from the centuries after the orchestra was founded, ranging from Prokofiev’s First Symphony, which premiered in 1918, to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, first performed in 1932, to Symphony No. 5 in E flat major, Op. 82, which Sibelius im First World War composed and revised.
Already in Prokofiev’s “Symphonie classique” the enormous drive and the thrust of the orchestra were perfectly combined with a high precision, which was never shaken by Pappano’s strong shifts and nuances of the tempo. Everything sounded agile and flexible, even the staccato motif that the excellent solo bassoonist never tired of throwing into the room. It became clear here, as in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, that it was a work of the 20th century, despite all the classicistic twists and turns. Pappano boldly questioned the composer’s own traces of proximity to Mozart, with powerfully incited wind passages and, in the finale, an escalation of the turbulence, which unfolded all the more wildly thanks to the extreme transparency. The excellent pianist, who parried it all with power, razor-sharp clarity, sharpness where necessary and vocality where possible, was Korean Seong-Jin Cho, 2015 winner of the Warsaw Chopin Competition. As a pointed encore, he played Handel’s “Grobschmied Variations” from the Suite in E major HWV 430.