Antonio Pappano discovered tonight how warm the Barcelona classic audience can be. At the end of his performance at the head of the London Symphony with Richard Strauss’ well-known symphonic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the hall of the Palau de la Música Catalana was filled with applause. The communicative capacity of the British master in a piece heard a thousand times but rarely heard live guaranteed total symphonic immersion. The London Symphony provided the technique and Pappano, the heart.
The conductor of Italian descent, who has spent the last two decades at the helm of the Royal Opera House in London – a stage that ends this season – stood on the Palau podium with the orchestra that he will join in 2024 as headline. Extroverted, sensitive… this excellent Puccinian who brings together the best of the Italian tradition – “from Riccardo Muti he has the musical rigor and from Claudio Abbado, the fantasy”, said the critic Jordi Maddaleno – made his appearance 18 years later at the Palau , and with the Central European repertoire in which he is also an ace. And on the lectern, a powerful program, the one that Strauss composed in 1896 inspired by the work of the same name by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose prologue, Breaking Dawn, was popularized by Stanley Kubrick in his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It is the music that evokes “the decline of Zarathustra”, the decline of the hegemonic role of conscience, that of the subject of knowledge, that of the moral subject… And before the warm spirit of a packed room, Pappano offered the Dance as an encore. Hungarian no. 1 by Brahms, an element in which he feels like a fish in water.
The event at the Palau was one of the undisputed highlights of this start of the season. The guest soloist of this tour, the delicate and very lyrical German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott, dressed in black, as if announcing Halloween, to perform Totentanz by Franz Liszt, the danse macabre that paraphrases the melody of the Gregorian Dies irae with the innovations of centuries later. This is how the end of the first part was reached, with an audience already excited by the 99 musicians. Ott gave an even more lyrical encore by Satie.
It had been a dark and disturbing program, befitting the difficult times. And it had begun by attending to the new creation: an admirer of the British composer Hannah Kendall, Pappano included his O flower of fire, a work that questions faith, commissioned by the London Symphony itself for this tour that, of course!, culminates in the Palau.
