A NIGHT OF THUNDER AND ELEGANCE
Presented by Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the London Symphony Orchestra, among the most disciplined and savagely expressive classical orchestras in the world, arrived in Costa Mesa at Segerstrom Concert Hall on Feb. 19, 2024, with Antonio Pappano conducting and a young firebrand at the keyboard. Yunchan Lim, the South Korean phenom who stunned the classical universe when he won the 2022 Van Cliburn Competition at 18, took on Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. A warhorse, certainly, but one with hooves that can still kick up sparks.
Lim’s initial chords, those signature tolling bells, appeared to come unbidden, tentative and insistent. And then the slow-building crescendo—a rising wave of arpeggios in the piano, a wash of unison strings. The orchestra reined in just short of excess, leaving Lim room to breathe between waves of sound. This was not a concert that depended on brute force, although Lim has that in spades. It was a question of control, of the fine line between storm and tranquility. When he launched into the bravura octaves of the cadenza, his fingers scarcely seemed to graze the keys. The movement ended with a flourish but fortunately the well-behaved audience didn’t applaud.
The Adagio sostenuto drifted in like an exhalation. Flute and clarinet sang their lonely duet, floating above Lim’s arpeggiated mist. He played with the touch of a painter adding watercolors to damp paper—deliberate, weightless. There was no indulgence here, no unnecessary gestures. Just sound, shaping itself. When the strings assumed dominance, the piano replied with a cadenza that grew in long, inquiring phrases, tension building, then bursting into muted resignation. The movement dissolved into silence, voices dropping off one by one, until only the air hummed where music had existed.
And then, the Allegro scherzando. Rachmaninoff in full gallop. Playful, irrepressible, rhythmic feints and turns abounding. Lim, for all his poetic sensitivity, is hardly a stranger to exuberance. The orchestra snapped under Pappano’s baton—quicksilver responses, restless energy. By the time the final theme came roaring back, triumphant, the whole performance had achieved a kind of fever pitch. The applause, when it came, was instantaneous and deafening.
Lim wasn’t finished. He went back to his seat and, without ceremony, took up Listz’s Petrarch Sonnet 104. No introduction, no cue. Just music, in mid-thought. Released from the concerto’s rhythm, he soared through it with an inner focus, as if oblivious to the still-breathless audience.
The second half belonged to Mahler. While Rachmaninoff is all about excess—of passion, of nostalgia, of pianistic bravura for its own sake—Mahler is all about contradiction. His First Symphony (which I reviewed at Disney Hall with Zubin Mehta and the LA Phil), the Titan, is an act of defiance, a cry of self within a crowd of borrowed voices. Pappano, who just finished his tenure as musical director of the Royal Opera, uncovered all the drama waiting in its pages.
Right from the start, Pappano shaped the symphony’s world with crystal clarity. That hushed, anticipatory beginning—a flash of strings, a distant horn—unrolled with the deliberation of something waking, something emerging from slumber. When the jaunty theme of the first movement took flight, it did so without ever losing the unease beneath it. Shadows flitted across, a reminder that in Mahler, innocence is never quite safe.
The second movement brought contrast, rustic and rough. Pappano opted for the ländler’s rough-around-the-edges character, letting its lilt tip toward the grotesque. A dance, yes, but one with ghosts lurking in the shadows. The middle section, eerie and suspended, pulled the floor out from under us before the dance returned, heavier now, wiser.
Then, the third movement. A funeral march, derived from a child’s round song, distorted through some funhouse mirror. Mahler’s irony is never just irony; it’s always something else, something disturbed. Pappano knew that precisely. He let the melody unfold with restraint, a slow procession of memory and mischief. When the music dissolved into its klezmer-inflected interruptions, the effect was shocking—humor shot through with something darker, a laugh with teeth in it.
The finale arrived in full technicolor. Pappano held nothing back, unleashing Mahler’s orchestral force without ever letting it blur into excess. The climaxes were earned, the transitions seamless. Mahler demands an emotional arc, a sense of arrival, and Pappano delivered. The final bars, all roaring brass and soaring strings, were like floodgates breaking. The audience jumped to its feet and cheered loudly. But, alas, no encore.
This was a night to remember—Yunchan Lim’s brilliance, the power of the London Symphony, and Antonio Pappano’s mastery came together flawlessly. Coming up from the Philharmonic Society are two nights of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
