BMW Classics review — the LSO and Pappano's operatic alfresco party

Times

16-06-2025

'Earth has not any thing to show more fair,' Wordsworth once wrote of the view from Westminster Bridge in 1802, but he hadn't yet seen Trafalgar Square — at least not with its grand neoclassical glow-up: the National Gallery's proud portico, the curvaceous fountains, Nelson on his column with the lions in wait at its base.
A couple of those lions were majestically incorporated into the temporary stage for BMW Classics, a free open-air concert the London Symphony Orchestra has performed (its players sporting sunglasses when the weather's fine) to thousands of people gathered in the city and more via broadcast abroad since 2012. In one of his addresses to the crowd, on a blue-sky day, the LSO's principal conductor, Antonio Pappano, called the square the 'greatest concert venue on earth'.
Clearly he was in a Romantic mood for hyperbole. But then again, when is he not? He was the music director of the Royal Opera House for 22 years before moving to his role with the LSO. Looking at this year's concert programme, you might suspect he was missing his old job. We were offered the capricious overture to Rossini's Semiramide; the less capricious yet more luscious Capriccio sinfonico by Puccini, a graduation piece whose material he returned to for his operas; Opera for Orchestra, a new commission from Isabella Gellis from the LSO's composers' scheme and the Triumphal March and Dance from Verdi's Aida. For the last two, the orchestra were joined by young east London musicians supported by the LSO and others supported by the Guildhall School. Pappano regretted they weren't also able to provide the chorus and elephants and camels for the Verdi. We had instead motorcycles, ambulances and double-deckers, the adverts plastered on their sides giving BMW a run for its money.
Their interjections would be one reason to shrink Pappano's big claim about the square. Despite the sound technicians' admirable efforts, you couldn't always make out the finer detail — which perhaps makes this an unfair arena in which to assess Gellis's somewhat hallucinatory composition, less operatic and more filmic in its atmospherics. But still, you could enjoy the grander gestures that this programme, and Pappano, had in spades.
After the young musicians departed the LSO launched into Juventus — not the football club but the Latin for youth, Pappano was keen to point out — written by the Italian opera conductor Victor de Sabata. As a composer, he has a reputation as an Italian Strauss though this flashy but also melancholic tone poem had shades of Holst and Walton. Fitting, under all the Italian exuberance, to find pomp and circumstance. ★★★★☆
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