The idea of taking listeners or viewers on a “journey” through a work of art is such a TV cliché that I hate to trot it out. But it applies – and meaningfully – to the business of conducting music. And it certainly applied to the way Gianandrea Noseda, conducting the LSO last week, took both his players and his audience at the Barbican through two connected pieces.
One was Mahler’s 7th Symphony, the other Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto. And the connection (worth remembering for a pub quiz) is that the Berg was written in memory of Alma Mahler’s daughter by her second husband Walter Gropius. Everybody in the hothouse culture of Vienna in the early 1900s seemed to be involved with everybody else.
