Concert review: Isabelle Faust (violin) London Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès

Ondřej Adámek wrote Follow Me as a concerto for Isabelle Faust back in 2017. Her Bavarian Radio recording of the time tells only a fraction of the story in a work whose gestures, often unprepossessing and repetitive in themselves, spring to life in concert as the text for a dynamic piece of orchestral theatre.

Either side of it, Thomas Adès led daringly inventive accounts of two Beethoven symphonies (Nos.1 and 4) with wildly outsize gestures. For the Adámek, baton in hand, he diligently cued the sections and soloists of the LSO as they followed Faust’s motivic lead at first, before staging a mutiny over the course of an absorbing half hour. Faust played in almost continuous recitative, punctuated by desperate or angry dialogue.

Three notionally separate movements are linked by breathing sounds on both strings and winds, underlining the impression of the work as a literal body of sound, comprised of rebelliously individual elements. There are good precedents for such wordless allegory in the concertante writing of both Mozart and Lutosławski – and, as in the latter’s Cello Concerto, the soloist is relentlessly hunted down. At a time when violin concerto writing often feels boxed in by lack of imagination or development, both Adámek and Faust showed that the grammar of modernism can still reinvent old forms and tell new stories for our time.

PETER QUANTRILL