All eyes and ears are trained on Antonio Pappano. In 2002, the young British-Italian conductor takes over the Music Directorship of the Royal Opera. His reputation is founded on theatrical performance and on a series of operatic recordings that have caused a substantial stir. But what's he like on the concert platform?
Thanks to the LSO - with which he's currently appearing in a series of concerts, both as conductor and as pianist in chamber works - we now have our chance to find out.
Actually, he's thrilling, with a style poised somewhere between Toscanini's precise viscerality and Bernstein's flamboyance. This is music-making on a knife-edge - which is where all great music-making should be - though there are occasions where he flies over the edge altogether.
A small, compact, bullish man, he moves with a mixture of grace and animalism. He waltzes on the podium with balletically turned-out feet during Webern's orchestration of Schubert's German Dances. In Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht, he looks like a sorcerer summoning up sound and emotion with a series of wild, extravagant, incantatory gestures. Sometimes, however, he can be distractingly noisy. He stamps from time to time, or hurls himself into the air and falls back to earth with a crash. He breathes excitedly, taking in great gulps of air with an intrusive, audible rasp.
Just occasionally, perfection of ensemble is sacrificed to emotion. The Scherzo of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony brought with it moments of ropey co-ordination, though the impact of the whole was overwhelming, provoking spontaneous applause after each movement, while at the end the audience began to erupt long before Pappano reached the final chord.
His interpretation of the Symphony is an object lesson in how to make the over-familiar sound disconcertingly new. Many conductors plod through it with stentorian grandeur. Pappano turns it into a thing of belligerence and triumph in which raw sensation and pomp overlap and collide.
His Schoenberg is equally disturbing. He takes huge risks with Verklaerte Nacht, pushing it into territory somewhere between narcosis and frenzy. The anguished chromatics of the opening act like some sort of obscene drug, and the lurid eroticism is tangible. Yet there are moments when it's pitched a fraction too high.
At the halfway mark, when Schoenberg slides from minor key to major, the tension suddenly drops. This may be deliberate, both in terms of the work's structure and the sexual relationship which it depicts - the transition signifies a new beginning - but it takes a while before momentum is regained.
The Schubert-Webern German dances, meanwhile, filter Vienna's imperial glory days through the post-Mahlerian orchestration that signifies Austria-Hungary's collapse. Pappano laces their repetitive sforzandos with a seedy brutality that is shocking in the extreme. The LSO clearly adore him.
Further performances on Sunday and October 14 . Box office: 020 7638 8891 .
