André Previn is one of music's great extroverts, but an atmosphere of meditative sadness hovered over the first of his series of concerts with the LSO. Three of the works chosen - Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and Strauss's Tod und Verklärung - are sombre reflections on mortality. The fourth, a suite from Der Rosenkavalier, is also linked to ideas of transience, despite its surface exuberance; Strauss's bitter operatic comedy deals with the corrosive nature of passing time on relationships.
The power of the two Britten works was rendered all the greater by their juxtaposition. The Sinfonia da Requiem, dating from 1940, inveighs against the carnage of war. The Serenade, written three years later, quietly links images of death with sleep. Hearing them together highlights certain similarities, despite the disparity in tone. The pulverising rituals of the Sinfonia's opening Lachrymosa and the graceless scherzo of the Dies Irae are echoed in the relentless processional of the Serenade's central Dirge.
Previn once remarked that he adores the LSO because "they play virtuoso". And in both works they did. The Sinfonia da Requiem erupted with the lethal precision of a well-aimed bomb, while the Serenade's strings had a hypnotic beauty. Principal horn David Pyatt played with consolatory warmth. Anthony Rolfe Johnson sang with an intensity that more than compensated for occasional moments of strain.
The Strauss pieces, however, were less assured. Tod und Verklärung was marred by some curiously indifferent playing, though Previn managed to convince you that the final peroration - regarded by some as one of Strauss's duff passages - achieves transcendence. More worrying was Previn's choice of an anonymously cobbled- together 1945 suite from Rosenkavalier rather than the more familiar concert extracts that Strauss prepared. The suite contains orchestral revampings of some of the opera's great scenes as well as the famous waltzes. Yet no amount of fine playing can disguise the fact that the Trio sounds peculiar with the vocal lines transcribed for woodwind. And the Presentation of the Rose does not work without a soprano soaring ecstatically to top B and beyond.
