United Kingdom Finnis, Bruckner: Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cello), London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor). Barbican Hall, London. 25.10.2026. (AV-E)
Edmund Finnis — Cello Concerto (LSO co-commission)
Bruckner — Symphony No.9 in D minor (Urtext Edition, ed. Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs)
Co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Philharmonic, Edmund Finnis’s Cello Concerto was written for Sheku Kanneh-Mason, whose cello is a solitary voice emerging from its subterranean soundworld.
In Radiant, the orchestra created a wide, shimmering space across which the cello traced long, florid lines. Finnis’s finely grained orchestral colours were tangibly elusive, their translucent calm buoyancy threaded with restless, rested energy. The orchestral monochrome colours had a delicately rough surface, their fine-grained sonority at once palpably elusive and otherworldly here.
The virtuoso Finnis makes a virtue out of ‘commonsense’ contradiction: the sound is weightlessly substantial, its translucent calm threaded and unthreaded with lethargic energy. Mutating motifs recur in subtly altered forms, gathering force before dissolving into orchestral haze.
Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra caught the minute gradations of this soundworld, its shadow-bright hues and tenderly abstract lyricism, without sacrificing the underlying momentum.
The central Lamentoso drew the sounds into a nocturnal noon. The cello’s yearning line seemed darkly luminous, its deep, resonant tones expanding and contracting like slow breaths. Kanneh-Mason’s somatostatin-sound had a warmly chilling quality, intimate in its emotional directness yet corporeally spectral as it merged and submerged with the orchestra. The languid lament was restrainedly raw, never sentimental; its grief seemed to surface from within the music rather than be imposed upon it. As the textures thinned, faint string overtones cast a vanishingly present pale-glow over the final descent.
In Fast, flowing, the music gathered a restlessly-fluid propulsion. The cello glided above the orchestra’s iterative patterns, then absorbed their motion into its own singing line. Kanneh-Mason brought a fiercely gossamer delicacy to the solo part, sustaining its lyrical freedom as the surrounding textures grew denser and more radiant. The result was exultantly weightless, ecstatic without bombast, its brilliance never blunt or overbearing. The concerto’s conclusion felt less like a conventional virtuoso triumph than an illumination from within: the music grew more urgent even as its sound remained radiantly blinding.
Pappano drew scintillating playing from the LSO, combining orchestral precision with stylish finesse while allowing Kanneh-Mason’s elusive cello sound to shine through its delicate interplay with the orchestra.
This was a remarkably compelling cello concerto — by far the most original I have heard so far this century. Finnis revealed himself to be of the first rank. Kanneh-Mason’s embrace with Finnis on the stage after the performance movingly acknowledged the affinity between them.
Just before the second half began, I encountered Finnis as he returned to his seat. I shook his hand saying, ‘Very good,’ and he replied, ‘Thank you.’
Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony began with a sense of darkly germinating expectancy. In Feierlich, misterioso, the tremulous strings established a barely voiced foundation over which wind chords and distant horn calls materialised out of a primordial, shadow-laden space. Pappano resisted hurrying this emergence: fragments gradually acquired definition, tension accumulating until the full orchestra unleashed the monumental first theme. The effect was a terrifyingly organic release, the sound rising from within the orchestra rather than imposed upon it.
The LSO’s playing was immaculate, the brass possessing granite-like authority and burnished brilliance, while the strings maintained the restless inner movement beneath Bruckner’s vast paragraphs. After the opening eruption, pizzicato strings provided an exposed transition to the second subject, whose broader, more lyrical contours offered provisional consolation. The cellos and violins brought warmth to the melody without dissolving its unease. The third thematic group, introduced by the woodwind, returned the music to an unsettled landscape, its colours increasingly poised-yet-foreboding as tension mounted.
What impressed most was Pappano’s command of the movement’s immense proportions. The development was not a succession of disconnected climaxes; earlier ideas returned in altered, more angular forms, the symphonic argument tightening towards passages of almost unbearable intensity. The great orchestral outbursts had a savagely disciplined force, heightened by Pappano’s control of the silences and retreats that followed. In the coda, the music surged toward a blinding, final affirmation, yet the underlying harmony maintained a deeply disquieting edge. This was grandeur stripped of easy resolution — a colossal, pounding conclusion that remained triumphantly unsettled, its solemn mystery entirely intact.
For the critical timpani part at the movement’s absolute climax, Pappano permitted a blurred, rumbling effect that was almost buried beneath the massive wall of brass. The shattering conclusion sounds far more potent when the notation is given sharp rhythmic clarity instead. Rather than a sustained roll, executing Bruckner’s written triplet rhythm as isolated, separate timpani blows creates a physical, hammering cadence. Delivering the part as a series of heavy, repeated pounding thuds — precisely timed to match each of the brass section’s terrifying block chords — allows the listener to actually hear the timpani rhythm punch through the dense orchestral texture. This was the legendary, bone-rattling approach pioneered by Bernard Haitink and his principal timpanist, Jan Labordus, at their unforgettable 1983 Concertgebouw BBC Prom. By hammering out individual, hard-accented timpani blows instead of a blurred roll, they kept the foundational pulse entirely clear. Lacking that percussive definition in this performance, the grandeur was never merely monumental: it remained triumphantly unsettled, its solemn mystery intact.
Bruckner’s schizoid Scherzo moved with its demonic possession, and jagged, hard-edged rhythms is less a dance than a darkly ritualistic procession. Pappano kept the momentum taut, allowing the jagged accents and dissonant clashes to bite without dissolving into orchestral tumult. The LSO’s precision gave the music a macabre exhilaration, at once rigorously controlled and perilously wild.
The Trio, marked Schnell, offered a fleeting contrast, its lighter textures elusive but still touched by nervous energy. When the Scherzo returned, its obsessive rhythmic force seemed all the more unsettling. Pappano and the LSO gave the movement sharply defined momentum, balancing discipline and delirium.
The Adagio brought the symphony to a deeply moving culmination, Pappano sustaining an unhurried span in which grief and radiance seemed inseparable. The opening violin melody rose with almost unbearably exposed poignancy, its searching intervals unfolding above a hushed orchestral foundation. Pappano gave the musical line room to breathe without losing its inner concentration. The LSO’s playing was immaculate, the strings infusing the melody with a warmth of expression and quiet yearning, while the brass chorales emerged with grave, burnished solemnity. Bruckner’s harmonic world remained poised between yearning and desolation, its moments of consolation never quite dispelling the shadow beneath them.
Pappano shaped the great crescendos with admirable patience, so that the climactic dissonances arrived not as isolated shocks but as the fulfilment of everything that had preceded them. The orchestral sound became almost physically overwhelming, yet Pappano retained control of its architecture and balance. After the great eruption, the retreat into stillness was all the more affecting: the music seemed to look back upon its own devastation, searching for a final, fragile serenity.
Particularly striking was the repeated figure in the first flute near the close (bars 219–224). In Klemperer’s 1970 recording, its isolated, pointed notes have a distinctly Morse-code quality, as though bleeping into infinity. Such details can easily be blurred in the larger flow of the music, but Pappano allowed the repeated notes to register with remarkable clarity, making them an arresting feature of the fading solarscape. The final pages receded into a sombre, melancholic withdrawal, the music gradually relinquishing its hold without consolation or resolution.
After the last lingering notes faded, the symphony felt utterly complete, in no need of a fourth movement. Had the Good Lord wanted Bruckner to complete the symphony, He would surely have given him the time to do so. The audience also shared this feeling of finality, waiting respectfully for a few seconds of silence before breaking into prolonged applause.
Alexander Verney-Elliott