★★★★

“An Alpine Symphony is a sonic spectacular”

The London Philharmonic Orchestra were in fine form for this evening’s An Alpine Symphony.

The evening opened with the European premiere of Pasajes (Passages – 2022), composed by LPO Composer-in-Residence Tania León. The composer describes the 14-minute piece as “flashes in my memory”. A musical experience of León’s Cuban childhood memories and sounds including birdsong and the rhythm of the Carnaval. Instead of conga drums, here the kettle drums pick up the Latin American beat. The orchestra felt underused with the eight double-basses mostly plucking on one note.

Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.16 (1870) is the only concerto he completed, but it is still one of the freshest-sounding and heroically emotional piano concertos of the Romantic era. In a last-minute change of artist, tonight it was played by one of Britain’s most treasured musicians, the pianist Steven Osborne OBE, who replaced the remarkable 18-year-old Alexandra Dovgan who suddenly “had to withdraw from this concert due to visa difficulties”.

The Concerto is in three movements and opens with one of concert music’s most famous and dramatic openings, which is always breathtaking. The lyrical Adagio unfolds with just strings playing the ravishing main theme and unfolds with a deeply touching expressivity before plunging into the thrilling last movement with its beautiful flute solo (Juliette Bausor), lovely duet with piano and first cello (Kristina Blaumane) and its vigorous Norwegian folk tunes.

Osborne’s performance had him bouncing off his seat and with his staccato hands it was technically brilliant but, one felt that he missed the ambiguity of Grieg’s melodic contours, and in bringing out the emotions of yearning and melancholy as well as the joy and vitality – Grieg is never straightforward. At full throttle, the large orchestra slightly drowned out the piano, but you certainly felt all their emotion. In complete contrast to the Concerto, Osborne played a short encore with a gentle blues interpretation of Danny Boy.

After the interval the full London Philharmonic Orchestra, 120 stunning musicians under the baton of Principal Conductor Edward Gardner put their heart and soul into playing An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 (1915) by Richard Strauss. The piece plays straight through, and you can literally visualise the journey up a snowy mountain from night to the sunrise, with the ascent up through the woods, past mountain pastures and waterfalls, wrong turns through thickets, going higher on to the glacier and up to the summit. Then comes the calm before the storm, then the thunder and tempest, to the descent as the sun is setting to night again. It is a massive play, and Strauss literally throws everything at this majestic piece. The French horn fanfares tonight came from an open doorway halfway to the back of the auditorium, then with a quick sprint backstage they joined the orchestra on stage. The whole orchestra is kept busy throughout; particularly the full timpani and percussion team who get to play everything from cowbells in the meadows to the incredible climactic storm atop of the mountain with wind machines, thunder sheets and symbols. The strings take up the rain and drip, drip, as the storm abates. Until then, the organ had been used more to prolong the notes of other instruments but came into its own strength towards the end as the descent begins before being joined by the deep and rich sounds of the brass section as the sun sets to night again.

I did not find the organ a comfortable instrument to listen to being played with a full orchestra. Sorry. It has such a different tone to the other instruments. But to have 120 of your band mates down below you on the stage and you hidden in between the crowded audience in the choir seats of the Royal Festival Hall, must truly be the loneliest gig in the world. Only able to see your fellow musicians and his conductor through his rear-view mirror, as his back is to them and the audience, facing a wall of organ pipes.

I loved the piece as a visual treat visualising twenty-four hours in the life of a mountain. However, it appears that Strauss might have had a different character for his symphony, drawing on the Neitzschean philosophy, writing in his diary in 1911 that he wanted “to call my Alpine Symphony, The Antichrist.” So maybe that is the answer as to why he put an organ in his symphony….

An Alpine Symphony is a sonic spectacular and the orchestra bowed to the front of the auditorium and turned and bowed low to the audience in the choir seats behind them – but I like to think they were bowing to their lonely fellow musician up top on the organ.

World class playing by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

THE EMPLOYEES

Queen Elizabeth Hall

★★★★★

“a chance to see one of Europe’s edgiest directors bend time and space to his liking, and ours”

The Employees, an immersive, promenade style production by acclaimed Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski, is now in London, playing in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank. This lengthy, dreamlike, multimedia creation, based on the science fiction novel of Danish writer Olga Ravn, will appeal to a variety of audiences. The best way to experience this show is to be drawn in without any expectation, and simply allow it to unfold. To be drawn into this world of flashing lights, pounding music, and moments of astonishing intimacy between the actors and audience via the medium of handheld cameras, projected onto a variety of screens.

Audiences for The Employees are free to move around on stage and the auditorium as they wish, for the entire duration. We are invited to take notes, take photos (except for moments of cast nudity), and examine the events of the show from a variety of perspectives. The actors themselves wander on and off stage. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they sit, and meditate. While we can’t actually enter the glowing box on stage which represents the living quarters of the crew on a spaceship, the videos give us a sense that we are also players in this show. We are part of the drama, as the actors stare intently into our eyes in moments of startling intimacy. They ask us to consider their dilemmas, their emotions. There’s a lot going on.

There is not so much a story, as a situation, being presented in The Employees. We are plunged into a situation where a group of humans are living with a group of humanoids that look exactly like them in every detail. The only way to tell whether a character is born, or manufactured, is by the identifying code on their clothes. A two digit number designates a human. Add a letter—a lowercase letter—and you have a humanoid. In this unnatural space, and on an unspecified mission in outer space, the humans are tasked with keeping track of any anomalies in their robotic doppelgängers. The mysterious Organization, their employer, is a disembodied voice instructing all the employees on their jobs. But the humans, it turns out, are the disruptors, the breaker of rules. They are lazy, duplicitous and pleasure seeking. While they appreciate a working environment that is apparently better than on the Earth they left behind, the humans still try to bend the rules. The humanoids in contrast, are constantly thrown into situations of existential doubt, when their primary objective is to become self aware. All kinds of messy emotions begin to emerge as the humans attempt to make the humanoids more “human.”

On one level, The Employees could be seen as a satirical take on late stage capitalism. It is a show that would delight the late David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs. Fans of the great Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem will also find many points of connection in the story, and the satire. Twarkowski’s work is asking big questions, all dressed up as a multimedia production where the audience and the actors, via live performance and video projection, perform in a playing space lacking the usual boundaries of a stage. Time is suspended, apart from three short breaks of three minutes each—a large digital counter on screen literally marking the seconds as we get up, stretch, move to a different location. The director, actors and technicians keep our sensory perceptions so busy that we don’t really notice the lengthy playing time. As we try to figure out the developing relationships between human and humanoid, the ultimate irony is that we don’t realize we have been co-opted into the Organization’s work project as well.

Perhaps the greatest achievement is that in the process of considering the dilemma of manufactured creatures without emotions, we develop a heightened appreciation of our own. Both good, and bad. Perhaps the saddest moment is when the robots realize that they can never experience birth. Watching children play becomes a torment to them. Contrast that sadness with a hilarious moment when the spotlights and the overhead lights of the Queen Elizabeth Hall suddenly reveal themselves to be sentient and launch into a good moan about how overworked and under-appreciated they are. All these perceptions feed into the overarching theme—that of the soulless nature of meaningless work. Or, to put it another way, work in search of meaning that is always flawed, and always incomplete. The Employees is a darkly dystopian warning on the predicament of twenty first century workers ensnared in the illusory promises of robotic capitalism.

And if this is too philosophical, too angst inducing a theme for evening entertainment, see the show anyway. It’s a chance to see one of Europe’s edgiest directors bend time and space to his liking, and ours. If there’s one criticism to be made of this production, it’s that the Queen Elizabeth Hall is probably not the ideal venue for a show that really needs to take place in an intimate dance space like a disco. Because the only way to escape an oppressive workspace is to groove on pounding sound, and to dance, right?

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY

Royal Festival Hall

★★★★

“An Alpine Symphony is a sonic spectacular”

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY

Royal Festival Hall

Reviewed on 21st February 2025

by Debbie Rich

Photography by Mark Allan (header image of Edward Gardner) and Ben Ealovega (image of Steven Osborne)

Previously reviewed at Southbank venues:

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY

THE EMPLOYEES

Queen Elizabeth Hall

★★★★★

“a chance to see one of Europe’s edgiest directors bend time and space to his liking, and ours”

THE EMPLOYEES

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Reviewed on 16th January 2025

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Natalia Kabanow

Previously reviewed at Southbank venues:

THE EMPLOYEES

THE EMPLOYEES

THE EMPLOYEES