LSO/Rattle review – wistful and life-enhancing, a terrific farewell for the departing chief

Barbican, London
Signing off with a joyous new commission from 96-year-old Betsy Jolas and a return to a longtime Messiaen favourite, Sir Simon led a regretful but sunny evening

Simon Rattle’s final concert at the Barbican as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra was inevitably an evening suffused with regret. Having got him back from Berlin in 2017, we should not have lost him again after only six years. His departure for Munich tolls another warning about music’s increasingly beleaguered status in Britain.

As a concert, however, this was the very opposite of sad. Indeed, it would be hard to devise a more joyous programme – as well as one closer to Rattle’s musical heart and ethos – than the Betsy Jolas world premiere that began it and the monumental Turangalîla symphony of Olivier Messiaen with which it concluded.

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