Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.If science ever finds a way of giving us eternal life, we could do worse than look to conductors to see how best to use the time to advantage. As his 70th birthday approaches later this week, Simon Rattle \u2014 curly locks now snowy white \u2014 seems to remain in a perpetual state of self-renewal.The London Symphony Orchestra, where he is conductor emeritus for life, is marking the occasion with a series of concerts in London, Paris and Luxembourg. They all feature new music, a life-long Rattle enthusiasm and a sure way of keeping one\u2019s artistic profile up with the youngsters.It was a neat idea to kick off with two anniversaries in one. As well as being Rattle\u2019s 70th, this year marks Pierre Boulez\u2019s centenary and Rattle\u2019s first concert also formed the opening of the Barbican\u2019s Boulez 100 celebrations. A performance of the brief \u00c9clat for 15 instruments combined Rattle\u2019s vitality, precision playing by members of the LSO and Boulez\u2019s legendary ear for sound, pinpointing the contrasting timbres of guitar, tubular bells and cimbalom, among others.Aside from that, the big draw in each of these two concerts was the premiere of a new work by a leading English composer. It is seven years since George Benjamin\u2019s second full-length opera was first seen at the Royal Opera House and he has now fashioned from it a suite called Interludes and Aria from \u201cLessons in Love and Violence\u201d.The result is reminiscent of Berg\u2019s suite from Lulu, both for being drawn from an opera and in its potent sense of suppressed danger ready to snuff out any fleeting spark of true love. Each also features a solo for high soprano, in this case Barbara Hannigan reprising her role as Isabel with her customary vocal panache. Away from the opera house, Benjamin\u2019s music sounds just as concentrated as before, compelling and expressive at every turn. How clever, too, to follow the Boulez with another, rare classical score that features a cimbalom.The premiere at the second concert was Mark-Anthony Turnage\u2019s Sco, a guitar concerto commissioned expressly to mark Rattle\u2019s birthday. The title Sco refers to American guitarist and friend John Scofield, whose life and artistry have long been an inspiration to Turnage, giving us Silent Cities, Scorched for jazz trio and orchestra, and more.In Sco, Turnage has given him a full-scale, five-movement, half-hour concerto. It starts and ends with rhythmic, upbeat movements \u2014 \u201cSco Train\u201d and \u201cSco Funk\u201d \u2014 bearing Scofield\u2019s musical fingerprints. The heart of the work, though, lies in the lyrical \u201cAria\u201d, where the orchestra creates an overcast landscape, shadowed by feelings of loss, against which the soloist largely improvises. A lot of the solo part is left to Scofield\u2019s on-the-spot embellishments. Appropriate though this may be for a concerto, it was Turnage\u2019s orchestra that more consistently held the attention here.The first concert concluded with a weighty performance of Brahms\u2019s Symphony No 4. With strings digging deep and the textures unrelievedly thick and rich, this was a suffocating kind of Brahms, at least in the Barbican acoustic. One longed for somebody to open a window and let in some fresh air.By contrast, the second concert featured two visionary works \u2014 Tippett\u2019s \u201cRitual Dances\u201d from The Midsummer Marriage and Vaughan Williams\u2019s Symphony No 5 \u2014 that found Rattle in his element. Few conductors can rival his ability to conjure another world of numinous marvels and the London Symphony Orchestra rewarded him with first-class playing, a birthday present worth having.\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606barbican.org.uk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.If science ever finds a way of giving us eternal life, we could do worse than look to conductors to see how best to use the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":163895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-163894","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":163896,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163894\/revisions\/163896"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}