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London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Thursday 19 May 2016 7.30pm Barbican Hall MAHLER SYMPHONY NO 6 Shostakovich Violin Concerto No 1 INTERVAL London’s Symphony Orchestra Mahler Symphony No 6 Sir Antonio Pappano conductor Viktoria Mullova violin Concert finishes approx 10.10pm Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 2 Welcome 19 May 2016 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief Welcome to this evening’s LSO concert, where we BMW LSO OPEN AIR CLASSICS are delighted to be joined by Sir Antonio Pappano, a long-standing friend of the Orchestra. This month Join us at this year’s BMW LSO Open Air Classics he conducts two programmes at the Barbican and concert, which takes place in Trafalgar Square a tour of Eastern Europe. on Sunday 22 May at 6.30pm. Valery Gergiev will once again be at the helm, conducting works by The concert opens with Shostakovich’s First Violin Tchaikovsky. Remember to arrive early to secure Concerto, for which the LSO is delighted to welcome your place in the Square. soloist Viktoria Mullova, marking her first performance with us since 2010. This is followed in the second lso.co.uk/openair half by Mahler’s mighty Sixth Symphony, sometimes referred to as the ‘Tragic’. LSO ON TOUR I would like to thank our media partners, BBC Radio 3, who will be broadcasting the concert live. Next week the LSO embarks on a short tour to Wrocław, Vilnius and Riga with Sir Antonio Pappano I hope you enjoy the performance and can join and Nikolaj Znaider. You can follow our journey with us again on 29 May, when Sir Antonio Pappano regular updates on our social media platforms. returns to conduct Elgar’s Second Symphony and Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, with Nikolaj Znaider facebook.com/londonsymphonyorchestra as the soloist. twitter.com/londonsymphony instagram.com/londonsymphonyorchestra A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS Kathryn McDowell CBE DL The LSO offers great benefits to groups of 10+, Managing Director including 20% discount on standard tickets. At this concert we are delighted to welcome: Coe College lso.co.uk/groups London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Gianandrea Noseda opens the season with the Verdi Requiem, his first concerts as LSO Principal Guest Conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner concludes his Mendelssohn symphonies cycle Two new commissions from Mark-Anthony Turnage receive their world and UK premieres Janine Jansen performs in three concerts as part of her LSO Artist Portrait François-Xavier Roth continues his After Romanticism series Bernard Haitink performs Bruckner, Mahler and Beethoven with Mitsuko Uchida Lang Lang returns to close the season with Bartók’s Piano Concerto No 2 See the full listings, now on sale, at lso.co.uk/201617season 4 Programme Notes 19 May 2016 Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75) Violin Concerto No 1 in A minor Op 77/99 (1948, rev 1955) 1 NOCTURNE: MODERATO personal and challenging works, putting them 2 SCHERZO: ALLEGRO aside for better times. As well as the Violin Concerto, 3 PASSACAGLIA: ANDANTE they included the Fourth and Fifth String Quartets, 4 BURLESQUE: ALLEGRO CON BRIO – PRESTO the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry and the Tenth Symphony. VIKTORIA MULLOVA VIOLIN These works became known to the public only after PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER By his early 40s, Shostakovich had produced a huge Stalin’s death in 1953, the Violin Concerto last of all. ANDREW HUTH is a musician, amount of music in almost every form: operas, ballets, Already familiar to friends and fellow musicians from writer and translator who writes symphonies, chamber music, and several scores for the composer’s run-throughs at the piano, it was extensively on French, Russian the theatre and cinema. His only concerto, however, premiered in Leningrad in October 1955 and then and Eastern European music. was the light (though wonderful and funny) Concerto four months later in Moscow, conducted by Evgeny for Piano, Trumpet and Strings of 1933. Wasn’t it now Mravinsky and played by Oistrakh, its dedicatee. time to follow his distinguished colleagues Prokofiev, Shostakovich was delighted by the performances, Myaskovsky and Khachaturian with a violin concerto? and later dedicated to Oistrakh both his Second Some prompting may have come from the great Violin Concerto (1967) and Violin Sonata (1968). DAVID OISTRAKH (1908–74) violinist David Oistrakh, whom he had known as a The movement titles might at first suggest something was one of the foremost violinists friend and chamber music partner for over a decade. like a series of loosely-connected character pieces, and violists of his generation. He but in fact this is one of Shostakovich’s most tightly worked with many of the leading The Violin Concerto was completed in March 1948, and symphonically organised scores. orchestras in the Soviet Union, but had to wait seven and a half years before Europe and America and was the it was performed. The reason, as so often with NOCTURNE dedicatee of a number of the most Shostakovich, was closely bound up with Soviet The Nocturne gives the impression of being the important additions to the violin musical politics. While he was in the middle of most free of the four movements, a long and repertoire of the 20th century. composing the finale, there came the infamous eloquent meditation for the violin, rising and falling Within the Soviet Union he was resolution from the Central Committee of the in great arches of melody. The orchestra functions awarded many prizes and awards Communist Party censoring a number of composers, as accompaniment to the soloist, providing a including the Stalin Prize in 1943, Shostakovich chief among them, for such crimes background of brooding anxiety. Much of this the title of People’s Artist of the USSR as ‘formalist perversions’ and ‘anti-democratic movement’s power derives from its measured in 1953 and the Lenin Prize in 1960. tendencies’. These accusations were nonsense, pace and rhythm, the overall restraint producing but it was Stalin’s nonsense and the composers an effect of great intensity. in question had no choice but to bow their heads and do as they were told. SCHERZO & PASSACAGLIA Restraint is thrown aside in the following Scherzo, Shostakovich was dismissed from his teaching posts a remorseless nightmare of activity that hurtles at the Leningrad and Moscow Conservatoires, and onwards in a wild, frantic dance. One of the many for the next five years presented himself in public as ideas that appear in its course is the four-note DSCH the author of much bland and politically acceptable motive (D, E-flat, C, B-natural in German musical music. But at the same time he also wrote more notation) that the composer used as his own musical lso.co.uk Programme Notes 5 Dmitri Shostakovich Composer Profile signature; another provides the basis of the third After early piano lessons with his mother, movement, a 17-bar theme given out initially by Shostakovich enrolled at the Petrograd Conservatory cellos and basses, and then repeated a further eight in 1919. He supplemented his family’s meagre income times. This Passacaglia recalls something of the from his earnings as a cinema pianist, but progressed brooding intensity of the first movement, though to become a composer and concert pianist following it is more sectional in construction and therefore the critical success of his First Symphony in 1926 offers a greater variety of expression and gesture. and an ‘honourable mention’ in the 1927 Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw. BURLESQUE A solo cadenza, of mounting tension and fearsome Shostakovich announced his Fifth Symphony of technical difficulty, spills into the finale, which 1937 as ‘a Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to Shostakovich originally intended to be launched by just criticism’. A year before its premiere he had the soloist. He changed his mind, scoring it instead drawn a stinging attack from the official Soviet for the full orchestra, when Oistrakh begged for a mouthpiece Pravda, in an article headed ‘Muddle moment of respite ‘so at least I can wipe the sweat instead of music’. When the Fifth Symphony was off my brow’. This finale, recalling the wild energy premiered in Leningrad, the composer’s reputation of the Scherzo, makes no concessions to Soviet COMPOSER PROFILE WRITER and career were rescued. Acclaim came not only orthodoxy or to the demands for optimism at all ANDREW STEWART from the Russian audience, who gave the work a costs, and puts the seal on one of Shostakovich’s 40-minute ovation, but also from musicians and most powerful and personal works. critics overseas. In July 1941 he began work on the SHOSTAKOVICH on LSO LIVE first three movements of his Seventh Symphony, completing the defiant finale after his evacuation in Schubert & October and dedicating the score to the city. Shostakovich LSO String In 1948 Shostakovich and other leading composers, Ensemble were forced by the Soviet cultural commissar, £7.99 Andrey Zhdanov, to concede that their work represented ‘the formalistic perversions and anti- The LSO String Ensemble, led by democratic tendencies in music’, a crippling blow LSO Leader Roman Simovic, to Shostakovich’s artistic freedom that was healed gives magnificent performances of only after the death of Stalin in 1953. Shostakovich INTERVAL – 20 minutes Schubert’s (arr Mahler) String Quartet answered his critics later that year with the powerful There are bars on all levels of the Concert Hall; ice cream No 14 ‘Death and the Maiden’ Tenth Symphony, in which he portrays ‘human can be bought at the stands on Stalls and Circle level. and Shostakovich’s (orch Barshai) emotions and passions’, rather than the collective The Barbican shop will also be open. Chamber Symphony in C minor.