Thursday 12 December 2019 7.30–9.30pm Barbican LSO SEASON CONCERT BRITISH ROOTS Tippett Concerto for Double String Orchestra Elgar Sea Pictures Interval PAPPANO Vaughan Williams Symphony No 4 Sir Antonio Pappano conductor Karen Cargill mezzo-soprano Supported by LSO Friends Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 6pm Barbican LSO Platforms: Guildhall Artists Vaughan Williams Phantasy Quintet Howells Rhapsodic Quintet Portorius Quartet Welcome News On Our Blog Thank you to our media partners: BBC Radio 3, LSO STRING EXPERIENCE SCHEME BELA BARTÓK AND who broadcast the performance live, and THE MIRACULOUS MANDARIN Classic FM, who have recommended the We are delighted to appoint 14 players to concert to their listeners. We also extend this year’s LSO String Experience cohort. Against a turbulent political background, sincere thanks to the LSO Friends for their Since 1992, the scheme has been enabling Bartók wrote his pantomime-ballet The important support of this concert; we are young string players from London’s music Miraculous Mandarin, which a German delighted to have so many Friends and conservatoires to gain experience playing in music journal reported caused ‘waves of supporters in the audience tonight. rehearsals and concerts with the LSO. They moral outrage’ to ‘engulf the city’ when it will join the Orchestra on stage for concerts premiered in Cologne. Ahead of tonight’s performance, the in the New Year. Guildhall School’s Portorius Quartet gave elcome to this evening’s LSO a recital of music by Vaughan Williams WHAT’S NEXT FOR OUR 2018/19 concert at the Barbican. It is a and Howells on the Barbican stage. These LSO DISCOVERY IN TOKYO LSO JERWOOD COMPOSER+ ARTISTS? pleasure to be joined by Sir Antonio performances, which are free to attend, Pappano, a long-standing friend and regular provide a platform for the musicians of the In November, LSO players Amanda Truelove We talk to Daniel Kidane and Amir Konjani guest conductor with the Orchestra, for future, and take place throughout the season. and Robert Turner, and musical animateur about their time as LSO Jerwood Composer+ the first of two concerts this season. He Rachel Leach, visited Tokyo to lead artists and their future plans, and hear from begins an exploration of music by English I hope that you enjoy the concert and that workshops for young people with learning incoming composers Hollie Harding and Des composers of the 20th century, opening you will join us again soon. Sir Antonio disabilities at the British Council in Japan. Oliver about their experience so far. with Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Pappano returns on 15 March, conducting Many thanks to All Nippon Airways for Orchestra and Elgar’s evocative Sea Pictures. Britten’s Violin Concerto and Vaughan providing flight support. • Read more at lso.co.uk/blog We are pleased to welcome mezzo-soprano Williams’ Symphony No 6, and you can Karen Cargill for this performance, who hear more music by Tippett on 14 June, returns to the LSO following her acclaimed as Alan Gilbert closes the season with WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUP appearance in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at the oratorio A Child of Our Time. the BBC Proms in 2017. In the second half, We are delighted to welcome Sir Antonio Pappano conducts Vaughan Linda Diggins and friends Williams’ Fourth Symphony, a dramatic to tonight’s concert. work that illustrates the darker side of the composer’s music. Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Please ensure all phones are switched off. Managing Director Photography and audio/video recording are not permitted during the performance. 2 Welcome 12 December 2019 Tonight’s Concert In Brief In the New Year The LSO at the Barbican lthough it was composed on the PROGRAMME CONTRIBUTORS Thursday 9 January 7.30pm Thursday 16 January 7.30pm eve of World War II, the subject matter reflected in Tippett’s Oliver Soden is the author of Michael STUTZMANN RATTLE: BEETHOVEN 250 Concerto for Double String Orchestra is Tippett: The Biography (Weidenfeld MENDELSSOHN VIOLIN CONCERTO BEETHOVEN & BERG totally musical. Following in the footsteps and Nicolson, 2019). of Stravinsky and BartÓk, Tippett picked up Wagner Overture and Venusberg Music Berg Seven Early Songs the trend of writing an orchestral concerto Stephen Johnson is the author of Bruckner from ‘Tannhäuser’ Berg Passacaglia using elements of a Baroque ‘concerto Remembered. He contributes regularly to Mendelssohn Violin Concerto Berg Three Pieces for Orchestra grosso’, with no soloist and with groups BBC Music Magazine and The Guardian, and Brahms Symphony No 1 Beethoven Symphony No 7 of instruments passing around musical broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and ideas. The piece is melodious, with dance World Service. Nathalie Stutzmann conductor Sir Simon Rattle conductor rhythms and harmonies characteristic Alina Ibragimova violin Dorothea Röschmann soprano of the folk-inspired style of his English Andrew Huth is a musician, writer and contemporaries. Then, before the interval, translator who writes extensively on French, Sunday 19 January 7pm is Elgar’s Sea Pictures, a full-bodied suite of Russian and Eastern European music. orchestral songs showing the composer’s Wednesday 15 January 6.30pm RATTLE: BEETHOVEN 250 full expressive range. Stephen Connock MBE is the author of CHRIST ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES Toward the Sun Rising – Ralph Vaughan HALF SIX FIX Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony Williams Remembered. He is also Chairman of BEETHOVEN & BERG Berg Violin Concerto finishes the concert. It was written in 1934 in Albion Music, which is dedicated to publishing Beethoven Christ on the Mount of Olives the composer’s 60s – a fierce and dissonant books on English music and poetry. Berg Violin Concerto piece that contradicted his reputation as a Beethoven Symphony No 7 Sir Simon Rattle conductor pastoralist. Commenting on the symphony, Lisa Batiashvili violin Vaughan Williams said, ‘I don’t know if I like Sir Simon Rattle conductor Elsa Dreisig soprano it, but it’s what I meant.’ He also avoided Dorothea Röschmann soprano Pavol Breslik tenor any explanation of what inspired the David Soar bass music, though many have heard the Fourth Supported by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne London Symphony Chorus Symphony as a cry of pain at World War I Part of Beethoven 250 at the Barbican Simon Halsey chorus director and the looming threat of another, possibly worse, war to come. Part of Beethoven 250 at the Barbican Tonight’s Concert 3 Michael Tippett Concerto for Double String Orchestra 1938–39 / note by Oliver Soden 1 Allegro con brio master. The BBC dismissed the music Tudor madrigalists. The string parts are should incorporate melodies and rhythms 2 Adagio cantabile as ‘unattractive’ and refused broadcast. rhythmically disinhibited, refusing to be of English folk-songs and dances. So the 3 Allegro molto Tippett was very little known as a composer, contained by bar lines, and paying scant third movement regains all the vitality of having given over much of his composition attention to the eight-beats-in-a-bar time the first, and Tippett includes snatches of n the summer of 1943, Michael in the 1930s to political activism. Not until signature. Each melodic line freewheels a Northumbrian bagpipe tune which, as Tippett’s Concerto for Double the 1950s, when Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt downhill, as if improvising, beating time each of the orchestras spurs the other on String Orchestra was performed conducted a performance with sympathy by irregular and unpredictable accents that to greater and greater heights, lead the at Wigmore Hall. The composer was and understanding, did the Concerto begin Tippett derived from the syncopation of Concerto to bursting point. The strings absent, ‘circumstances beyond his control’ to take its place among the acknowledged jazz. ‘One could fill pages’, reads one liner tauten, as if winding up a spring that, when preventing his attendance. In truth, he was masterpieces of 20th-century string writing. note, ‘on just the opening ten seconds.’ released, propels the movement to a burst in a cell in His Majesty’s Prison Wormwood of melody that ends the piece in burnished Scrubs, where he had been jailed for defying The piece does not pitch a soloist against Tippett took the structure of the Concerto joy, after a final whoop from the cellos. • the terms of his military exemption as a an orchestra; it is more a ‘concerto grosso’, from Beethoven. The first movement is an conscientious objector, and where he still the form of Baroque music that passes allegro in sonata form; the slow movement was when the Concerto was recorded in a material between a group of soloists and (in Tippett’s words) is ‘explicitly modelled on London studio. Benjamin Britten stepped in orchestra. Tippett’s forces, however, are two the song-fugue-song layout of the andante as producer. equal string orchestras, of five parts each. of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor, They form a complementary partnership, Op 95’; and the final movement is a sonata World War II had interrupted the Concerto’s from which Tippett spins an astonishing rondo with a coda. The central movement birth in other ways. The premiere, scheduled number of textures and effects, as the has a part for solo violin, based on the for late 1939, had been cancelled. Tippett’s two orchestras kick the music joyfully folksong ‘Ca’ the Yowes’, that is taken up by publishers, Schott, were German, making back and forth, each winding in and out of the whole orchestra to form a slow, yearning release of the score all but impossible (to the spotlight. The Concerto clearly owes a interlude, indebted to the blues songs of say nothing of paper rationing). A handful debt to the music of folk-inspired English Bessie Smith.