London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Sunday 24 May 2015 7.30pm Barbican Hall LSO INTERNATIONAL VIOLIN FESTIVAL CHRISTIAN TETZLAFF Beethoven Violin Concerto INTERVAL Brahms German Requiem Daniel Harding conductor Christian Tetzlaff violin Dorothea Röschmann soprano Matthias Goerne baritone London’s Symphony Orchestra London Symphony Chorus Simon Halsey chorus director Concert finishes approx 9.55pm The LSO International Violin Festival is generously supported by Jonathan Moulds CBE International Violin Festival Media Partner 2 Welcome 24 May 2015 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief This evening we are pleased to welcome back the THE LSO AT THE BBC PROMS LSO’s Principal Guest Conductor Daniel Harding for a programme culminating in Brahms’ German The LSO returns to the BBC Proms this summer Requiem. The London Symphony Chorus, led by with Principal Conductor Valery Gergiev for a concert the LSO’s Choral Director Simon Halsey, join Daniel on 28 July showcasing all five of Prokofiev’s piano Harding for his first performance of this work with concertos. Joining the Orchestra on stage at the the Orchestra. Royal Albert Hall will be soloists Daniil Trifonov, Sergei Babayan and Alexei Volodin. Tickets are The LSO International Violin Festival also continues now on sale through the Royal Albert Hall. tonight with a performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto by Christian Tetzlaff, who has worked with bbc.co.uk/proms both the Orchestra and Daniel Harding on many occasions in the past, recently performing a BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert at LSO St Luke’s. A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS We are grateful for Jonathan Moulds’ generous The LSO offers great benefits for groups of ten or support of the Festival, and to our media partner more, including 20% discount on standard tickets, The Strad, who continue to cover the Festival in a dedicated group booking phone-line, priority print and online. booking and, for larger groups, free hot drinks and the chance to meet LSO musicians at private interval I would also like to take this opportunity to thank receptions. Tonight, we are delighted to welcome: the musicians who played in this evening’s LSO Platforms recital, a chance for musicians from the The Gerrards Cross Community Association Guildhall School to perform free pre-concert recitals Farnham U3A Concert Club on the Barbican stage. Redbridge and District U3A University of Wisconsin Please join us again on 2 June when Daniel Harding Eventika Travel SRL and the Orchestra will be joined by Janine Jansen for The University of Minnesota, Morris a performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Elizabeth Hayllar and Friends following a short tour to Germany and Switzerland. Ian Fyfe and Friends Swen Wiehen and Friends Annette Graves and Friends Edwin Poquette and Friends lso.co.uk/groups Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director lso.co.uk LSO International Violin Festival 3 Coming soon LSO International Violin Festival Thu 10 Oct 7.30pm HAITINK & AX Mozart Piano Concerto No 9 K271 Shostakovich Symphony No 4 Bernard Haitink conductor Emanuel Ax piano Is there a creamier, more ravishing violin timbre in the Tue 15 Oct 7.30pm world today than that from HAITINK & AX Ehnes’ Strad? Add immaculate Mozart Piano Concerto No 27 K595 Shostakovich Symphony No 15 tuning, serene lyricism and an Bernard Haitink conductor understated but unfaltering Emanuel Ax piano musicality, and it’s clear why the young Canadian is fast becoming the connoisseur’s fiddler-of-choice. The Times JANINE JANSEN JAMES EHNES ALINA IBRAGIMOVA BBC RADIO 3 LUNCHTIME Tue 2 Jun 2015 7.30pm Sun 7 Jun 2015 7.30pm Sun 14 Jun 2015 7.30pm CONCERTS AT LSO ST LUKE’S Edward Rushton I nearly went, there* Bartók Divertimento for Strings Mozart Violin Concerto No 3 Thu 11 Jun 2015 1pm Mendelssohn Violin Concerto Korngold Violin Concerto Mahler Symphony No 1 (‘Titan’) James Ehnes violin Mahler Symphony No 5 Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances Steven Osborne piano Daniel Harding conductor Marin Alsop conductor Bernard Haitink conductor Thu 18 Jun 1pm, LSO St Luke’s Janine Jansen violin James Ehnes violin Alina Ibragimova violin Veronika Eberle violin Michail Lifits piano * UK premiere LSO Platforms 6pm – Korngold Chamber Music performed by Guildhall School students 020 7638 8891 The LSO International Violin Festival is generously supported by Jonathan Moulds CBE International Violin Festival Media Partner lso.co.uk/violinfestival 4 Programme Notes 24 May 2015 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) Violin Concerto in D major Op 61 (1806) 1 ALLEGRO MA NON TROPPO It was not until one of the 19th century’s greatest 2 LARGHETTO violinists, Joseph Joachim, performed it in London 3 RONDO: ALLEGRO in 1844 under Mendelssohn’s baton that the work came to be recognised as the sublime masterpiece CHRISTIAN TETZLAFF VIOLIN that it is. Joachim was only twelve years old at the time, but later descriptions of his playing, which Beethoven did not provide cadenzas for the talked of artistic perfection with bravura as a premiere of his Violin Concerto, but he did compose secondary consideration, perhaps explain how it cadenzas when he transformed the piece into a was that he was the first one to be able to put the piano concerto a year later. In tonight’s performance, concerto across; these qualities, after all, apply Christian Tetzlaff performs his own arrangements of equally well to the work itself. those cadenzas. ‘All its most famous strokes of For Beethoven, the concerto was not a form to be taken lightly. Like Mozart, the first great master genius are not only mysteriously of the Classical concerto, he composed concertos quiet, but mysterious in radiantly principally for his own instrument, the piano; PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER whereas Mozart’s output of piano concertos ran happy surroundings.’ LINDSAY KEMP is a senior to nearly 30, Beethoven completed only five, each Donald Tovey on Beethoven’s Violin Concerto producer for BBC Radio 3, including of them a dynamic and virtuosic conflict between programming lunchtime concerts soloist and orchestra. It is not hard to picture him from Wigmore Hall and LSO St Luke’s, at the keyboard, challenging the orchestra to battle The circumstances of the first performance in Artistic Director of the London in the gigantic flourishes of the first movement of Vienna in December 1806 sound somewhat less Festival of Baroque Music, and a the ’Emperor’ Concerto, running it ragged in the promising. Beethoven had rushed to complete the regular contributor to Gramophone fleet-footed games of the finale of the First, or piece in time and the soloist, Franz Clement, was magazine. coaxing it patiently into submission in the slow apparently forced to sight-read much of the music movement of the Fourth. at the concert. This sounds hard to believe, but it is surely significant that the autograph contains Compared to these dramas, his only completed many alterations to the solo part, perhaps made violin concerto is a very different animal, a work at Clement’s suggestion, after what one can of unprecedented warmth and serenity that its only imagine was a somewhat hairy premiere. first audiences evidently found rather puzzling. If Beethoven made things hard for his soloist, ’The opinion of connoisseurs admits that it contains however, Clement did not show the concerto to beautiful passages but confesses that the context its best advantage by playing the second and third often seems broken and that the endless repetition movements at opposite ends of the concert from of unimportant passages produces a tiring effect’, the first, and inserting some virtuoso showpieces ran one account of its first performance. Clearly, in between (including one played with the violin a little more action was expected. upside down). lso.co.uk Programme Notes 5 BEETHOVEN on LSO LIVE Although Beethoven knew how to play the violin, new tune, which is then alternated with the main it was not really his instrument, so we should not theme before a peaceful coda, a fanfare-like Symphonies be too surprised that his concerto does not adopt outburst from the strings and a short cadenza lead Nos 1–9 the confrontational and virtuoso tone of the piano straight into the finale. £19.99 concertos. And unlike the piano, the violin cannot lsolive.lso.co.uk accompany itself, with the result that the orchestra FINALE has to play along almost all of the time. Beethoven Here again, the form is simple – a rondo whose does not fight against this. Instead he turns it to uncomplicated treatment may owe much to ‘A towering achievement.’ an advantage by writing a supremely conciliatory Beethoven’s haste to complete the concerto, but The Times concerto in which the violin and orchestra are in whose recurring theme is irresistible nevertheless. agreement throughout. As Donald Tovey has said, And there is real originality in the way in which the Benchmark Beethoven Cycle ’all its most famous strokes of genius are not only movement opens with the theme given out by the BBC Music Magazine mysteriously quiet, but mysterious in radiantly soloist over a bare, prompting accompaniment from happy surroundings’. the cellos and basses, and in the way that, just when Classical Recordings of the Year you feel Beethoven has proved that he could carry New York Times FIRST MOVEMENT on for ever, he wittily brings the concerto to an end. This is certainly true of the work’s unusual opening, Nominated for Best Classical Album where five gentle drum beats introduce the sublime 49th Annual Grammy Awards first theme, and then proceed to dominate and unify the whole movement through repeating and recycling their insistent rhythm in different contexts. There is no menace in this (as well there might be), and when the solo violin first enters it is not to contradict the orchestra, or even to contribute any new themes of its own, but to enrich the music with soaring embellishments and eloquent refinements of the movement’s glorious melodic material.