London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Sunday 7 June 2015 7.30pm Barbican Hall LSO INTERNATIONAL VIOLIN FESTIVAL JAMES EHNES Bartók Divertimento for Strings Korngold Violin Concerto INTERVAL Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances London’s Symphony Orchestra Marin Alsop conductor James Ehnes violin Concert finishes approx 9.30pm The LSO International Violin Festival is generously supported by Jonathan Moulds CBE International Violin Festival Media Partner 07-06 Alsop.indd 1 5/29/2015 1:11:02 PM 2 Welcome 7 June 2015 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief This evening we are delighted to welcome conductor THE LSO AT THE BBC PROMS Marin Alsop, who last worked with the Orchestra in 2011. Tonight she returns to conduct a programme The LSO returns to the BBC Proms this summer exploring the music of three of the best-known with Principal Conductor Valery Gergiev for a concert expatriate composers of the 20th century: Bartók, on 28 July showcasing all five of Prokofiev’s piano Korngold and Rachmaninov. concertos. Joining the Orchestra on stage at the Royal Albert Hall will be soloists Daniil Trifonov, Following Bartók’s folk-inflected Divertimento, a Sergei Babayan and Alexei Volodin. virtuosic work showcasing the LSO’s string section, violinist James Ehnes, a regular collaborator with bbc.co.uk/proms both the LSO and Marin Alsop, joins the Orchestra for Korngold’s lyrical Violin Concerto. This performance forms part of the LSO International Violin Festival, BAFTA TV AWARD: WORLD WAR I a three-month celebration of the violin with some REMEMBERED FROM THE BATTLEFIELD of the world’s greatest soloists, which will also see James Ehnes feature in a BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime An event that featured a collaboration between the Concert at LSO St Luke’s on 11 June. I would like to LSO and the Berlin Philharmonic has won a BAFTA take this opportunity to thank Jonathan Moulds for Award. Members of the two orchestras, conducted his generous support of the Festival. by Sir Simon Rattle, were brought together to record the music played at the St Symphorien A very warm welcome to the retired LSO players Military Cemetery in Belgium in August 2014. The and their guests who join us tonight for their annual event, which also featured members of the London reunion. We are always delighted to see so many Symphony Chorus and LSO Choral Director Simon members of the LSO from years gone by, and are Halsey, took place 100 years after the declaration very pleased that they have this opportunity to of World War I, and was broadcast worldwide. hear the Orchestra perform. I hope you enjoy tonight’s concert and will join BBC RADIO 3 LUNCHTIME CONCERTS us again soon. On 10 June, André Previn, the Orchestra’s Conductor Laureate, conducts a BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concerts are a chance to performance of his Violin Concerto, joined by hear the world’s finest musicians in the intimate soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter, the work’s dedicatee. setting of the LSO St Luke’s Jerwood Hall. Our current series of concerts, part of the LSO International Violin Festival, features performances by James Ehnes, Veronika Eberle and Nicola Benedetti. Visit our website to browse listings. Kathryn McDowell CBE DL lso.co.uk/lunchtimeconcerts Managing Director 07-06 Alsop.indd 2 5/29/2015 1:11:03 PM lso.co.uk LSO International Violin Festival 3 Coming soon LSO International Violin Festival Bell’s big sound is consistently beautiful, round, focused and unfailingly in tune. The Washington Post on Joshua Bell ALINA IBRAGIMOVA JOSHUA BELL THE STRAD SUNDAY BBC RADIO 3 Sun 14 Jun 2015 7.30pm Sun 28 Jun 2015 7.30pm Sun 28 Jun 2015 LUNCHTIME CONCERTS Mozart Violin Concerto No 3 Sibelius Violin Concerto Photographic Exhibition James Ehnes Mahler Symphony No 1 (‘Titan’) Berlioz Symphonie fantastique 3–5.30pm, Fountain Room Thu 11 Jun 2015 1pm, LSO St Luke’s Bernard Haitink conductor Pablo Heras-Casado conductor Panel Discussion: Making Veronika Eberle Alina Ibragimova violin Joshua Bell violin Instrument Lessons Fun for Kids Thu 18 Jun 2015 1pm, LSO St Luke’s 6pm, Barbican Hall Nicola Benedetti Free entry, no ticket required Thu 25 Jun 2015 1pm, LSO St Luke’s 020 7638 8891 The LSO International Violin Festival is generously supported by Jonathan Moulds CBE International Violin Festival Media Partner lso.co.uk/violinfestival 07-06 Alsop.indd 3 5/29/2015 1:11:04 PM 4 Programme Notes 7 June 2015 Béla Bartók (1881–1945) Divertimento for Strings Sz 113 (1939) 1 ALLEGRO MA NON TROPPO was unaware of the momentous political upheaval 2 MOLTO ADAGIO that would affect his life so dramatically. 3 ALLEGRO ASSAI After the Divertimento’s premiere in Basle on PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER Bartók’s Divertimento was one of the last works 11 June 1940, a critic wrote: ‘Thinking back to the WENDY THOMPSON he wrote before leaving Europe for exile in the US. concert, it now seems unreal and ghostly. Will the Like the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, creative forces that stirred here be able to survive it was written for the influential Swiss conductor against the raging forces of annihilation, the violence MARIN ALSOP INTRODUCES and patron of contemporary music Paul Sacher, and that leads to total extermination of life?’ Within four TONIGHT’S CONCERT his Basle Chamber Orchestra. The list of Sacher’s months, Bartók had left Europe for the safety of the commissions, apart from Bartók’s pieces, eventually US. He never returned. The three pieces in this concert included Strauss’ Metamorphosen and Stravinsky’s are tour-de-force works that will Concerto in D, alongside works by Honegger, Henze, For a piece written in such troubled times, the highlight the LSO’s fabulous Malipiero, Britten and Tippett, among others. Divertimento at first seems unusually buoyant and musicians and their extraordinary light-hearted. Bartók announced that he was thinking virtuosity. But the works are linked Bartók had become a vigorous and vocal opponent of ‘some kind of concerto grosso’, and the scoring on many other levels: all three of fascism during the 1930s, and by 1938 he was pits a solo string quartet against the broad mass of pieces were written in the years seriously considering emigration. But he had a frail, strings, rather in the 18th-century manner. But there around World War II by composers elderly mother to look after in Budapest, and he the resemblance ends. The Divertimento is a highly who had emigrated, or would was clearly torn between his desire to ‘stay at home original work in his own unique idiom, and is in no emigrate, to the US. and help matters as much as possible’ and his fear sense a neo-Classical pastiche. that, by staying on, he would be perceived as tacitly Bartók’s Divertimento opens the condoning Nazi cultural and social policies. Then, in The first movement is a sonata-form structure in programme, featuring the LSO November 1938, he received Sacher’s commission, light, carefree mood; the second, a sombre Adagio in strings alone in a concerto-grosso together with the generous offer of the loan of a four sections (of which the first and last correspond for the 20th century. Korngold’s chalet in the Swiss mountains, where he could in Bartók’s favourite arch form), while the finale is a brilliant Violin Concerto follows, compose in peace. playful rondo that effortlessly incorporates a double incorporating themes from a fugue at its heart. number of his groundbreaking After a frenetic round of international concert tours film scores. The programme and folk-music collecting in the first half of 1939, closes with Rachmaninov’s Bartók finally accepted Sacher’s invitation. He spent Symphonic Dances, the final piece about a month in Switzerland, feeling like ‘a musician Rachmaninov wrote before his of olden times, the invited guest of a patron of the death in 1943. It is a fantastic arts’. In mid-August he reported to his family in piece filled with brilliant orchestral Budapest that work on the new Divertimento had colours and melodic invention. gone well, and he had finished the piece in just 15 days. Such was his intense concentration that when Sacher went to tell him of the outbreak of war, he found Bartók so utterly absorbed in his work that he 07-06 Alsop.indd 4 5/29/2015 1:11:04 PM lso.co.uk Composer Profiles 5 Béla Bartók Erich Wolfgang Korngold Composer Profile Composer Profile Born in 1881 in Hungary, Bartók Erich Wolfgang Korngold, like so began piano lessons with his many European composers, found mother at the age of five. He refuge from the Nazis by settling studied piano and composition in Hollywood during the 1930s at the Royal Academy of Music and 40s. As a child he had been in Budapest, where he created a one of the most gifted prodigy number of works echoing the composers that there has ever style of Brahms and Richard Strauss. been. Mahler proclaimed him a genius when he was just nine After graduating he discovered years old; he was hailed as ‘the Austro-Hungarian and Slavic new Mozart’ by Ernest Newman folk music, travelling extensively and admired by Richard Strauss, with his friend Zoltán Kodály who expressed feelings of awe at and recording countless ethnic his youthful genius. Korngold was songs and dances which began a pupil of Alexander Zemlinsky to influence his own compositions. and by his 17th birthday he had Kodály also introduced him to the works of Debussy in 1907, the year in produced a string of amazingly mature chamber and symphonic works. which he became Professor of Piano at the Budapest Conservatory.