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London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Friday 6 November 2015 7.30pm Barbican Hall WYNTON MARSALIS WORLD PREMIERE Bernstein Prelude, Fugue and Riffs Wynton Marsalis Concerto in D (world premiere) London’s Symphony Orchestra INTERVAL Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements Bernstein Chichester Psalms James Gaffigan conductor Nicola Benedetti violin Ben Hill boy treble London Symphony Chorus Simon Halsey chorus director Concert finishes approx 9.50pm 2 Welcome 6 November 2015 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief Welcome to tonight’s LSO concert at the Barbican. APPLICATIONS OPEN FOR THE 2016 We are delighted to welcome back American PANUFNIK COMPOSERS SCHEME conductor James Gaffigan, following his debut performance with the Orchestra in 2014, for a The LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme is an exciting programme of works by Bernstein, Wynton Marsalis initiative offering six emerging composers each year and Stravinsky. the opportunity to write for and work with a world- class symphony orchestra. It has been devised by The concert opens with Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue the Orchestra in association with Lady Panufnik in and Riffs for jazz combo and clarinet, in which the memory of her late husband, the composer Sir Andrzej Orchestra’s Principal Clarinet Chris Richards is Panufnik, and is generously supported by the Helen featured. This is followed by the world premiere Hamlyn Trust. of a new Violin Concerto by America’s pre-eminent jazz musician, Wynton Marsalis. Concerto in D was We are now accepting applications for the 2016 composed in close collaboration with violinist scheme. The programme begins in February 2016 Nicola Benedetti – also a great friend of the LSO’s – and culminates with a public workshop in April 2017. and we are delighted that she will give the world For more details on the scheme and how to apply, premiere performance with the Orchestra this evening. please visit the LSO website. After the interval the Orchestra will be joined by the lso.co.uk/composing London Symphony Chorus to perform Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, their first concert with the LSO this season. The Orchestra and Chorus gave their A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS first performance of the Chichester Psalms in 1986 under the baton of the composer himself. The LSO offers great benefits for groups of 10+ including 20% discount on standard tickets. I hope that you enjoy tonight’s concert and can At tonight’s concert, we are delighted to welcome: join us again soon. The LSO returns to the Barbican St Paul’s School on Thursday 12 November with Nikolaj Znaider, who King Edward VI Grammar School conducts works by Strauss alongside Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. lso.co.uk/groups Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director lso.co.uk Programme Notes 3 Leonard Bernstein (1918–90) Prelude, Fugue and Riffs (1949) London Symphony Orchestra CHRIS RICHARDS CLARINET LSO SECTIONS UP CLOSE Bernstein was not a natural improvising jazzman – however, composing ‘written-out’ jazz was no problem. Writing fluently for clarinet solo and jazz PROGRAMME NOTE AUTHOR combo, he set down Prelude, Fugue and Riffs in DAVID GUTMAN has written November 1949, conceiving it as an American four books on subjects ranging riposte to Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto. And yet from Prokofiev to Lennon, and is a the jazz musician Woody Herman, who had also regular contributor to Gramophone, commissioned the Stravinsky, appears not even to International Record Review and have acknowledged receipt of Bernstein’s score, The Stage. his own career in disarray. Its ‘real’ premiere did not take place until October 1955 with the new A series of concerts showcasing the virtuosity soloist and dedicatee Benny Goodman, presented and musicianship of the LSO’s players in the context of one of Bernstein’s celebrated TV programmes, his second Omnibus show, an LSO BRASS ENSEMBLE BENNY GOODMAN (1909–86) enquiry into the nature of jazz. Seemingly destined Thu 26 Nov 2015 7.30pm, Barbican was an American jazz and swing to remain a pièce d’occasion, it has instead become bandleader and one of the most increasingly familiar in recent years. The heroes of the LSO brass section take influential clarinet players of the centre stage in an evening of rousing fanfares, 20th century. His early career As the title promises, the music integrates classical original works and new arrangements for established jazz and swing music forms and contrapuntal structures with jazz/swing ten-piece brass ensemble. Featuring works by as popular forms and his band was melodies and rhythms, doing so with such Brahms, Bach, Grieg and Gershwin and the the first jazz ensemble to perform in naturalness that it sounds sometimes as though the world premiere performance of a new piece New York’s Carnegie Hall. Later on players are improvising. In fact, only at the very end by LSO Soundhub scheme alumnus Ayanna in his career he began to focus on is there some flexibility – the performers themselves Witter-Johnson. refining a classical technique and decide when the piece should actually stop! used his considerable influence to LSO STRING ENSEMBLE commission works from many of The Prelude is launched on trumpets and Wed 3 Feb 2016 7.30pm, Barbican the century’s leading composers trombones, the Fugue on saxophones, the Riffs by The string players of the LSO, led by director including Copland, Bartók, Hindemith, the solo clarinet and piano. What remains is a kind and LSO Leader Roman Simovic, will perform Arnold and Milhaud. of all-embracing, wild yet structured, written out jam a programme featuring music by three of this session that seldom fails to bring the house down. country’s best-loved composers – Elgar, Shamelessly eclectic as it is, ‘trying everything’ as Vaughan Williams and Britten it does – including what sounds like a visit to a strip club – Bernstein’s idiom is unmistakably his own. 020 7638 8891 lso.co.uk 4 Programme Notes 6 November 2015 Wynton Marsalis (b 1961) Concerto in D (2015) 1 RHAPSODY Nicola Benedetti is someone he has known a long 2 RONDO BURLESQUE time, and he sees similarities in her career and his 3 BLUES own, outside music as well, sharing similar social 4 HOOTENANNY and educational concerns. He also believes that even her celebrated recording catalogue does not really NICOLA BENEDETTI VIOLIN do justice to her abilities and depth as an artist. By contrast, she responded to his first drafts for Few musicians have excelled so prominently in the this concerto by telling him it was too easy, and fields of jazz and classical music as Wynton Marsalis, she needed to be challenged further. The result is a piece that pushes her violin technique to the limit. with Grammy awards to his credit for recordings in both genres. ‘It has been a very collaborative and incredible process.’ As a composer he has not been shy of stretching PROGRAMME NOTE AUTHOR himself, writing his extended jazz oratorio, Blood on Nicola Benedetti ALYN SHIPTON is author of A New the Fields, in 1994 (which went on to win the Pulitzer History of Jazz and presenter of Jazz Prize three years later), and more recently composing Most of Marsalis’ compositions have an underlying Record Requests for BBC Radio 3. his Blues Symphony (premiered in Atlanta in 2009) story, and this is no exception, with a narrative that and the Abyssinian Mass (given its first European unfolds across the work’s four movements as follows: performance here at the Barbican in 2012). FIRST MOVEMENT His life is something of a miracle of time management, Movement 1, ‘Rhapsody’, concerns sleep. It starts as he leads the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra with a lullaby catching the following moods: sweet, (currently on a 14-concert tour of the Eastern angsty, nurturing, humble, sensual, sanctified and seaboard of the United States), is artistic director of angelic. There follows a nightmare, which is by turns the entire programme for Jazz At Lincoln Center in anxious, introspective, fearful and courageous, New York, and also manages to lead his own jazz before finally retreating into the mind. Then comes septet (they’re appearing in Philadelphia next week). peace, in music that Wynton sees as high-minded, Consequently, finding space in his schedule to wise, deep and serene. From peace, the movement compose – particularly sizeable works – is not easy. turns to recollection, which is sweet, wistful, ‘It takes so much time to write something like this optimistic and pure. The final section he describes concerto that I really have to want to write it. Most as ‘gleaming’, with moments that are whimsical, of the time it’s for specific people. I pick out the ones playful, dancing, syncopated, energetic and childlike, that I write for. I don’t have any other reason to do it like a harlequin or griot. but for them. I work on it until it’s something I think that is deserving of them, and I don’t mind changing it, as I go, because I’m doing it for them.’ lso.co.uk Programme Notes 5 NICOLA BENEDETTI: SECOND MOVEMENT And from courtship we find ourselves in church, COLLABORATING WITH Movement 2, ‘Rondo Burlesque’, brings us wide full of congregational call and response, which builds WYNTON MARSALIS awake. It starts with a section marked ‘animato’, quite freely until we reach the sermon: a fiery one and moves through phases that are virtuosic and that is exhorting, shouting, hollering, repetitive, and ’Wynton and I have known each fiery, precise, complex and unapologetic. This takes finally introspective. As the sermon ends, we hear other for over eleven years. us to a depiction of the circus, violin and orchestra the big collective sigh, combining all the feelings We first met at the Academy of sharing music that is acrobatic, mocking, mimicking, it has aroused: wistfulness, loss, cleansing grief, Achievements Summit in New ironic, fanciful, at times becoming a parody.