LSO SEASON CONCERTS SIR JOHN ELIOT GARDINER Thursday 7 February 2019 7.30–9.30pm Barbican Weber Overture: Euryanthe Mendelssohn Concerto for Violin and Piano Interval Schumann Symphony No 3, ‘Rhenish’ Sir John Eliot Gardiner conductor Isabelle Faust violin Kristian Bezuidenhout fortepiano SCHUMANN Programme Notes on Pages 4 to 9 Sunday 10 February 2019 7–9pm Barbican Hall Schumann Overture: Manfred Beethoven Piano Concerto No 1 Interval Schumann Symphony No 1, ‘Spring’ Sir John Eliot Gardiner conductor Piotr Anderszewski piano Programme Notes on Pages 10 to 14 Welcome Latest News On Our Blog Thanks to our media partner Classic FM, CENTRE FOR MUSIC ORCHESTRA’S CHOICE: SCHUMANN who have recommended this concert to their listeners. Thursday evening will be broadcast The LSO, Barbican and Guildhall School have LSO players share stories about their live on the LSO’s YouTube channel, and both ambitious plans for a new London concert favourite music by Robert Schumann concerts will also be captured for the LSO’s hall. The vision for the Centre for Music is and how it came into their lives, from the own recording label LSO Live, as part of a to develop a world-class venue for music symphonies to chamber music to song. complete cycle of Schumann’s symphonies and education. First concept designs for the • lso.co.uk/blog conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. project have now been released. • lso.co.uk/news I hope that you enjoy the performances and MEET LAHAV SHANI that you will be able to join us again soon. In these two LSO concerts at the Barbican we In the LSO’s next concert at the Barbican, on THANK YOU TO THE LSO GUARDIANS Ahead of his LSO debut on 28 February, welcome back Sir John Eliot Gardiner, as he Sunday 17 February, pianist Daniil Trifonov conductor Lahav Shani talks about Kurt completes his survey of Robert Schumann’s launches his LSO Artist Portrait with Ravel’s On 10 February we welcome the LSO Weill, musical life in Tel Aviv and stepping symphonies, alongside works by the Piano Concerto in G, conducted by the LSO’s Guardians and extend our thanks for their into Zubin Mehta’s shoes as Music Director composer’s contemporaries and colleagues: Music Director Sir Simon Rattle. commitment to the Orchestra and for their of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Weber. pledge to remember the LSO in their Will. • lso.co.uk/blog In making this commitment, they help to On Thursday 7 February, keyboard artist ensure that our world-class artistic programme Kristian Bezuidenhout makes his London and pioneering education and community 7 FEBRUARY: LIVE-STREAMED CONCERT debut with the Orchestra, appearing projects will thrive for years to come. alongside violinist Isabelle Faust in Kathryn McDowell CBE DL • lso.co.uk/legacies This concert will be broadcast live on our Mendelssohn’s lesser-heard Concerto for Managing Director YouTube channel and will be available to Violin and Piano, which the young prodigy WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS watch back for free for the next 90 days. wrote at the age of just 14. On Sunday Visit our website to find out about future 10 February, long-standing friend of the A warm welcome to Campus Travel Groups, broadcasts and how to watch. LSO Piotr Anderszewski returns as soloist Gerrards Cross Community Association, • lso.co.uk/livestream in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. The Friends of St Albans Abbey and the United Wards Club (7 February) and Please ensure all phones are switched off. the Institute of Global Studies at the Photography and audio/video recording University of Delaware (10 February). are not permitted during the music. 2 Welcome 7 & 10 February 2019 Continuing the LSO’s concert series with two of the most astounding musicians of our time … ARTIST Rameau, Betsy Jolas, Poulenc & Ravel with Daniil Trifonov & Sir Simon Rattle 17 February Ligeti, Haydn, Berg and Gershwin with Barbara Hannigan 17 March Ives & Beethoven with Daniil Trifonov & Michael Tilson Thomas 2 June Solo Recital: Beethoven & Prokofiev with Daniil Trifonov 10 June Beethoven, Berlioz & Shostakovich with Daniil Trifonov & Gianandrea Noseda 16 June Daniil Trifonov & Barbara Hannigan Read more and book online lso.co.uk/whats-on Thursday 7 February 2019 In Brief / by Stephen Johnson LSO SEASON CONCERT hree giants of 19th-century German firing at top strength, and the result was GARDINER’S SCHUMANN Romanticism rub shoulders in this exuberant, colourful, moody and finally this uplifting programme. Weber’s joyous five-movement symphony. It sounds Weber Overture: Euryanthe opera Euryanthe was a flop, largely thanks to as though it was all conceived in a single Mendelssohn Concerto for Violin and Piano its toe-curling, absurdly engineered libretto. sweep, and the current of the great river runs Interval But there is great music in Euryanthe and, through all of it, carrying the tide of dazzling Schumann Symphony No 3, ‘Rhenish’ fortunately for us, the purely orchestral ideas irresistibly to its exultant conclusion. • Overture is a rip-roaring success, with fine Sir John Eliot Gardiner conductor sweeping love-melodies and a wonderfully Isabelle Faust violin eerie brief appearance of a ghost. Kristian Bezuidenhout fortepiano Mendelssohn was just 14 when he wrote his PROGRAMME CONTRIBUTORS Concerto for Violin and Piano, but he was already a highly experienced composer, and Stephen Johnson is the author of Bruckner just two years short of writing his string Remembered (Faber). He also contributes Streamed live at youtube.com/lso Octet, one of the towering masterpieces regularly to BBC Music Magazine and The of the Romantic chamber repertoire. Guardian, and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 Concert ends approx 9.30pm This Concerto may not be a fully perfect (Discovering Music), BBC Radio 4 and the achievement, but it is full of startling, BBC World Service. memorable ideas and bursting with life, and the dramatic reversal at the end – Andrew Stewart is a freelance music triumph twisted at the last minute into journalist and writer. He is the author tragedy – is stunning. Mastery, one senses, of The LSO at 90, and contributes to is only just around the corner. a wide variety of specialist classical music publications. Robert Schumann had just taken up the post of conductor in the city of Düsseldorf when he wrote his ‘Rhenish’ Symphony – a prospect that both enthralled and terrified him. Exploring the Rhineland countryside and seeing the cathedral in Cologne set Schumann’s normally fertile imagination 4 Concert Introduction 7 February 2019 Carl Maria von Weber Overture: Euryanthe Op 81 1823 / note by Stephen Johnson he world premiere of Weber’s opera fidelity of his beloved Euryanthe. Soon after education. In 1798 Weber went to Salzburg Der Freischütz (The Free-Shooter) this the much more melodious second theme to study with Michael Haydn, and that same in Berlin in 1821 was the high (violins) derives from another of Adolar’s year saw Weber’s first published work – six point of the composer’s career. Soon it was arias, again expressing his love and devotion. fughettas for piano. Aged 14, Weber and playing in opera houses all over the western family moved to Freiburg where he wrote his world. The influence of Der Freischütz on a Weber’s flair for daring orchestration, so first opera Das Waldmädchen (The Forest whole generation of Romantic nationalists much on display in Der Freischütz, reveals Maiden). The latter half of the first decade was immense, and not just in Weber’s itself at the beginning of the central of the century was marred with troubles for native Germany. Alas, he was never to repeat development section, where the tempo Weber – debt, an ill-fated affair, his father its success. His opera Euryanthe (1823) was drops to Largo and eight muted solo violins, misappropriating a vast amount of money – reasonably well received, at first, but doubts with tremolando violas, conjure up the ghost however, he remained a prolific composer. soon escalated, especially concerning its of Euryanthe’s sister Emma, who saves the libretto, which degenerates into absurdity day by scaring the heroine’s duplicitous rival Things brightened up from 1810; he visited in the third act, in which all the characters Eglantine into confessing her wickedness. several cities and spent time as Director meet quite coincidentally in the middle of The return of Adolar’s themes in the final of Opera in Prague and Dresden, and also a rocky desert. recapitulatory section unquestionably CARL MARIA VON WEBER 1786–1826 worked in Berlin promoting and establishing heralds the opera’s concluding celebration German opera. The successful premiere The music, however, is another matter – of faith and true love. • orn in Holstein, North Germany, of Der Freischütz in Berlin in 1821 led to the influential musicologist Donald Tovey Weber was the eldest of three performances all over Europe. In 1823 he was even pronounced it superior musically to children. After being discharged invited to the Royal Opera House, Covent Wagner’s Lohengrin – and there have been from the militia, his father Franz took up Garden, to compose and produce Oberon, several prestigious attempts to rescue it. a number of musical directorships and which premiered in 1826. Fortunately for orchestral concert-goers, founded a theatre company in Hamburg. the Overture to Euryanthe is an unqualified His mother Genovefa was a Viennese singer. While in London, Weber was already success, and it manages to give a taste of Weber had four musically gifted cousins, suffering from tuberculosis, which then took what Weber might have achieved if he’d one of whom was Constanze Weber, who hold entirely. He died at the house of Sir found a better text.