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London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Sunday 25 June 2017 7pm Barbican Hall London’s Symphony Orchestra MAHLER SYMPHONY NO 3 Robert Trevino conductor Anna Larsson alto Tiffin Boys’ Choir Ladies of the London Symphony Chorus Simon Halsey chorus director Please note that there will be no interval Concert finishes approx 8.50pm 2 Welcome 25 June 2017 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief A warm welcome to this evening’s LSO concert at the NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR Barbican. We are joined by Robert Trevino, making EARLY-CAREER COMPOSERS his debut with the Orchestra. One of the most dynamic young American conductors to emerge Applications have re-opened for our flagship composer in recent years, Robert Trevino has a particularly programme – LSO Soundhub – which provides a strong reputation for Mahler. We are very grateful flexible environment for four composers annually to him for stepping in to replace Daniel Harding, to develop their work with access to vital resources, who is unable to conduct owing to a wrist injury. state-of-the-art equipment and professional support. We are very grateful to Susie Thomson for generously Tonight’s programme is focused on Mahler’s supporting LSO Soundhub from September 2017. expansive Third Symphony, for which we are delighted to welcome soloist Anna Larsson, The LSO is also launching a new programme, LSO the Tiffin Boys’ Choir, the London Symphony Jerwood Composer+, with the generous support of Chorus and our Choral Director Simon Halsey. the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. The programme will support two composers in programming and I hope you enjoy the concert and that you will delivering chamber-scale concerts at LSO St Luke’s, be able to join us again soon. On Sunday 9 July, including work of their own developed through the Sir Simon Rattle will conduct the LSO in the UK programme. The deadline for applications for both premiere of Andrew Norman’s new children’s programmes is Friday 28 July. opera A Trip to the Moon, a joint commission by the LSO, the Berlin Philharmonic and the lso.co.uk/composers Los Angeles Philharmonic. This new children’s opera will feature many of LSO Discovery’s choirs and young performers. The programme will A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS close with Sibelius’ Symphony No 2, for which we welcome members of the Guildhall School’s Groups of 10+ receive a 20% discount on standard Orchestral Artistry programme, run in association tickets to LSO concerts, plus other exclusive benefits. with the LSO. Tonight we are delighted to welcome: Musikreisen Manufaktur GmbH lso.co.uk/groups Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director lso.co.uk Composer Profile 3 Mahler the Man by Stephen Johnson obsession with mortality in Mahler’s music. Few of his major works do not feature a funeral march: in fact Mahler’s first composition (at age ten) was I am … a Funeral March with Polka – exactly the kind of three times homeless extreme juxtaposition one finds in his mature works. a native of Bohemia in Austria For most of his life Mahler supported himself by conducting, but this was no mere means to an end. an Austrian among Germans Indeed his evident talent and energetic, disciplined commitment led to successive appointments a Jew throughout the world. at Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg and climactically, in 1897, the Vienna Court Opera. In the midst of this hugely demanding schedule, Mahler composed whenever he could, usually during his summer holidays. The rate at which he composed during these brief periods is astonishing. The workload in no way decreased after his marriage Mahler’s sense of being an outsider, coupled with to the charismatic and highly intelligent Alma Schindler a penetrating, restless intelligence, made him an in 1902. Alma’s infidelity – which almost certainly acutely self-conscious searcher after truth. For Mahler accelerated the final decline in Mahler’s health in the purpose of art was, in Shakespeare’s famous 1910/11 – has earned her black marks from some phrase, to ‘hold the mirror up to nature’ in all its biographers, but it is hard not to feel some sympathy bewildering richness. The symphony, he told Jean for her position as a ‘work widow’. Sibelius, ‘must be like the world. It must embrace everything’. Mahler’s symphonies can seem almost Nevertheless, many today have good cause to over-full with intense emotions and ideas: love and be grateful to Mahler for his single-minded devotion hate, joy in life and terror of death, the beauty of to his art. T S Eliot – another artist caught between nature, innocence and bitter experience. Similar the search for faith and the horror of meaninglessness – themes can also be found in his marvellous songs wrote that ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’. and song-cycles, though there the intensity is, But Mahler’s music suggests another possibility. With if anything, still more sharply focused. his ability to confront the terrifying possibility of a purposeless universe and the empty finality of death, Gustav Mahler was born the second of 14 children. Mahler can help us confront and endure stark reality. His parents were apparently ill-matched (Mahler He can take us to the edge of the abyss, then sing remembered violent scenes), and young Gustav us the sweetest songs of consolation. If we allow grew dreamy and introspective, seeking comfort ourselves to make this journey with him, we may in nature rather than human company. Death was find that we too are the better for it. a presence from early on: six of Mahler’s siblings died in infancy. This no doubt partly explains the 4 Programme Notes 25 June 2017 Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) Symphony No 3 (1893–96) 1 KRÄFTIG. ENTSCHIEDEN It isn’t hard to see why the Third Symphony should 2 TEMPO DI MENUETTO provoke such extreme reactions. In concept – and in 3 COMODO (SCHERZANDO) some of its content – it is Mahler’s most outrageous 4 SEHR LANGSAM – MISTERIOSO work. The forces may be smaller (slightly) than those 5 LUSTIG IM TEMPO UND KECK IM AUSDRUCK used in Symphony No 2 (‘Resurrection’) or the so- 6 LANGSAM – RUHEVOLL – EMPFUNDEN called ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ (No 8), but in other respects it is incredibly ambitious. Mahler is quoted PERFORMED WITHOUT AN INTERVAL as saying that ‘the symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything’, in which case the PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER ROBERT TREVINO CONDUCTOR Third is his most ‘symphonic’ work. ‘Just imagine a STEPHEN JOHNSON is the author ANNA LARSSON ALTO work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the of Bruckner Remembered (Faber). LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA whole world’, Mahler wrote to the singer Anna von He also contributes regularly to BBC TIFFIN BOYS’ CHOIR Mildenburg, ‘My [third] symphony will be something Music Magazine and The Guardian, LONDON SYMPHONY CHORUS the like of which the world has never heard!’. In this and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 SIMON HALSEY CHORUS DIRECTOR music, he wrote, ‘the whole of nature finds a voice … (Discovering Music), BBC Radio 4 Some passages in it seem so uncanny that I can and the BBC World Service. hardly recognise them as my own work’. ‘It’s all very well, but you can’t call that a symphony.’ At first Mahler thought of giving the Third Symphony THE DICHOTOMY OF THE a title. It was to be called ‘Pan’, after the Greek APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN god of nature, or ‘The Joyful Science’, after one was introduced as a literary and William Walton’s brusque dismissal of Mahler’s Third of Nietzsche’s philosophical works, Die fröhliche philosophical concept by Friedrich Symphony may strike some readers as provincial Wissenschaft. The Third Symphony contains, in its Nietzsche in his 1872 work of today. But there was a time when musically minded fourth movement, a setting of lines from Nietzsche’s dramatic theory The Birth of people would have agreed with him. After the Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra), Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. symphony’s 1904 Viennese premiere, a critic stated the work which first puts forward the ideal of the He considered the opposition of that Mahler ought to be sent to jail for perpetrating ‘Superman’, the man who can embrace life – nature Apollo, Greek god of order, rationality such an insult to the intelligent listener. But amid – in all its fullness, whether glorious or terrible. and prudence, and Dionysus, god of the scandalised, outraged comments one can find This message struck chords in Mahler himself, emotion, chaos and irrationality. equally impassioned praise. After hearing that same as he noted after writing the symphony’s second He argued that while each attempts 1904 Viennese performance, the young Arnold movement: ‘It always strikes me as odd … think only (and ultimately fails) to overwhelm Schoenberg (who had at first been hostile to Mahler) of flowers, little birds, and woodsy smells. No one the other, artistic endeavour, in told the composer that the symphony had revealed knows the god Dionysus, the great Pan. There now! particular Classical Athenian tragedy, to him ‘a human being, a drama, truth, the most You have a sort of programme – that is, an example achieves its apex in the fusion ruthless truth!’. of how I make music. Everywhere and always it is or balance of the two, affording only the voice of nature!’. the audience an opportunity to encounter the fullest range of human experience. lso.co.uk Programme Notes 5 THE GUSTAV MAHLER As to that ‘programme’, Mahler was prepared to music (brass fanfares, dotted rhythms and plenty of SOCIETY UK be more specific. He described the symphony’s six percussion).