François-Xavier Roth
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Sunday 11 November 2018 7–8.55pm Barbican Hall LSO SEASON CONCERT FRANÇOIS-XAVIER ROTH Ligeti Lontano Bartók Cantata profana NELSON Interval Haydn Nelson Mass François-Xavier Roth conductor Camilla Tilling soprano Adèle Charvet mezzo-soprano Julien Behr tenor Matthew Rose bass MASS London Symphony Chorus Simon Halsey chorus director Welcome Latest News On Our Blog I hope you enjoy the performance and THE DONATELLA FLICK LSO DONATELLA FLICK LSO CONDUCTING that you are able to join us again soon. CONDUCTING COMPETITION COMPETITION: THE SHORTLIST This coming Tuesday we present the first of our short, informal Half Six Fix concerts of This month, 20 emerging conductors from Throughout November we’ll be sharing the the season, as François-Xavier Roth conducts across Europe will take part in the 15th stories of the 20 shortlisted contestants Strauss’ instantly recognisable Also sprach Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition. vying for the position of LSO Assistant Zarathustra and Debussy’s Prélude à l’après- Across two days of intense preliminary Conductor in the Donatella Flick LSO midi d’un Faune, introducing each work from rounds they’ll compete for the chance to Conducting Competition. the stage. Then on Wednesday we hear a impress our panel of esteemed judges in part repeat of Tuesday’s concert with the the Grand Final here in Barbican Hall on • lso.co.uk/blog addition of Dvořák’s virtuosic Cello Concerto Thursday 22 November. warm welcome to this evening’s with soloist Jean-Guihen Queyras. THE LIFE OF CHARLES SORLEY concert at the Barbican. Tonight • lso.co.uk/conducting-competition we are joined by Principal Guest Visit the LSO Blog to read extracts from war Conductor François-Xavier Roth for the first LSO EAST LONDON ACADEMY poet Charles Sorley’s letters written between of six concerts this season, which build on 1914 and 1915, revealing an insight into life on our theme of Roots, with explorations of Developed in partnership with ten East the Western Front, and the loss and human musical origins in relation to the changes Kathryn McDowell CBE DL London boroughs, the LSO East London cost of the conflict. of the 19th and 20th centuries. Managing Director Academy is the first step on a path to making the Orchestra truly representative • lso.co.uk/blog Ligeti’s modernist work Lontano opens the of its community in London. Opening at LSO programme, followed by two choral works St Luke’s in spring 2019, it aims to identify THE LSO IN WORLD WAR I with the London Symphony Chorus: Bartók’s and develop the potential of young East Cantata profana and Haydn’s Nelson Mass. Londoners who show exceptional musical In 2014 we began a project to uncover the These latter works see us joined by four talent, irrespective of their background or story of the LSO and its players during exceptional soloists – we welcome back financial circumstance. World War I. Four years later, to mark the Matthew Rose and Camilla Tilling, both centenary of the Armistice, we return to take of whom last sang with the Orchestra in • lso.co.uk/news a look at how the LSO was coping by the end Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust of the War and what happened next. in 2016. And we hear the LSO debuts by tenor Julien Behr and mezzo-soprano • lso.co.uk/blog Adèle Charvet. 2 Welcome 11 November 2018 Tonight’s Concert / introduction by Liam Hennebry Coming Up onight we hear music by three The Nelson Mass is one of six written for the Tuesday 13 November 2018 6.30pm Thursday 22 November 2018 7.30pm central European innovators. Esterházys towards the end of Haydn’s life, Barbican Hall Barbican Hall Joseph Haydn, whose contributions regarded collectively to be the pinnacle of earn him such epithets as ‘inventor of the his liturgical writing. Its original title Missa HALF SIX FIX: ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA DONATELLA FLICK LSO CONDUCTING symphony’, consistently pioneered new in Angustiis (Mass for Troubled Times), COMPETITION FINAL forms, structures and means of musical refers to a moment of substantial economic Debussy Prélude à l’après-midi d’un Faune development. Bartók and Ligeti too, and political calamity as Napoleon’s armies Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra Wagner through narrative, textural and harmonic threatened to overwhelm not just Haydn’s Introduced on stage by the conductor Prelude: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg experimentation, pushed both boundaries native Austria, but the whole of Europe. Prokofiev Violin Concerto No 2 and audiences in their own characteristic François-Xavier Roth conductor Kodály Dances of Galánta ways. It’s easy to think that these sons of Mittleuropa would have got along rather well. PROGRAMME NOTE WRITERS Three finalists to be announced Wednesday 14 November 2018 7.30pm Vadim Repin violin Lontano comes from the height of Ligeti’s Paul Griffiths has been a critic for nearly 40 Barbican Hall avant-garde writing of the mid-1960s. years, including for The Times and The New A mysterious and eerily metallic sound- Yorker, and is an authority on 20th- and DVOŘÁK CELLO CONCERTO Thursday 29 November 2018 7.30pm world interweaves the roles of distance 21st-century music. Among his books are Barbican Hall and time while drawing the lush orchestral studies of Boulez, Ligeti and Stravinsky. Debussy Prélude à l’après-midi d’un Faune textures of late Romanticism into wholly He also writes novels and librettos. Dvořák Cello Concerto DIVINE GEOMETRY new harmonic and tonal territory. Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra Andrew Stewart is a freelance music Charles Coleman Drenched Bartók once described the dramatic, journalist and writer. He is the author of The François-Xavier Roth conductor Charles Coleman Bach Inspired secular parable Cantata profana as ‘his LSO at 90, and contributes to a wide variety Jean-Guihen Queyras cello Philip Glass Piano Concerto No 3 most profound credo’. The work deploys of specialist classical music publications. (UK premiere) challenging vocal writing to present a tale Kristjan Järvi Too Hot to Handel which has been variously interpreted as Lindsay Kemp is a senior producer for BBC Steve Reich Music for ensemble and representing intergenerational conflict, Radio 3, including programming Lunchtime orchestra (UK premiere, LSO co-commission) transfiguration in death, and opposition to Concerts from LSO St Luke’s, Artistic LSO Platforms: Guildhall Artists the fascism of the 1930s. It portrays nine sons Director of Baroque at the Edge, and a 6pm Barbican Hall Kristjan Järvi conductor who, knowing nothing of work and possessed regular contributor to Gramophone magazine. Free entry Simone Dinnerstein piano of no skills, spend their days hunting and so become stags of the forest themselves. Tonight’s Concert 3 György Ligeti Lontano 1967 / note by Paul Griffiths his is music from afar – da lontano, to use the Italian phrase sometimes found in musical scores. It begins very quietly and ends with a prolonged fade, as if arriving from far away and slowly departing again. And there are other distances. The music’s quietly sustained chords seem remote, its more definite figures nearer at hand. A chime of octaves will sound closer than a more complex chord – though the particular quality of distance or nearness will depend too on loudness, register (very high or very low sounds, both prominent here, will tend to sound recessed), and orchestration. Completed in May 1967, the piece also that again we experience distance, across temperament. Normally these effects are It is, to quote the lines from Keats that conveys distances in time. There is the the platform). This note becomes fuzzy negligible or irrelevant, but here, where Ligeti cited apropos this piece: echo of a work Ligeti had written six years with the addition of neighbours, and soon processes of change are so decelerated, before for a similar large orchestra without a new focus becomes evident as C starts to they begin to count, and to contribute to — percussion: Atmosphères. And beyond that sound in treble-register octaves throughout the music’s essential impalpability ‘The same that oft-times hath we rehear the orchestral sumptuousness of the orchestra. The highest C remains as a and mystery. What also matters is how the late Romantic era, in the rich octave- harmonic in two violins, joined far below, in ‘harmonic crystals’, as Ligeti called them, Charm’d magic casements, doubled textures (‘like velvet’, Ligeti said) another sensation of distance, by D-flat and dissolve and new ones crystallise out – opening on the foam and in such moments as the soft, warm D in double basses and contrabassoon. So sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.’ entry of the horns near the end, replaying the music goes on. present and scintillant. a similar point in the slow movement of Excerpt from John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale Bruckner’s Symphony No 8. Also important are subtleties of tuning. As The work’s rediscovery of harmony is at once — Ligeti pointed out, a violinist’s pitching will wondrous and sad: wondrous in the clarity The start, as in the choral Lux aeterna of the depend on harmonic and melodic context, and beauty with which the crystals come previous year, is with an eerily protracted and a plain fifth will tend to be played by into view, sad in their isolation and their unison initiated by flutes and cellos (so strings in just intonation rather than equal inability to function as they used to. 4 Programme Notes 11 November 2018 György Ligeti in Profile 1923–2006 / profile by Paul Griffiths aving survived living under the Nazi luminous, characterful – he preferred, prepared for publication, alongside their dictatorship, Ligeti found himself though he also returned to the symphony younger siblings, which included a sequence subject to another.