London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Sunday 3 April 2016 7pm Barbican Hall ALAN GILBERT: LSO DEBUT Nielsen Overture: Masquerade Sibelius Symphony No 3 INTERVAL Anders Hillborg Exquisite Corpse Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto Alan Gilbert conductor Joshua Bell violin Supported by Toshiba Concert finishes approx 9pm Thursday 7 April 2016 7.30pm Barbican Hall Sibelius En Saga London’s Symphony Orchestra Prokofiev Piano Concerto No 2 INTERVAL Nielsen Symphony No 4 (‘The Inextinguishable’) Alan Gilbert conductor Daniil Trifonov piano Supported by LSO Patrons Concert finishes approx 9.40pm 2 Welcome 3 & 7 April 2016 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief At this evening’s LSO concert we are delighted SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES CH CBE to welcome Alan Gilbert, the Music Director of the (1934–2016) New York Philharmonic Orchestra, to make his LSO debut with two concerts built around the works of The LSO was deeply saddened to hear of the Sibelius and Nielsen. death of the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies on Monday 14 March 2016. Sir Peter had been On 3 April we hear the overture from Nielsen’s working closely with the LSO in recent years, with opera Masquerade and Sibelius’ Symphony No 3, his Tenth Symphony in 2014 and latterly on his new before a contemporary work by the Swedish children’s opera The Hogboon, which the Orchestra composer Anders Hillborg. To complete the will premiere on 26 June. programme, we are delighted that Joshua Bell returns to perform the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. To read the LSO’s full tribute, please visit our website. The second concert, on 7 April, opens with an early lso.co.uk/more/news tone poem from Sibelius, En Saga, and closes with Nielsen’s Symphony No 4, a work Alan Gilbert has championed for many years. Between the two, it is THE MONSTER IN THE MAZE NOMINATED a pleasure to welcome back Daniil Trifonov to FOR AN INTERNATIONAL OPERA AWARD perform Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 2. Jonathan Dove’s The Monster in the Maze, an LSO I would like to take this opportunity to thank our co-commission with the Berliner Philharmoniker and corporate sponsors Toshiba, who support the the Aix-en-Provence Festival, has been nominated concert on 3 April, and the LSO’s Patrons, who for an International Opera Award in the Accessibility support the concert on 7 April. Thank you also to our Category. The winners will be announced on 15 May. media partner Classic FM, who have recommended the 3 April concert to their listeners. operaawards.org I hope you enjoy the performance and can join us again when Sir Simon Rattle, the LSO’s Music A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS Director Designate, returns for a programme of Messiaen and Bruckner on 14 April, and Haydn’s Adele Friedland and Friends The Seasons on 17 April. Faversham Music Club Gerrards Cross Community Association Live Travel and Tours The Grand Tour Redbridge & District U3A Kathryn McDowell CBE DL lso.co.uk/groups Managing Director BE IN TOUCH Stay connected with your customers. Wherever they are. With Toshiba’s leading integrated solutions. Be free. Be smart. Be in touch. Be Together Commerce. 4 Programme Notes 3 April 2016 Carl Nielsen (1865–1931) Overture: Masquerade (1906) PROGRAMME NOTE & Like his contemporary Sibelius, Carl Nielsen is best Even before the curtain goes up, the Masquerade COMPOSER PROFILE WRITER known for his symphonies. But, also like Sibelius, overture flings wide the doors on the opera’s STEPHEN JOHNSON he too wrote plenty of fine music for the stage: glittering 18th century setting. The bustling energy of during the years 1908–14 Nielsen was a conductor the opening, the swinging waltz theme that follows, at the Royal Danish Theatre. His last years at the aptly convey the excited preparations for the opera’s theatre were stormy and controversial, but even masked ball. A lighter theme in two-time – elegant after his resignation he continued to write theatre 18th century dance music with a Danish folk accent – music, including his colourful and today widely loved provides contrast, but the end is all joyous energy. music for Adam Oehlenschläger’s play Aladdin (1918–19). There are also two operas. The Biblical epic Saul and David (1898–1901) has its champions, but the more general view is that Nielsen’s comic opera Masquerade, is the real success story – for many Danes it is simply the Danish national opera, completely upstaging the play by Ludvig Holberg on which it is based. MASQUERADE: IN BRIEF The day after a masquerade Nielsen composed Masquerade surprisingly quickly – ball Leander is reminiscing with most of it was written during 1905. The Overture his valet, and tells him about was added in 1906, just in time for the premiere. Leonora, a girl he met at the 1906 was also the 150th anniversary of the birth ball and summarily got engaged of Mozart, and around the time he was writing to. Leander’s father hears of the overture, Nielsen wrote an essay in which he the drunken arrangement and argued (somewhat controversially in those days) is furious at his son because that the ‘Classical’ Mozart was greater than the great he had already arranged a Romantic hero Beethoven. Something of Nielsen’s marriage for him with a country growing love and admiration for Mozart can be felt in heiress, the daughter of Leonard. Masquerade: the wit, playfulness, the delightful irony Leonard then complains that his could all be described as Mozartean, and so could daughter has also fallen in love the lively, sophisticated vocal ensembles – one area with someone else and refuses in which Mozart unquestionably did put Beethoven to honour her commitment to in the shade. marry Leander. In the final act, at another masquerade, it turns out the Leonora was Leander’s betrothed all along! The opera then finishes with a chorus extolling the virtues of the The poster for the world premiere of Masquerade in masquerade. Copenhagen, on 11 November 1906. lso.co.uk Composer Profile 5 Carl Nielsen Composer Profile ‘If music were to assume human form and explain its essence, it may say something like this: ‘I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my chief delight to break it’’. Carl Nielsen Often described as a ‘nationalist’, Nielsen’s role in Denmark’s rise to At 14 Nielsen enrolled in the army as a trumpeter, making himself musical nationhood is without parallel. Indeed, many of the songs useful in military bands by learning a wide range of instruments. How Danish schoolchildren are still taught today were composed by Nielsen. and when he first encountered classical music isn’t clear but by the But after the First World War Nielsen turned against nationalism, age of 19 he had become accomplished enough as performer and describing it pungently as a ‘spiritual syphilis’. Having hymned composer to attend the Copenhagen Conservatory. Throughout his nationhood in his Third Symphony (1911) he portrayed its decline life Nielsen remained a fascinating mixture of earthy simplicity and from the ‘high and beautiful’ into ‘senseless hate’ in the mechanistic intellectual sophistication, reading widely and keeping up to date with strutting march rhythms of the Fifth (1922). musical innovations. Initially he reacted against Wagner’s modernism, but in later years he was fascinated by what progressive-minded Nielsen’s national consciousness was of a very different kind from composers like Bartók, Schoenberg and Hindemith were doing. that of most late 19th and early 20th-century national composers. His very last works show him as keen as ever to extend his musical His family were Danish peasants on the island of Funen (Fyn) and horizons, though without sacrificing the rootedness. his father was leader of a village band. Young Carl soon joined as a violinist, and his first compositional efforts were dance tunes. Thus, unlike the vast majority of nationally inclined composers, Nielsen didn’t have to ‘discover’ his country’s indigenous culture: it was in his blood. If he needed a folk tune in one of his works, all he had to do was compose one; it could hardly have been more authentic. 6 Programme Notes 3 April 2016 Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) Symphony No 3 in C major Op 52 (1907) 1 ALLEGRO MODERATO the virtuoso pianist and composer Ferrucio 2 ANDANTINO CON MOTO, QUASI ALLEGRETTO Busoni. But Sibelius was probably also thinking 3 MODERATO – ALLEGRO MA NON TANTO of Beethoven, whose Fifth Symphony delivers its epochal message in around half an hour. PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER At the time when Sibelius was labouring on his Third STEPHEN JOHNSON Symphony (1904–7), his home country Finland was FIRST MOVEMENT still a Grand Duchy of Russia. Full independence was The Third Symphony’s opening movement could only to come in 1917, when Finns were able to take be seen as a study in austere Nordic economy. The COMPOSER PROFILE advantage of the upheaval caused by the Russian opening theme – hushed but full of potential energy – PAGE 8 Revolution. After its triumphant premiere in 1902, is presented by cellos and basses alone. Gradually Sibelius’ Second Symphony had been quickly seized the full orchestra enters as the music builds to a upon by Finns as a ‘Liberation Symphony’ – the ardent vigorous climax then, with minimal transition, cellos expression of his people’s yearning for freedom. change the mood with a long, melancholic second But Sibelius had already begun to turn his back on theme. Eventually, after a long, masterfully sustained his romantic nationalist past. The Second Symphony crescendo, the opening theme returns at exactly shows Sibelius wrestling as never before with musical the right moment to announce the beginning of the form: how to evolve a coherent, organic argument recapitulation.