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London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Sunday 14 June 2015 7.30pm Barbican Hall LSO INTERNATIONAL VIOLIN FESTIVAL ALINA IBRAGIMOVA Mozart Violin Concerto No 3 SundayINTERVAL 21 September 2014 7.30pm BarbicanMahler Symphony Hall No 1 (‘Titan’) London’s Symphony Orchestra MAKEBernard UP Haitink A TITLE conductor HERE Alina Ibragimova violin Composer Work ComposerConcert finishes Work approx 9.30pm Composer Work The LSO International Violin Festival is Namegenerously conductor supported by Jonathan Moulds CBE Name soloist Concert finishes approx ?.??pm International Violin Festival Media Partner 2 Welcome 14 June 2015 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief A very warm welcome to the first of two concerts PICTURES IN MUSIC, 25 JUNE 2015 this month with conductor Bernard Haitink. It is always a pleasure for the LSO to work with Bernard, On 25 June, the LSO presents Pictures in Music, a who has a very special relationship with the concert that celebrates the joy of live music-making, Orchestra’s musicians, and we are delighted that inviting young musicians from across East London to he will return in September to open our 2015/16 share the Barbican stage with LSO musicians. They season with three concerts at the Barbican followed will perform Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition by a tour to Japan. Bernard Haitink is one of the with specially created illustrations projected onto world’s foremost interpreters of Mahler and he will the stage, Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending close the concert this evening with the composer’s with LSO Leader Gordan Nikolitch, and a new piece First Symphony. written especially for the occasion by Howard Moody. We also welcome this evening’s soloist, violinist lso.co.uk/pictures Alina Ibragimova, who opens the programme with Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 3. Sincere thanks must go to Jonathan Moulds for his generous support of THE SOUTH BANK SKY ARTS AWARDS the LSO International Violin Festival, and also to our media partner, The Strad, who have covered all the Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ Symphony No 10, which events in the Festival in print and online. was commissioned and given its world premiere by the LSO, has won a prestigious South Bank Sky Arts I hope that you enjoy the concert and can join award in the Classical category. The performance us again on 21 June for Bernard Haitink’s second was recorded by LSO Live, and is available to concert with the LSO this month, and on 28 June as download from our website. we welcome back conductor Pablo Heras-Casado for the final instalment of the Violin Festival. lsolive.lso.co.uk A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS The LSO offers great benefits for groups of 10+. Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Tonight we are delighted to welcome: Managing Director The Koncertclub National Junior College The One Style Tour, Taiwan Teruko Iwanaga and Friends and Swen Wiehen and Friends lso.co.uk/groups lso.co.uk 2015/16 Highlights 3 LSO Season 2015/16 Highlights Concerts at the Barbican London’s Symphony Orchestra 2015/16 SEASON OPENING CREATIVE GENIUSES MAN OF THE THEATRE SHAKESPEARE 400 with Bernard Haitink with Sir Simon Rattle with Valery Gergiev with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Gianandrea Noseda Bruckner Symphony No 7 Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande Stravinsky The Firebird Mendelssohn Tue 15 Sep 2015 directed by Peter Sellars Fri 9 Oct 2015 A Midsummer Night’s Dream Sat 9 & Sun 10 Jan 2016 Tue 16 Feb 2016 Mahler Symphony No 4 Stravinsky The Rite of Spring Sun 20 Sep 2015 Ravel, Dutilleux and Delage Sun 11 Oct 2015 Berlioz Romeo and Juliet with Leonidas Kavakos Sun 28 Feb 2016 Brahms Symphony No 1 Wed 13 Jan 2016 Bartók The Miraculous Mandarin Wed 23 Sep 2015 Sun 18 Oct 2015 Bruckner Symphony No 8 Thu 14 Apr 2016 020 7638 8891 lso.co.uk 4 Programme Notes 14 June 2015 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) Violin Concerto No 3 in G major K216 (1775) 1 ALLEGRO lyricism and an eloquent personal expressiveness 2 ADAGIO which we now recognise as being unique to the 3 RONDEAU: ALLEGRO composer, but which at the time marked a new stage in his artistic development. As he once ALINA IBRAGIMOVA VIOLIN wrote to his father after hearing another violinist play a particularly demanding concerto, ‘I am no Although the prevailing image of Mozart the lover of difficulties’. performer is that of a pianist, the part played by the violin in his early development as a musician was Mozart’s First Violin Concerto was composed in the an equally important one. How, indeed, could it be spring of 1773, and his second just over two years PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER otherwise when his father and teacher, Leopold, later in June 1775. Yet the most startling advance in LINDSAY KEMP is a senior was the author of Violinschule, one of the 18th artistic inspiration and identity occurs not between producer for BBC Radio 3, including century’s most influential and trenchant treatises these two, but in the three months which separate programming lunchtime concerts on violin technique? Accounts of the child prodigy’s the Second Concerto from the Third, which was from Wigmore Hall and LSO St Luke’s, triumphs throughout Europe suggest that, at that completed on 12 September. Suddenly, we are Artistic Director of the London stage at least, he was equally proficient on violin and hearing the 19-year-old Mozart as we know him Festival of Baroque Music, and keyboard, and right into the mid-1770s his letters from the great piano concertos of the 1780s – a regular contributor to home to his father contained reports of appearances elegant, witty, beguilingly changeable and, above Gramophone magazine. as a violinist. ‘I performed a symphony and played all, capable of writing music of surpassing beauty. Vanhal’s Violin Concerto in B-flat, which was unanimously applauded’, he wrote from Augsburg FIRST MOVEMENT in 1777. ‘In the evening at supper I played my The first movement finds Mozart in the rare act of Strasbourg concerto which went like oil. Everyone borrowing material from another work, the opening praised my beautiful, pure tone.’ orchestral section being based on an aria from his recent opera Il re pastore (The Shepherd King), in Despite these peripatetic successes, it was which the main character sings of his love for the Salzburg which was really the spiritual home of shepherd’s lot, unaware that he is of royal blood. Mozart’s violin music. It was there – where violin The implied mixture of nobility and carefree concerto movements were as likely to be heard contentment could not be a more apt way of as outdoor evening entertainment music or as an characterising the concerto movement. embellishment to a church service as in a concert hall – that he first played a concerto at the age SECOND MOVEMENT of seven, later toiled in the court orchestra, and, It is the slow movement, however, which has won between 1773 and 1775, composed his five violin this concerto a place in people’s hearts. ‘An adagio concertos. They may not probe the depths of his that seems to have fallen straight from heaven,’ is later Viennese piano concertos, but it is true to how the Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein described say that they all show some degree of Mozartian it, and indeed this is a movement that exhibits to inspiration, often of the most ravishing kind. The an outstanding degree that God-given talent for accent here is not on technical brilliance but on serene melodic perfection that was Mozart’s alone. lso.co.uk Programme Notes 5 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Composer Profile The nocturnal sound-world, too, is new to the violin Born in Salzburg on 27 January 1756, Mozart began concertos, with the orchestral strings muted and the to pick out tunes on his father’s keyboard before his oboes giving way to softer-toned flutes. fourth birthday. His first compositions were written down in the early months of 1761; later that year, FINALE the boy performed in public for the first time at the The ‘rondeau’ finale demonstrates another feature University of Salzburg. Mozart’s ambitious father, that was to colour many of Mozart’s later concertos, Leopold, court composer and Vice-Kapellmeister to namely a greater independence given to the wind the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, recognised the section, which even has the work’s final say. More money-making potential of his precocious son and noticeable, however, is the element of knowing pupil, embarking on a series of tours to the major skittishness that it introduces, nowhere more so courts and capital cities of Europe. than when, after the cheerful main theme has made its third appearance, orchestral pizzicatos In 1777 Wolfgang, now 21 and frustrated with life accompany an exaggeratedly powdered French-style as a musician-in-service at Salzburg, left home, gavotte, and then a more rustic tune is heard with visiting the court at Mannheim on the way to Paris. bagpipe-like drones from the soloist. Scholarship has The Parisian public gave the former child prodigy revealed this tune to be a popular song of the day a lukewarm reception, and he struggled to make known as ‘The Strasbourger’, and that this concerto money by teaching and composing new pieces is therefore the one that Mozart performed ‘like oil’. for wealthy patrons. A failed love affair and the The music lovers of Augsburg were fortunate indeed! death of his mother prompted Mozart to return to Salzburg, where he accepted the post of Court and Cathedral Organist. In 1780 he was commissioned to write an opera, Idomeneo, for the Bavarian court in Munich, where he was treated with great respect.