Mahler Transcending London Symphony Orchestra Simon Rattle , Conductor

Friday–Monday, May 4–7, 2018

Friday, May 4, 2018 at 8:00 pm Symphony No. 9

Sunday, May 6, 2018 at 3:00 pm Das Lied von der Erde

Monday, May 7, 2018 at 8:00 pm Symphony No. 10 (completed by Deryck Cooke)

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These programs are supported by the Leon Levy Fund for Symphonic Masters. Symphonic Masters is made possible in part by endowment support from UBS. This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center.

David Geffen Hall Great Performers

Support is provided by Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser, Audrey Love Charitable Foundation, Great Performers Circle, Chairman’s Council, and Friends of Lincoln Center. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Endowment support for Symphonic Masters is provided by the Leon Levy Fund. Endowment support is also provided by UBS. Nespresso is the Official Coffee of Lincoln Center NewYork-Presbyterian is the Official Hospital of Lincoln Center

We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might distract the performers and your fellow audience members. In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces . The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building. Friday, May 4, 2018, at 8:00 pm m Pre-concert lecture by Christopher H. Gibbs at 6:45 pm in the a Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse r

g Symphonic Masters o r P

London Symphony Orchestra

e Simon Rattle, Conductor h T MAHLER Symphony No. 9 in D major (1908–09) Andante comodo Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb Rondo-Burleske: Allegro assai. Sehr trotzig Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend

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David Geffen Hall Great Performers

UPCOMING GREAT PERFORMERS EVENTS:

Sunday, May 6 at 3:00 pm in David Geffen Hall London Symphony Orchestra Simon Rattle, conductor Stuart Skelton, tenor Christian Gerhaher, baritone MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde

Monday, May 7 at 8:00 pm in David Geffen Hall London Symphony Orchestra Simon Rattle, conductor MAHLER: Symphony No. 10 (completed by Deryck Cooke)

Saturday, May 12 at 7:30 pm in Alice Tully Hall Sol Gabetta, cello Bertrand Chamayou, piano BEETHOVEN: Cello Sonata in F major, Op. 5, No. 1 BRITTEN: Sonata in C major, Op. 65 CHOPIN: Sonata in G minor; Grand Duo on themes from Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable

For tickets, call (212) 721-6500 or visit LCGreatPerformers.org. Call the Lincoln Center Info Request Line at (212) 875-5766 to learn about program cancellations or to request a Great Performers brochure.

Visit LCGreatPerformers.org for more information relating to this season’s programs.

Join the conversation: @LincolnCenter Great Performers I Conductor’s Note

By Sir Simon Rattle e t About 25 years ago, I made my debut with the Vienna Philharmonic,

o which was broadcast live on the radio. I begged the engineers to make a copy of the performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. They N

were very sweet and grabbed the only cassette they could find,

s which I later discovered also had the composer’s Das Lied von der ’ Erde on it. It was fairly surreal to hear these two masterpieces played r simultaneously, but it also made me reflect that I was hearing music

o which Mahler had composed but never heard live. t

c In this series of concerts, we play all three of Mahler’s late sym -

u phonies (including Das Lied ), which all had posthumous premieres, and were all shot through with memories and experiences of his d New York years. They were all on his composing desk while he was n the busy head of the New York Philharmonic and conducting a wide

o swath of repertoire including Elgar, Debussy, Chabrier, and Rachmaninoff, endlessly curious as he was. It was in New York that C he heard the cylinders of Chinese music which so influenced Das Lied , and the distant but shattering drum strokes from a policeman’s funeral that unforgettably punctuate the finale of his Tenth Symphony. All three of these pieces have followed me through my entire musical life, and I recently worked out, to my horror, that I have conducted the complete Tenth Symphony over 100 times—not that it makes the piece any easier! Or less profoundly emotionally shat - tering for that matter.

Without New York, these three masterpieces would have been totally different: Even the urban landscape of the third movement of the Ninth Symphony, unparalleled in his entire oeuvre, would be unthinkable without his deep connection with this city. So for me to bring my new musical family, the extraordinary London Symphony Orchestra, to New York to make this epic journey is a very special experience and a perfect way to carry on our long and warm relation - ship with our loyal partners at Lincoln Center. I look forward to many years of this happy collaboration.

By Christopher H. Gibbs

m Symphony No. 9 in D major (1908–09)

a GUSTAV MAHLER r Born July 7, 1860, in Kalištë, Bohemia

g Died May 18, 1911, in Vienna o

r Approximate length: 80 minutes P

With Mahler’s last works, it has primarily been musicians, critics, and listen - ers who have drawn connections with farewell and death. A similar situation e applies to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, premiered just nine days before h the Russian composer’s death in 1893, and a piece, like Mahler’s Ninth t

Symphony, that ends with an emotional slow movement. Mahler, however, provided little specific comment about his final three pieces: Das Lied von n der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), the Ninth Symphony, and the unfinished o Tenth Symphony. Concerning the Ninth, he informed his protégé Bruno

Walter that “the work itself…is a very satisfactory addition to my little fam - s ily.” This is an interesting association, given the recent death of his four-year- e old daughter Maria, and may indicate how successfully Mahler sublimated t his feelings into his music. Also suggestive are some indications that he o scribbled in the orchestral draft. In the first movement he wrote: “O Youth! Lost! O Love! Vanished!” and in the finale: “O Beauty! O Love! Farewell! N Farewell!” These were personal notes, not meant for public consumption. (Although they do not appear in the final score, colleagues such as Alban Berg and the conductor Willem Mengelberg learned of them. The latter noted in his score: “The Ninth Symphony is: Farewell from all whom he loved—and from the world!—and from his art, his life, his music.”)

The opening of the first movement ( Andante comodo ) picks up from the ending of “Das Abschied” (“The Farewell”), the final song of Das Lied von der Erde , with its nine-fold repetition of the word ewig (“forever”). The opening rhythm, presented by cellos and a horn repeatedly intoning the pitch “A,” returns at crucial structural moments in the movement, including at the climax “with utmost force.” Soon after the premiere in 1912, the rhythm was likened to a heartbeat, an image Leonard Bernstein later popularized. A nostalgic D-major theme gradually emerges in the second violins, accumu - lating force through a series of fragments played by strings, harp, clarinets, and muted horns. Commentators have discerned various allusions in this movement, not just to Mahler’s own music, but also to other compositions, including Johann Strauss Jr.’s waltz “Freut euch des Lebens” (“Enjoy Life”) and, more tellingly, Beethoven’s “Lebewohl” (“Farewell”) Piano Sonata, Op. 81a. Berg believed that “The whole movement is permeated with the pre - monition of death. …Again and again it occurs, all the elements of worldly dreaming culminate in it…which is why the tenderest passages are followed by tremendous climaxes like new eruptions of a volcano.” Great Performers I Notes on the Program

The slow first and last movements frame two faster paced, more ironic central movements. Constantin Floros has called the second, which begins “in the tempo of a relaxed Ländler, ” the “summation” of Mahler’s dance styles. Although it starts innocently, it takes on the flavor of a “Dance of Death,” as T.W. Adorno observed. The following Rondo-Burleske likewise offers a wide range of moods and ideas, including the gestures of popular music that aroused charges of banality against Mahler. The movement shows Mahler’s increasing interest in counterpoint, which took his studies of Bach to new extremes. Fugal passages mix with marches, grotesque and angry sections with more tender moments. A quieter, phantasmagorical middle section looks forward to the last movement.

The final Adagio opens with a forceful unison violin theme reminiscent of the slow movement of Bruckner’s final Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s last opera Parsifal , both of which also project lush, hymn-like meditations. All of the Ninth Symphony’s movements, except for the furious coda of the third, end in disin - tegration, approaching the condition of chamber music. The incredible last page of the last movement offers the least rousing finale in the history of music, but undoubtedly one of the most moving. Mahler provides a final self-allusion, played by the first violins, to the fourth of his Kindertotenlieder (“Songs of Dead Children”). The unsung song, played by the first violins, originally carried the words Der Tag ist schön auf jenen Höh’n (“The day is beautiful on those heights”), telling of parents’ vision of their dead children at play on a distant mountain. The music becomes ever softer and stiller, almost more silence than sound, until we may be reminded of the heartbeat that opened the symphony, but now realize it is consciousness of our own heartbeat. In this extraordinary way Mahler implicates his listeners into the work, which ends ersterbend — “dying away.”

Psychologists have explored the various stages of dealing with death, including denial, anger, and acceptance, and one might argue that all these and more are conveyed in Mahler’s last works. One finds denial in Das Lied von der Erde through the ecstatic celebration of nature and life, but also rage, and ultimately peace. The Rondo-Burleske movement of the Ninth Symphony is an even more terrifying expression of rage, while the last moments of the work transcend acceptance so as to suggest some sort of visionary state.

Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College.

e G I B h L E H t

E V I L t O

e Simon Rattle e Sir Simon Rattle was born in Liverpool, England, and studied at the Royal

M Academy of Music. From 1980 to 1998, he was principal conductor and artistic adviser of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and was appointed music director in 1990. In 2002 he took up his current position of artistic director and chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, where he will remain until June 2018. Sir Simon took up the position of music direc - tor of the London Symphony Orchestra in September 2017.

In addition to fulfilling a taxing concert schedule between Berlin and London, Sir Simon regularly tours within Europe, North America, and Asia. His part - nership with the Berlin Philharmonic has also broken new ground with the education program Zukunft@Bphil, earning the Comenius Prize in 2004, the Schiller Special Prize from the city of Mannheim in 2005, and the Golden Camera and the Urania Medal in 2007. He and the Berlin Philharmonic were also appointed International UNICEF Ambassadors in the same year—the first time this honor has been conferred on an artistic ensemble.

In September 2017, Sir Simon opened his first season as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra with a program of English music, a semi- staged opera of La damnation de Faust , and the Stravinsky ballets. In November, he toured Asia with the Berlin Philharmonic and soloists Yuja Wang and Seong-Jin Cho. The remainder of the 2017–18 season takes Sir Simon on a European and U.S. tour with the London Symphony Orchestra, to Munich with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and he will return to Baden-Baden with the Berlin Philharmonic for a production of Parsifal .

Sir Simon was knighted in 1994 and in the New Year’s Honors of 2014, he received the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II. Great Performers I Meet the Artists

London Symphony Orchestra

The London Symphony Orchestra aims to bring the greatest music to the greatest number of people. This is at the heart of everything it does. This com - mitment to serve music and the people who love music is borne of a unique ethos developed over more than 100 years. Established in 1904 by a number of London’s finest musicians, the LSO is a self-governing musical collective built on artistic ownership and partnership. The orchestra is still owned by its members and has a signature sound emanating from the combined zeal and virtuosity of these 95 brilliant musicians who come from around the world; its music-making remains firmly at the center of the orchestra’s activities.

The LSO is resident orchestra at the Barbican in the City of London, where it gives 70 symphonic concerts every year, and performs a further 70 concerts worldwide on tour. The orchestra works with a family of artists that includes the world’s greatest conductors—Sir Simon Rattle as music director, Gianandrea Noseda and François-Xavier Roth as principal guest conductors, Michael Tilson Thomas as conductor laureate, and André Previn as conductor emeritus. LSO Discovery, the orchestra’s community and education program based at LSO St. Luke’s, brings the work of the LSO to all parts of society and engages with 60,000 people every year. The LSO reaches out much further with its own recording label—LSO Live, the first of its kind, which launched in 1999—and now streams its music to millions around the world. Millions more have enjoyed the LSO through its reputation as a leading orchestra for film; it has recorded hundreds of classic scores, including films from the Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Indiana Jones series. Every year the orchestra also gives a free outdoor concert in Trafalgar Square. Combined, these activities reflect the LSO’s cooperative spirit and its ongoing commitment to making music as accessible as possible to the greatest number of people.

The orchestra extends thanks to the generous supporters of the American London Symphony Orchestra Foundation: Alan & Sally Bell, Tony & Gisela Bloom, John & Glenda Burkhart, Brian & Susan Dickie, Mr & Mrs Robert Marchbank, Reidler Foundation, Christopher Stewart, and those who wish to remain anonymous.

And the Advisory Council to the American London Symphony Orchestra Foundation: David Chavolla, Philip C. Keevil, Shirley Lord Rosenthal, Ilona Nemeth Quasha, André Previn KBE, Louise Shackelton, Sir Nigel Sheinwald GCMG, Ernest Steiner, Sir Howard Stringer, Martin Sullivan, Michael Tilson Thomas. G r

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Lincoln Center’s Great Performers

Initiated in 1965, Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series offers classical and contemporary music performances from the world’s outstanding symphony orchestras, vocalists, chamber ensembles, and recitalists. One of the most significant music presentation series in the world, Great Performers runs from October through June with offerings in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Walter Reade Theater, and other performance spaces around New York City. From symphonic masterworks, lieder recitals, and Sunday morning coffee concerts to films and groundbreaking productions specially commissioned by Lincoln Center, Great Performers offers a rich spectrum of programming throughout the season.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) serves three primary roles: pre - senter of artistic programming, national leader in arts and education and com - munity relations, and manager of the Lincoln Center campus. A presenter of more than 3,000 free and ticketed events, performances, tours, and educa - tional activities annually, LCPA offers 15 programs, series, and festivals includ - ing American Songbook, Great Performers, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Midsummer Night Swing, the Mostly Mozart Festival, and the White Light Festival, as well as the Emmy Award–winning Live From Lincoln Center , which airs nationally on PBS. As manager of the Lincoln Center campus, LCPA pro - vides support and services for the Lincoln Center complex and the 11 resident organizations. In addition, LCPA led a $1.2 billion campus renovation, com - pleted in October 2012.

Lincoln Center Programming Department Jane Moss, Ehrenkranz Artistic Director Hanako Yamaguchi, Director, Music Programming Jon Nakagawa, Director, Contemporary Programming Jill Sternheimer, Director, Public Programming Jordana Leigh, Director, David Rubenstein Atrium Lisa Takemoto, Production Manager Charles Cermele, Producer, Contemporary Programming Mauricio Lomelin, Producer, Contemporary Programming Andrew C. Elsesser, Associate Director, Programming Luna Shyr, Senior Editor Regina Grande Rivera, Associate Producer Viviana Benitez, Associate Producer, David Rubenstein Atrium Walker Beard, Production Coordinator Meera Dugal, Programming Manager, David Rubenstein Atrium Nana Asase, Assistant to the Artistic Director Olivia Fortunato, Programming Assistant