Shostakovich Ninth Symphony
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Thursday 30 January 2020 7.30–9.15pm Barbican LSO SEASON CONCERT SHOSTAKOVICH NINTH SYMPHONY Prokofiev Symphony No 1, ‘Classical’ Mozart Violin Concerto No 3 NOSEDA Interval Mussorgsky orch Rimsky-Korsakov Prelude to ‘Khovanshchina’ Shostakovich Symphony No 9 Gianandrea Noseda conductor Christian Tetzlaff violin 6pm Barbican Hall LSO Platforms: Guildhall Artists Kathy Chow piano Mozart Piano Sonata No 9 in D major, K 311 Prokofiev Piano Sonata No 7 in B-flat major Welcome Latest News On Our Blog our season theme of ‘roots and origins’, and DONATELLA FLICK LSO LUNAR NEW YEAR PREMIERES: the concert concludes with Shostakovich’s CONDUCTING COMPETITION LSO DISCOVERY COMPOSERS PAST Ninth Symphony, a work which also AND PRESENT refers back to an earlier era, described by Applications are now open for the 16th Gianandrea Noseda as Shostakovich at his Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition Following a sold-out debut in 2019, artist ‘most classical’. in 2021, founded in 1990 by Donatella Flick collective Tangram returned to LSO St Luke’s and celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. in January. We caught up with composers Before tonight’s concert, musicians from Raymond Yiu, Jasmin Kent Rodgman and the Guildhall School performed a recital on • lso.co.uk/more/news Alex Ho – all LSO Discovery composers – to the LSO stage in the Barbican Hall. These find out more about the music they wrote performances, which are free to attend for the concert. elcome to tonight’s LSO concert across the season, provide a platform for WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS at the Barbican. We are delighted the next generation of musicians, and CLASSIC FM RECOMMENDED CONCERTS: to welcome back Principal Guest complement the repertoire heard in the St Columba’s College SPRING 2020 Conductor Gianandrea Noseda for this evening concert. Charters School performance, as he continues his survey of We are proud to have been Classic FM’s Shostakovich’s symphonies, a major project I hope you enjoy tonight’s concert, and Please ensure all phones are switched off. Orchestra in the City of London for over 17 that began in 2016 and is being recorded for that you will join us again soon. In February Photography and audio/video recording years. Don’t miss our round-up of Classic future release on LSO Live. we look forward to performances of are not permitted during the performance. FM's recommended concerts for spring and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by a look at where the music sits in the history Tonight’s programme looks back to the Sir Simon Rattle. At the end of the month, of the LSO. Classical period in music, opening with Elim Chan conducts the Orchestra in Ravel Prokofiev’s First Symphony, a witty and Rachmaninov, alongside a recent work • lso.co.uk/more/blog reference back to the era of Haydn and by Elizabeth Ogonek and a premiere from by Mozart, followed by Mozart’s own Third Panufnik composer James Hoyle. Violin Concerto. It is a great pleasure to be joined by Christian Tetzlaff as soloist for this performance, and we look forward to a series of concerts with him in our 2020/21 season. After the interval, Mussorgsky’s folk-infused Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Prelude to the opera Khovanshchina builds on Managing Director 2 Welcome 30 January 2020 Tonight’s Concert In Brief Coming Up rokofiev’s First Symphony opens PROGRAMME CONTRIBUTORS Saturday 15 February 7pm Sunday 1 March 7pm the concert. It was composed LSO St Luke’s Barbican in 1917, the year of the Russian David Nice writes, lectures and broadcasts Revolution, but it has a rustic simplicity that on music, notably for BBC Radio 3 and LSO DISCOVERY SYMPHONIC GOSPEL SPIRIT keeps a distance from political upheavals. BBC Music Magazine. His books include SOUNDHUB SHOWCASE: PHASE II The ‘Classical’ symphony was imagined on studies of Strauss, Elgar, Tchaikovsky and Orchestral arrangements of gospel classics the smaller scale of a symphony by Haydn Stravinsky, and a Prokofiev biography, From Composers on Phase II of LSO Discovery’s and André J Thomas' celebratory Mass. or Mozart, with clear textures and melodies Russia to the West 1891–1935. Soundhub scheme showcase new music and harking back to an age before Romanticism. are joined by LSO musicians. André J Thomas conductor Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto follows, which Andrew Stewart is a freelance music NaGuanda Nobles soprano was written when the composer was 19 years journalist and writer. He is the author of LSO Soundhub is generously supported by Jason Dungee tenor old and is noted for its serene and melodious The LSO at 90 and contributes to a variety Susie Thomson Brandon Boyd piano slow movement. of specialist classical music publications. London Adventist Chorale Thursday 27 February 7.30pm Community Choirs from around London After the interval, the Prelude to Mussorgsky’s Andrew Huth is a musician, writer and Barbican unfinished operaKhovanshchina, orchestrated translator who writes extensively on French, Saturday 7 March 2.30pm by the composer’s friend Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian and Eastern European music. DAPHNIS AND CHLOE Barbican evokes dawn on the Moscow river, before the programme ends with Shostakovich’s James Hoyle Thymiaterion (world premiere) * LSO DISCOVERY Ninth Symphony, a piece which bypasses the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 3 FAMILY CONCERT: heroism, grandeur and finality associated Elizabeth Ogonek All These Lighted Things HOW TO BUILD AN ORCHESTRA with a composer’s ‘Ninth’. – three little dances for orchestra Ravel Daphnis and Chloe – Suite No 2 When it comes to making music, there's For Noseda, the Ninth is ‘Shostakovich nothing for it like an orchestra. Learn how at his most ‘classical’’, but a modern Elim Chan conductor the instruments come together to make statement nonetheless. ‘Stalin wanted a Lukáš Vondráček piano on-stage magic. celebration of the victory of Russia, and Shostakovich came out with a sort of opera *Commissioned through the Panufnik Composers Jessica Cottis conductor buffa symphony,’ he says. ‘Short, witty, lots Scheme, generously supported by Lady Hamlyn Rachel Leach presenter of sarcasm. I can really feel his wish to go and The Helen Hamlyn Trust against what was expected of him.’ Recommended by Tonight’s Concert 3 Sergei Prokofiev Symphony No 1 in D major Op 25, ‘Classical’ 1917 / note by David Nice 1 Allegro then they’ll kick up a fuss about a new The simple fact is that in the early part of joyful that it might, he thought, ‘verge on 2 Larghetto Prokofievian audacity, to the effect that he the year, Prokofiev was reasonably confident the indecently irresponsible’. He completed 3 Gavotte (Non troppo allegro) wouldn’t leave Mozart to rest in peace and about the upheavals. During the February the orchestration that September in his 4 Finale (Molto vivace) grabs at him with his dirty hands, smearing revolution he had been in Petrograd, as mother’s favoured southern health resort pure classical pearls with his Prokofievian his alma mater St Petersburg had been of Yessentuki. y 1917 the young Prokofiev was dissonances, but true friends will understand renamed in World War I, dodging the bullets known to his fellow Russians, that the style of my symphony is simply true on street corners, and he was glad to get The premiere, which Prokofiev conducted if not as yet to the world at Mozartian Classicism and will appreciate it, out of the ‘foul city’ in the spring. Yet as the the following April in Petrograd just before large, as the impudent composer of spicy while the public will probably just be glad diaries reveal, the ‘happy optimism’ of his his departure for the US, proved plain piano miniatures rife with nose-thumbing that it is uncomplicated and cheerful and character welcomed the form of provisional sailing, even though he had anticipated ‘wrong’ notes, of two piano concertos in will surely applaud it.‘ government proposed by the revolutionaries. some antagonism from the ‘Revolutionary which his own talents as a virtuoso were orchestra’. It was a success, pure and simple. more extensively served, and of a raucous Everyone, after all, took Prokofiev’s orchestral work, the Scythian Suite, drawn — self-styled ‘pure Mozartian Classicism’ at from a ballet rejected by the impresario ‘True friends will understand that the style of my symphony is simply true face value; the lessons he had learnt from Sergei Diaghilev. his favourite professor Nikolai Tcherepnin – Mozartian Classicism and will appreciate it … ’ who inclined more to Haydn than Mozart – Prokofiev’s symphonic ambitions were aired — and from his own conducting of a student in a three-movement student work of 1908, version of The Marriage of Figaro had then scaled down in the bright and breezy It is, perhaps, not so extraordinary that He was buoyant, too, to find a place in the not gone awry. Our own interest, even so, Sinfonietta the following year. He was never Prokofiev should be venturing into the kind country just a short distance from the dacha is much less in the perfect sonata-form a composer to repeat past successes, and of so-called neo-Classicism supposedly zone, where most Petrograders brought their workings of the Classical style than in in the May 1917 entry from his revelatory ‘discovered’ by Stravinsky several years later city ways to bear on the peace and quiet. the symphony’s youthful high spirits and diaries, published now in an English with Pulcinella; after all, Tchaikovsky had Here, at a simple farm serving up healthy surprising good humour. translation by Anthony Phillips (my own time-travelled long before in works like the food, he went walking and composed whole is used here), he shows delight at how the Rococo Variations and his opera The Queen stretches of the ‘Classical’ symphony that Its scoring is clean and clear, excelling in the ‘Classical’ symphony he has half-composed of Spades.