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London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Thursday 26 January 2017 7.30pm Barbican Hall BRAHMS AND STRAUSS Brahms Piano Concerto No 1 INTERVAL Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn London’s Symphony Orchestra Strauss Death and Transfiguration Alpesh Chauhan conductor Benjamin Grosvenor piano Concert finishes approx 9.35pm 2 Welcome 26 January 2017 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief A very warm welcome to tonight’s LSO performance 2017/18 SEASON LAUNCH at the Barbican. This evening we are delighted to be joined by two musicians making their debuts with On 17 January the LSO revealed the full details of the Orchestra: conductor Alpesh Chauhan, who is its 2017/18 Season, the first with Sir Simon Rattle becoming known both in the UK and internationally as Music Director. Booking opens to the public for his work with leading orchestras; and pianist online at 10am on Friday 3 February, and all Benjamin Grosvenor, who has steadily built his of the concert listings can be found on our website. career after winning the Keyboard Final of the 2004 BBC Young Musician of the Year competition at just alwaysmoving.lso.co.uk 11 years old. This evening’s programme explores pivotal works MAHLER SYMPHONY NO 6 LIVE STREAM: from two beloved Romantic composers. We begin NOW ON YOUTUBE with Brahms’ Piano Concerto No 1, before hearing his Variations on a Theme by Haydn – which, although Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO’s performance of composed at the age of 40, was Brahms’ first major Mahler’s Symphony No 6 and Mark-Anthony work for orchestra alone. Paired with these pieces Turnage’s Remembering was streamed live on the is Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration, a 25-year-old LSO’s YouTube channel on 19 January, preceded composer’s ambitious meditation on life itself, and by a backstage tour with presenter Rachel Leach. one of his most celebrated works. The broadcast is now available to watch again. Thank you to our media partners, Classic FM, who youtube.com/lso have recommended this concert to their listeners. I hope you enjoy tonight’s performance and that you A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS are able to join us again soon. On Sunday 5 February violinist Janine Jansen gives the first concert of her The LSO offers great benefits for groups of 10+, LSO Artist Portrait series, performing Bernstein’s including 20% discount on standard tickets, a Serenade with conductor Sir Antonio Pappano. dedicated group booking hotline and, for larger groups, free hot drinks and interval receptions. At this concert we are delighted to welcome: The Friends of St Albans Abbey Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Richard Wimberley & Friends Managing Director Hertford U3A Gerrards Cross Community Association lso.co.uk/groups lso.co.uk Interview 3 Alpesh Chauhan In Conversation What have been some of the highlights of your career so far? I have had some really fantastic opportunities that have helped me develop at this crucial early stage. One particular highlight was conducting my first Bruckner symphony with the CBSO this season – the orchestra I grew up with, and where I later became Assistant Conductor. The post gave me a brilliant education, as it offered unrestricted access to all of the CBSO rehearsals, concerts and two years shadowing Andris Nelsons. Of course, there have been some other great opportunities for me including concerts with the BBC orchestras, and debuts this season with the Philharmonia and the LSO! What are you looking forward to about your performance with the LSO? It’s such an honour to have this concert with the LSO – one that I’ve been mentally and musically preparing for since we started discussing it around 18 months ago! I think for a 26-year-old to have an opportunity to work with the world-class LSO is a real privilege, and one that I will do everything I can to make the absolute most of. The Alpesh Chauhan makes his conducting debut with the Orchestra at repertoire, though, is the biggest highlight. I feel very lucky but also this evening’s concert. Ahead of the performance, Rebecca Sharp extremely excited to be able to share this Brahms/Strauss programme spoke to him about his career as a conductor, this evening’s with an orchestra that really knows how to perform these works. repertoire and working with Benjamin Grosvenor. I performed the Brahms Piano Concerto with Benjamin Grosvenor Having been Principal Cello with the CBSO Youth Orchestra, earlier this season with the CBSO, and I’m really interested to see what made you decide to go down the conducting route how the piece has changed for both of us (still being relatively young!) rather than the instrumental? in the interim period. We really enjoyed working with each other in Birmingham (Benjamin is a real chamber musician and I found it so I used to love playing in orchestras more than any other aspect of natural and easy to work with him on this piece, which is more a my music-making when I was younger. When I started playing in full symphony for piano and orchestra!) so it will be great to bring the symphony orchestras, I developed a real fascination with the people concerto to London for both of our LSO debuts. at the front and the dark art that they practised! This led me to set up orchestras of my own so I could try my hand at the craft, and to then take part in a conducting masterclass offered by the CBSO Youth Orchestra. From that point on, I never looked back. I loved being in the middle of the sound, shaping and crafting the musical journey and sound-world. Read the rest of this interview and more at lso.co.uk/blog 4 Programme Notes 26 January 2017 Johannes Brahms (1833–97) Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor Op 15 (1854–58) 1 MAESTOSO Such incomprehension may be surprising today; 2 ADAGIO nevertheless it’s possible to feel some compassion 3 RONDO: ALLEGRO NON TROPPO for the Leipzigers. However much they may have prided themselves on their musical sophistication, BENJAMIN GROSVENOR PIANO they simply weren’t prepared for what Brahms was offering them. Here was a piano concerto conceived PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER ‘My Concerto has had here a brilliant and decisive in much grander terms than most contemporary STEPHEN JOHNSON is the failure’. Brahms was writing to his friend, the violinist symphonies. Not since Beethoven had anyone author of Bruckner Remembered and composer Joseph Joachim, the morning after attempted anything on this scale in concerto (Faber). He also contributes the Leipzig premiere of his First Piano Concerto in form. And while the piano writing may have been regularly to BBC Music Magazine, January 1859. He wasn’t exaggerating. A performance hugely challenging, it wasn’t the kind of glamorous and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 in Hannover a few days earlier had been received display-piece that mid-19th century audiences had (Discovering Music), Radio 4 politely, though without enthusiasm. But this come to expect. The orchestral contribution was and the World Service. performance, in Germany’s unofficial musical capital, much weightier than normal in a concerto, and the could not have been less like the breakthrough the harmonic language must have seemed exceptionally 25-year-old composer had been hoping for. In the dissonant to its first hearers. And in place of the same letter, Brahms described the audience’s usual scintillating acrobatic solo cadenzas, Brahms reaction to both his music and his playing (Brahms had provided a series of intensely serious dramatic himself played the solo part): ‘At the conclusion three monologues for the piano. pairs of hands were brought together very slowly, JOSEPH JOACHIM (1831–1907) whereupon a perfectly distinct hissing from all sides It wasn’t that Brahms had set out with the intention was a Hungarian violinist, conductor, forbade any such demonstration. There is nothing of writing something difficult. Even as a young composer and teacher. He is noted more to say about this episode, for not a soul has composer he showed little interest in novelty for for reviving interest in the Violin said a word to me about the work!’. its own sake. For an explanation we have to look at Sonatas and Partitas of J S Bach, the First Piano Concerto’s history. Initially Brahms as well as Beethoven’s Violin ‘My Concerto has had here a hadn’t intended to write a concerto at all. His first Concerto, both now key pieces brilliant and decisive failure’. plans were for a symphony – a massively ambitious in the repertoire. Joachim’s close orchestral work that would justify the composer collaboration with Brahms produced Johannes Brahms Robert Schumann’s prophecy that Brahms would the Violin Concerto in D major, and become Germany’s leading symphonist. A four- several other major violin works Unfortunately the critics weren’t so restrained. movement sketch was nearly completed in 1854. were written for him, including For the reviewer Edward Bernsdorf, the Concerto had But Brahms was plagued by doubts and insecurities: Schumann’s Concerto in D major ‘nothing to offer but hopeless desolation and aridity … was this an orchestral work at all, or might it be and Dvorˇák’s Concerto in A minor. for more than three-quarters of an hour one must more effective as a sonata for two pianos? The endure this rooting and rummaging, this straining example of Beethoven’s symphonies was just and tugging, this tearing and patching of phrases and too intimidating. As he put it years later, ‘You’ve flourishes! Not only must one take in this fermenting no idea how discouraging it is with such a giant mass; one must also swallow a dessert of the marching behind you’.