Thursday 15 March 2018 7.30–9.40pm Barbican Hall LSO SEASON CONCERT SIR JOHN ELIOT GARDINER Schumann Overture: Genoveva Mozart Piano Concerto No 25 SCHUMANN Interval Schumann Overture, Scherzo and Finale Schumann Symphony No 4 Sir John Eliot Gardiner conductor Piotr Anderszewski piano Welcome LSO News Online I hope that you enjoy tonight’s concert THE LSO’S 2018/19 SEASON YOUTUBE LIVE STREAM and that you are able to join us again soon. On Sunday 25 March, Principal Guest The LSO’s 2018/19 season is now on sale. Sunday’s concert with Sir John Eliot Gardiner Conductor François-Xavier Roth will conduct Highlights include Music Director Sir Simon was broadcast live and is available to watch the world premiere of Ewan Campbell’s Rattle’s exploration of folk-inspired music back for free at youtube.com/lso. Frail Skies, an LSO Panufnik Composers in his series Roots and Origins; Artist Portraits Scheme commission, alongside three with soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan works inspired by Debussy, and Debussy’s and pianist Daniil Trifonov; and eight WHY IS THE ORCHESTRA STANDING? best-loved orchestral piece, La mer. premieres across the season. Full listings are available at lso.co.uk/201819season. This evening’s performance of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony will be performed with A warm welcome to this evening’s LSO concert some members of the Orchestra standing. at the Barbican. Tonight we are delighted GRUPPEN AT TATE MODERN Sir John Eliot Gardiner explains why on to hear the second instalment of Sir John youtube.com/lso. Eliot Gardiner’s Schumann cycle with the Kathryn McDowell CBE DL The LSO has announced that the Orchestra Orchestra, which spans a European tour Managing Director will give two performances of Karlheinz and concerts at the Barbican in 2018 and Stockhausen’s Gruppen in Tate Modern’s LA MER: AN ANIMATED INTRODUCTION 2019. This programme focuses on three Turbine Hall with Sir Simon Rattle on of the composer’s orchestral works: the Saturday 30 June 2018. Tickets will go on Ahead of François-Xavier Roth’s overture to his only opera, Genoveva, the sale in April; visit lso.co.uk/tate for details. performance of La mer with the Orchestra Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and the Fourth on 25 and 28 March, view our animated Symphony, which Sir John Eliot Gardiner introduction to Debussy’s great work on conducts this evening in its original form. WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS Instagram and Facebook. It is also a pleasure to welcome pianist IFSA-Butler, FSU London Study Centre, Piotr Anderszewski for Mozart’s Piano Gerrards Cross Community Association, Read our news, watch videos and more Concerto No 25. We are pleased that he Adele Friedland & Friends and • lso.co.uk/news is able to join us this evening, and we look Ann Parrish & Friends. • youtube.com/lso forward to welcoming him back again in • lso.co.uk/blog the 2018/19 season. 2 Welcome Thursday 15 March 2018 Tonight’s Concert / by Stephen Johnson Coming Up in April chumann venerated Ludwig van The concert starts with the Overture to Sunday 8 April 2018 7pm Thursday 19 & 26 April 2018 7.30pm Beethoven – the titanic creator of Schumann’s only opera, Genoveva, which Barbican Hall Barbican Hall the greatest cycle of symphonies in tells the story of a woman wronged, plunged musical literature. In his role as a brilliantly into despair, yet ultimately vindicated. SHOSTAKOVICH’S EIGHTH MAHLER’S NINTH insightful critic he said rather less about Between these fascinating works comes one Mozart, but it’s arguable Schumann learned of Mozart’s most imposing piano concertos – Beethoven Piano Concerto No 4 Helen Grime Woven Space * just as much from him. Mozart’s ability to or at least that’s the way it seems at first. Shostakovich Symphony No 8 (world premiere) combine passion with ‘Grecian lightness and There are grand ideas, but there’s also Mahler Symphony No 9 grace’ enchanted Schumann, as did Mozart’s something impish, which seems to win out in Gianandrea Noseda conductor exquisite playfulness. We can see both the end. It’s possible Schumann never heard Nikolai Lugansky piano Sir Simon Rattle conductor qualities at work in Schumann’s Fourth it, but if he had, he would surely have loved it. Symphony. On one level, it is a deeply felt, * Commissioned for Sir Simon Rattle and the acutely sensitive musical drama. On another, PROGRAMME NOTE WRITERS Sunday 15 April 2018 7pm LSO by the Barbican though, it’s a colossal tease, interweaving Barbican Hall and mixing up elements of the traditional Stephen Johnson is the author of Bruckner 26 April generously supported by Baker McKenzie four movements of a symphony, almost Remembered. He contributes regularly to ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO like one of the artist M C Escher’s famous BBC Music Magazine and The Guardian, ‘impossible’ architectural drawings – a quality and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 Patrick Giguère Revealing that comes over particularly effectively in and the BBC World Service. (world premiere, Panufnik Commission *) the original version of the Symphony, which Elgar Cello Concerto Sunday 22 April 2018 7pm is the one performed tonight. Lindsay Kemp is a senior producer for Sibelius Symphony No 5 Barbican Hall BBC Radio 3, including programming The composer nearly called the Overture, lunchtime concerts at Wigmore Hall and Susanna Mälkki conductor MAHLER’S TENTH Scherzo and Finale ‘Symphonette’, arguably LSO St Luke’s; Artistic Advisor to York Daniel Müller-Schott cello a much better title. At times we hear echoes Early Music Festival; Artist Director of Tippett The Rose Lake * of the grandest of Beethoven and Schubert’s Baroque at the Edge Festival; and a regular * The Panufnik Composers Scheme is generously Mahler comp Cooke Symphony No 10 symphonies; at others – and especially contributor to Gramophone magazine. supported by Lady Hamlyn and The Helen Hamlyn Trust in the strangely captivating Scherzo – Sir Simon Rattle conductor it’s almost like listening to a clever child, Andrew Stewart is a freelance music one moment all adult seriousness, the journalist and writer. He is the author of * Supported by Resonate, a PRS Foundation initiative next delightfully naughty. The LSO at 90, and contributes to a variety lso.co.uk/whatson in partnership with the Association of British Orchestras, of specialist classical music publications. 020 7638 8891 BBC Radio 3 and the Boltini Trust Tonight’s Concert 3 Robert Schumann in Profile 1810–56 / by Stephen Johnson he youngest son of a Saxon Besides welcoming the financial return • SCHUMANN ON LSO LIVE bookseller, Robert Schumann that published Lieder (songs) could deliver, was encouraged by his father to Schumann was also able to preserve his study music. Soon after his tenth birthday intense feelings for Clara in the richly in 1820, young Robert began taking piano expressive medium of song. The personal lessons in his home town of Zwickau. nature of Schumann’s art even influenced Although he later enrolled as a law student his choice of certain themes, with the notes at Leipzig University in 1828, music remained A – B – E – G – G enshrined as the theme of an overriding passion and he continued to one set of piano variations in tribute to his study piano with Friedrich Wieck. friend Countess Meta von Abegg. — ‘To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.’ — Robert Schumann Das Paradies und die Peri Sir Simon Rattle conductor The early death of his father and two of Schumann also developed his skills as Sally Matthews, Mark Padmore, his three brothers influenced Schumann’s a composer of symphonies and concertos Kate Royal, Bernarda Fink, appreciation of the world’s suffering, during his years in Leipzig. Four years Andrew Staples, Florian Boesch soloists intensified further by his readings of after their marriage in September 1840, London Symphony Orchestra Romantic poets such as Novalis, Byron the Schumanns moved to Dresden where London Symphony Chorus and Hölderlin and his own experiments as Robert completed his C major Symphony. Simon Halsey chorus director poet and playwright. Schumann composed In the early 1850s the composer’s health a number of songs in his youth, but it was and mental state seriously declined. In March Available to purchase in the Barbican Shop, not until he fell in love with and became 1854 he decided to enter a sanatorium near at lsolive.lso.co.uk, on iTunes and Amazon, secretly engaged to the teenage Clara Wieck Bonn, where he died two years later. • or to stream on Spotify and Apple Music in September 1837 that he seriously began to exploit his song-writing gift. 4 Composer Profile 15 March 2018 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Profile 1756–91 / by Andrew Stewart orn in Salzburg on 27 January 1756, Mozart to resign in 1781 and move to Vienna AT LSO ST LUKE’S IN 2018/19 Mozart began to pick out tunes in search of a more suitable position, fame on his father’s keyboard before and fortune. In the last decade of his life, Friday 14 September 2018 6.30–7.30pm his fourth birthday. His first compositions he produced a series of masterpieces in LSO St Luke’s were written down in the early months of all the principal genres of music, including 1761; later that year, the boy performed in the operas The Marriage of Figaro (1785), BBC RADIO 3 RUSH-HOUR CONCERT public for the first time at the University Don Giovanni (1787), Così fan tutte and ANNE QUEFFÉLEC of Salzburg. Mozart’s ambitious father, The Magic Flute, the Symphonies Nos Leopold, court composer and Vice- 40 and 41 (‘Jupiter’), a series of sublime Mozart Kapellmeister to the Prince-Archbishop of piano concertos, a clarinet quintet and the Menuet in G major Salzburg, recognised the money-making Requiem, left incomplete at his death on Menuet in F major potential of his precocious son and pupil, 5 December 1791.