London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Sunday 19 March 2017 7pm Barbican Hall BRAHMS’ GERMAN REQUIEM Schubert Symphony No 8 (‘Unfinished’) INTERVAL Brahms German Requiem London’s Symphony Orchestra Fabio Luisi conductor Julia Kleiter soprano Simon Keenlyside baritone London Symphony Chorus Simon Halsey chorus director Concert finishes approx 9.10pm 2 Welcome 19 March 2017 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief Welcome to tonight’s LSO concert at the Barbican, THANK YOU TO THE LSO GUARDIANS where conductor Fabio Luisi returns for his second programme of German repertoire with us this season. Tonight we welcome the LSO Guardians, and extend our sincere thanks to them for their commitment to After his performance of Beethoven’s Mass in C in the Orchestra. 2014, we are delighted that Fabio Luisi will conduct the LSO and London Symphony Chorus in Brahms’ LSO Guardians are those who have pledged to German Requiem, joined by soloists Simon Keenlyside remember the LSO in their Will. In making this and Julia Kleiter, who makes her LSO debut tonight. meaningful commitment, they are helping to The concert opens with another piece from the 19th secure the future of the Orchestra; ensuring that century, Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony No 8. our world-class artistic programme continues, and that our pioneering education and community I would like to take this opportunity to thank our projects will thrive for years to come. media partner Classic FM, who have supported and recommended tonight’s concert. lso.co.uk/legacies I hope you enjoy the performance and will join us again on 23 March, when Alain Altinoglu makes his FRANÇOIS-XAVIER ROTH TO BECOME LSO debut conducting a programme of Prokofiev’s LSO PRINCIPAL GUEST CONDUCTOR Overture on Hebrew Themes, Ravel’s complete Daphnis and Chloé with the London Symphony On 7 March the LSO was delighted to announce that Chorus, and Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 1 François-Xavier Roth will become the Orchestra’s with Gautier Capuçon as the soloist. Principal Guest Conductor from September 2017. For more information, please visit: lso.co.uk/news Kathryn McDowell CBE DL A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS Managing Director The LSO offers great benefits for groups of 10+, including 20% discount on standard tickets. Tonight we are delighted to welcome: Paradise Travel lso.co.uk/groups London Symphony Orchestra Legacy Giving Leaving a legacy to the London Symphony Orchestra is one of the most enduring gifts you can make, and ensures that future generations will have access to the outstanding music- making of the Orchestra. When the time is right for you to include a gift in your Will, please securing remember us. the future To find out more about legacy giving, or to have a discussion about leaving a legacy to the LSO, please contact us: [email protected] London Symphony Orchestra 020 7382 2514 Barbican Centre, London EC2Y 8DS lso.co.uk/legacies London Symphony Orchestra is a registered charity in England No 232391 4 Programme Notes 19 March 2017 Franz Schubert (1797–1828) Symphony No 8 in B minor D759 (‘Unfinished’) (1822) 1 ALLEGRO MODERATO Whatever it was that stopped Schubert from 2 ANDANTE CON MOTO completing the symphony we shall probably never know. A number of theories have been suggested, PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER Music history is littered with incomplete compositions, among the most convincing of which is that, having LINDSAY KEMP is a senior from Bach’s Art of Fugue to Berg’s opera Lulu. So why, broken off composition with the third movement producer for BBC Radio 3, including alone among them all, has the symphony that Schubert just begun, Schubert simply felt unable to pick up programming Lunchtime Concerts began in October 1822, and then abandoned with the threads of such an intensely personal work. from Wigmore Hall and LSO St Luke’s, only two of its intended four movements completed, His development as an instrumental composer was Artistic Director of the London become known as the ‘Unfinished’? Why are Bruckner’s rapid at this time, and an ambitious desire to forge Festival of Baroque Music, and a Ninth or Mahler’s Tenth, both regularly performed for himself a position as Beethoven’s acknowledged regular contributor to Gramophone. today in their partial state, not similarly entitled? successor may well be the reason for a large The probable reason is that in most cases it was death number of other broken works from the years that prevented fulfilment of the work, an implacable around 1820. Maybe, too, in his mind he had simply external force which gives no reason to cast doubt moved on by the time the chance to resume work on a composer’s motivation or drive. Short though on the ‘Unfinished’ presented itself; certainly its his life was, Schubert had another six years in which uniquely sustained brand of pained poetic lyricism to finish the ‘Unfinished’, and he wrote many other was not one to which he later returned. works after it. Clearly the reason for its abandonment SCHUBERT’S LETTER TO was an inner one. Whatever it was that stopped THE GRAZ MUSIC SOCIETY Vienna, 20 September 1823 The known facts are inconclusive. When in August Schubert from completing Highly esteemed Society! 1823 Schubert was elected an honorary member the symphony we shall For the diploma appointing me an of a music society based in Graz, he offered to probably never know. honorary member – which on account present them with the manuscript of the incomplete of my prolonged absence from Vienna symphony as a token of thanks, perhaps with a I received only a few days ago – I thank promise to compose the rest of it soon. The score The opening presents a bleak vision: a sinuous and you most devotedly. May my fervour was duly given to the Society’s representatives, menacingly subterranean theme intoned by cellos to serve the art of music succeed in Joseph and Anselm Hüttenbrenner, in whose private and double basses, followed by a nervous string making me once fully worthy of this hands it then remained. That they saw no reason to accompaniment to an aching tune given out on honour. To express my sincerest release it is not as perverse as it sounds; Schubert’s oboe and clarinet. The music then builds steadily gratitude in a musical form as well contemporary reputation was almost exclusively in volume until a held note on horns and bassoons I shall take the liberty of sending as a composer of vocal music, and, as far as we swells into a brief but sturdy bridge to the lilting your worthy society within the know, no symphony of his was accepted for public second theme. Announced by cellos and taken up by shortest possible time the score performance anywhere between the premiere of the the violins, this new, major-key theme seems at first of one of my symphonies. Sixth in 1818 and his death ten years later. Thus it was to promise a more carefree mood, but interruptions With the deepest respect, only when latter-day Schubert-lovers wrested the score from the full orchestra suggest otherwise, and it is A most grateful and obedient of the ‘Unfinished’ from Anselm over 40 years after it with a sense of relief that the theme later emerges servant of this worthy society, was written that it finally came to light, receiving its in a sweetly extended version. After this first section Franz Schubert premiere in Vienna in 1865 to keen public interest. has been repeated, a brief reminder of the opening lso.co.uk Programme Notes 5 Franz Schubert Composer Profile then leads us into the dark realms of the central In childhood, Schubert was taught the violin by development section, which takes the cello-and- his schoolmaster father and piano by his eldest bass theme and works it up to a pitch of nightmarish brother. He rapidly became more proficient than his intensity. The sequence of first and second themes is teachers, and showed considerable musical talent, then reprised, before the introductory theme returns so much so that in 1808 he became a member of once again to initiate a world-weary, dejected coda. Vienna’s famous Imperial Court chapel choir. He was educated at the Imperial City College, where Schubert casts the slow second movement in E major, he received lessons from the composer Salieri. His a distant key from the B minor of the first which father, eager that Franz should qualify as a teacher enhances the sense of entering a different and work in the family’s schoolhouse, encouraged world. Indeed, the relationship between the two the boy to return home in 1814. Compositions soon movements has been described by one writer as began to flow, although teaching duties interrupted that of ‘a certain premonition of death and a vision progress. Despite his daily classroom routine, of heaven’. But despite the Elysian beauty of the Schubert managed to compose 145 songs in 1815, tender first theme, and even the apparent gruff together with four stage works, two symphonies, cheerfulness with which its striding bass line at one two masses and a large number of chamber pieces. point offers to take things over, the night-terrors still COMPOSER PROFILE BY lurk. The clarinet’s nostalgic second theme is the first ANDREW STEWART Though the quantity of Schubert’s output is to hint at disquiet, but the orchestral outburst which astonishing enough, it is the quality of his melodic rears its head later on leaves no doubt that true invention and the richness of his harmonic peace of mind is not to be had here.