Shostakovich

Sunday 24 June 2018 7–9.10pm Barbican Hall LSO SEASON CONCERT SHOSTAKOVICH Shostakovich Violin Concerto No 1 Interval Shostakovich Symphony No 10 * Gianandrea Noseda conductor Nicola Benedetti violin Generously supported by Reignwood * Symphony No 10 broadcast live on YouTube Recorded for future broadcast on medici.tv Welcome LSO News Having performed Shostakovich Symphony The concert this evening is generously TATE MODERN & BMW CLASSICS No 10 in many of those locations, the work supported by LSO Principal Partner will form the second half of tonight’s concert, Reignwood, who have also sponsored On Saturday 30 June the Orchestra will perform and also part of Gianandrea Noseda’s continuing the LSO’s tour of China as part of a wider in the vast chamber of Tate Modern’s survey of the Shostakovich symphonies shared ambition to develop understanding Turbine Hall as Sir Simon Rattle conducts which resumes next season on 1 November. and exchange between our two cultures. Stockhausen’s multi-orchestra masterpiece Tonight we welcome a group of Chinese Gruppen; followed by BMW Classics in Beginning the concert this evening with musicians on an exchange, following a visit Trafalgar Square on Sunday 1 July. Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, of some of the LSO’s Panufnik composers it is a pleasure to welcome back violinist to China during the tour. The Orchestra is FOND FAREWELLS Nicola Benedetti, who has been a friend indebted to Reignwood for its support. Welcome to the LSO for the final full orchestra of the LSO for many years and who is as This evening’s performance will be the final concert in our 2017/18 season. It has been a passionate about the importance of music I do hope you enjoy tonight’s concert concert for two distinguished LSO Members – landmark year for the Orchestra which began so education as we are. One of the Orchestra’s and would like to take this opportunity to LSO Principal Trombone Dudley Bright who memorably with the ten-day ‘This is Rattle’ leading education projects is LSO On Track thank you for your presence at concerts became a full LSO Member in 2001, and LSO festival launching the LSO’s first season with which reaches thousands of young throughout the 2017/18 season. We wish Trumpet Gerald Ruddock who joined in 1997 its new Music Director. It also featured two musicians in boroughs across East London you an enjoyable summer and look forward and was LSO Vice-Chairman for a number centenary celebrations – François-Xavier every year; it celebrates its tenth anniversary to welcoming you to the LSO again soon. of years. We wish them well. Roth exploring Debussy and Marin Alsop with a special concert featuring current conducting Bernstein – and included a brand and past participants on 5 July here at THIS IS RATTLE WINS RPS AWARD new series of concerts, Half Six Fix, the first the Barbican, alongside the LSO and of which was with this evening’s conductor Guildhall School musicians. The LSO has been awarded the Royal Gianandrea Noseda, who has been LSO Philharmonic Society’s Music Award in the Principal Guest Conductor since 2016/17. One of the LSO’s core aims is to bring Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Concert Series and Festivals category for great music to as many people as possible, Managing Director September’s ‘This is Rattle’ celebrations. Gianandrea Noseda and the LSO have just and tonight’s performance is one of returned from an extensive three-week tour eight this season that is live streamed WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS to Thailand and China, taking in major cities on YouTube for viewers around the world including Bangkok, Shanghai, Shenzhen, to see for free. It is also being filmed Tonight we are delighted to welcome Wuhan and Beijing among others where for medici.tv whom we are grateful for our group bookers from Gerrards Cross the LSO has been very warmly received. their continuing partnership. Community Association, Hertford U3A and Adele Friedland & Friends. 2 Welcome 24 June 2018 HOW I LIVE... ONE MEMBERSHIP. TWO CLUBS TEN TRINITY SQUARE PRIVATE CLUB, LONDON WENTWORTH CLUB, SURREY CLUB.TENTRINITYSQUARE.COM WENTWORTHCLUB.COM MEMBERSHIP ENQUIRIES: +44 (0)1344 846 337 EMAIL: [email protected] Dmitri Shostakovich in Profile 1906–75 / by Andrew Stewart fter early piano lessons with his With the outbreak of war against Nazi work represented ‘most strikingly the mother, Shostakovich enrolled Germany in June 1941, Shostakovich began formalistic perversions and anti-democratic at the Petrograd Conservatory to compose and arrange pieces to boost tendencies in music’, a crippling blow to in 1919. He supplemented his family’s public morale. He lived through the first Shostakovich’s artistic freedom that was meagre income from his earnings as a months of the German siege of Leningrad, healed only after the death of Stalin in 1953. cinema pianist, but progressed to become serving in the auxiliary fire service. Shostakovich answered his critics later that a composer and concert pianist following — year with the powerful Tenth Symphony, the critical success of his First Symphony in which he portrays ‘human emotions in 1926 and an ‘honourable mention’ in the ‘If they cut off both hands, and passions’, rather than the collective 1927 Chopin International Piano Competition I will compose music anyway dogma of Communism. A few years before in Warsaw. Over the next decade he the completion of his final and bleak embraced the ideal of composing for Soviet holding the pen in my teeth.’ Fifteenth String Quartet, Shostakovich society, and his Second Symphony was Shostakovich writing in 1936 suffered his second heart attack and the dedicated to the October Revolution of 1917. — onset of severe arthritis. Many of his final works – in particular the penultimate Shostakovich announced his Fifth Symphony In July he began work on the first three symphony (No 14) – are preoccupied with of 1937 as ‘a Soviet artist’s practical creative movements of his Seventh Symphony, the subject of death. • reply to just criticism’. A year before its completing the defiant finale after his premiere he had drawn a stinging attack evacuation in October and dedicating the from the official Soviet mouthpiece Pravda, score to the city. A micro-filmed copy in an article headed ‘Muddle instead of was despatched by way of Teheran and music’, in which Shostakovich’s initially an American warship to the US, where it was successful opera Lady Macbeth of the broadcast by the NBC Symphony Orchestra Mtsensk District was condemned for its and Toscanini. In 1943 Shostakovich extreme modernism. ‘It is leftist bedlam completed his Eighth Symphony, its instead of human music,’ the article claimed. emotionally shattering music compared When the Fifth Symphony was premiered by one critic to Picasso’s Guernica. in Leningrad, the composer’s reputation and career were rescued. Acclaim came not In 1948 Shostakovich and other leading only from the Russian audience, who gave composers, Prokofiev among them, were the work a reported 40-minute ovation, but forced by the Soviet cultural commissar, also from musicians and critics overseas. Andrei Zhdanov, to concede that their 4 Composer Profile 24 June 2018 Dmitri Shostakovich Violin Concerto No 1 in A minor Op 77/99 1948, rev 1955 / note by Andrew Huth 1 Nocturne: Moderato censoring a number of composers, dedicated to Oistrakh both his Second Violin theme given out initially by cellos and 2 Scherzo: Allegro Shostakovich chief among them, for such Concerto (1967) and Violin Sonata (1968). basses, and then repeated a further eight 3 Passacaglia: Andante crimes as ‘formalist perversions’ and The movement titles might at first times. This Passacaglia recalls something 4 Burlesque: Allegro con brio – Presto ‘anti-democratic tendencies’. These suggest something like a series of loosely of the brooding intensity of the first accusations were nonsense, but it was connected character pieces, but in fact movement, though it is more sectional in Nicola Benedetti violin Stalin’s nonsense and the composers in this is one of Shostakovich’s most tightly construction and therefore offers a greater question had no choice but to bow their and symphonically organised scores. variety of expression and gesture. y his early 40s, Shostakovich had heads and do as they were told. produced a huge amount of music NOCTURNE BURLESQUE in almost every form: operas, Shostakovich was dismissed from his ballets, symphonies, chamber music, and teaching posts at the Leningrad and The Nocturne gives the impression of being A solo cadenza, of mounting tension and several scores for the theatre and cinema. Moscow Conservatoires, and for the next the most free of the four movements, a fearsome technical difficulty, spills into His only concerto, however, was the light five years presented himself in public as long and eloquent meditation for the violin, the finale, which Shostakovich originally (though wonderful and funny) Concerto for the author of much bland and politically rising and falling in great arches of melody. intended to be launched by the soloist. Piano, Trumpet and Strings of 1933. Wasn’t acceptable music. But at the same time he The orchestra functions as accompaniment He changed his mind, scoring it instead for it now time to follow his distinguished also wrote more personal and challenging to the soloist, providing a background of the full orchestra, when Oistrakh begged for colleagues Prokofiev, Myaskovsky and works, putting them aside for better times. brooding anxiety. Much of this movement’s a moment of respite ‘so at least I can wipe Khachaturian with a violin concerto? Some As well as the Violin Concerto, they included power derives from its measured pace and the sweat off my brow’. This finale, recalling prompting may have come from the great the Fourth and Fifth String Quartets, rhythm, the overall restraint producing the wild energy of the Scherzo, makes no violinist David Oistrakh, whom he had the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry an effect of great intensity.

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