Music of Exile

Saturday 13 January 2018 7.30–9.35pm Barbican Hall MUSIC OF EXILE Schoenberg, Shilkret, Tansman, Milhaud, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Toch & Stravinsky Genesis Suite (UK premiere) Interval BartÓk Concerto for Orchestra Sir Simon Rattle conductor Gerard McBurney creative director MUSIC OF Mike Tutaj projection design Simon Callow, Rodney Earl Clarke, Sara Kestelman, Helen McCrory narrators London Symphony Chorus Simon Halsey chorus director Produced by the LSO and the Barbican. Part of the LSO’s 2017/18 Season, Barbican EXILE Presents and the Barbican’s 2018 season, The Art of Change, which explores how artists respond to, reflect and can potentially effect change in the social and political landscape. Welcome Kathryn McDowell & Sir Nicholas Kenyon elcome to tonight’s LSO concert at We are joined by a stellar cast of narrators WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS the Barbican, part of the Barbican’s for the Genesis Suite: Simon Callow, 2018 season, The Art of Change. Rodney Earl Clarke, Sara Kestelman and We are delighted to welcome Continuing his first season as Music Director Helen McCrory. A warm welcome also Mr & Mrs Nisbet & Friends of the Orchestra and Artist-in-Association to the London Symphony Chorus, who join with the Barbican and Guildhall School, the Orchestra on-stage, led by the LSO’s Sir Simon Rattle explores music written during Choral Director Simon Halsey. the 1940s by composers who fled wartime Europe to take refuge in the US. He conducts This evening’s concert, following opera the Genesis Suite, a rarely heard collaboration performances in 2015 and 2016, is presented by seven of the leading composers of the day, in partnership by the LSO and the Barbican. followed by BartÓk’s joyful celebration of Working in collaboration allows us to bring music, his Concerto for Orchestra. together both partners’ work and expertise to create truly memorable musical experiences. Under the creative directorship of Gerard The LSO and Barbican are both partners in McBurney, the music and stories of the Culture Mile, a recently unveiled initiative Genesis Suite – and its themes of creation, to create a major destination for culture, destruction and politics – will be brought creativity and learning in the Square Mile, to life through specially created visual and we look forward to future collaborations. projections by Mike Tutaj, an award-winning projection designer. Gerard McBurney is well We hope you enjoy the performance and that known in classical music on both sides of the you will return to the Barbican – where, Atlantic as a composer, broadcaster, writer as Resident Orchestra, the LSO performs and creative director, and it is a great pleasure 70 concerts every year – for a wide range of to be working with him on this performance. events across the art-forms in the year ahead. Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Sir Nicholas Kenyon CBE Managing Director, LSO Managing Director, Barbican Centre 2 Welcome 13 January 2018 Tonight’s Concert / introduction by Gerard McBurney at Shilkret was a kaleidoscopically of was something more like high-falutin’ answered; and one – Béla Bartók – half- To that end, Mike Tutaj and I have sifted colourful and talented musician. agitprop. Or a gigantic musical billboard. accepted and then had to pull out. It is through filmed, photographed and recorded New York-born, the son of Jewish Or an exercise in popular conscience-stirring. certainly intriguing, though, that of the materials from the time when this music immigrants from Central Europe, he began seven composers who eventually participated, was conceived and written down (1943–45) as a child-prodigy clarinettist (playing Still, the idea was not simple to execute. six were recent immigrants to America, and then, feeling pretty confident Shilkret under Mahler!), before turning to the piano, Selections from the opening chapters of refugees from the European nightmare; himself would have approved, we have composing, conducting, arranging, producing, the Book of Genesis were to be dramatically and six – all except Stravinsky – were Jewish. moved forwards in history through the more and goodness knows what else besides. declaimed to the accompaniment of music than 70 years between then and now to He was fascinated by the most varied kinds of by composers working in as many different Evidently, Shilkret intended his Genesis Suite draw in some fairly bald and more recent modern music and by the latest technologies – styles as possible – a weird game of musical to make an appeal to the hearts and minds echoes of what was already prophesied in film, recording, radio – all of which he dreamed consequences, as it were. The results were of the American public in 1945. In the event, the original composition. of combining to bring ‘high’ and ‘low’ art to be performed, recorded, broadcast and financial limitations and the overwhelming closer together. And in his more ambitious distributed so as to reach mass audiences. practical difficulties of rebuilding a post-war Shilkret’s first plan was that Bartók would moments he whimsically contemplated a world meant the piece was really not much write the Prelude – and it is clear from their large-scale work ‘based on the Bible’. Shilkret himself prepared the text, using noticed. What’s disturbing now – returning friendly correspondence that Bartók was the American Standard Version of the to it more than 70 years after it was written – really interested. Unfortunately, it eventually Towards the end of World War II, with King James Bible. Cutting out repetition is that while the music and the aesthetic are became clear that the dangerously ill the overwhelmingly appalling news of the and extras like genealogies, he created of their time, the moral message has lost Hungarian composer was not going to be Holocaust, the destruction of old Europe a version that tells a story of menacing absolutely nothing of its relevance. able to take part after all, and that was and the impending migration of millions of darkness, emphasising and mourning the when Shilkret asked Schoenberg to step in refugees filling newspapers and magazines hideous damage inflicted by humankind This was the starting point for our idea of a to compose the opening movement. It was and newsreels, Shilkret – always generous- upon the world and on itself. The intended ‘production’ of a rarely heard and sometimes with this tantalising ‘might-have-been’ hearted – decided to invite as many famous political significance at that historical downright peculiar collective composition. in mind – what would Bartók’s Prelude to (and mostly penniless) composers as he turning-point hardly needs underlining. This piece was always intended to have a Genesis have been like? – that Sir Simon could think of to take part in an unusual But it is worth noting – and this evidently theatrical or cinematic side. To his wife, Rattle came up with the beautiful idea of work of collective public art. mattered to Shilkret – that each of these for example, Shilkret proudly called his own involving Bartók in the project anyway by ancient disasters is followed by migration, contribution ‘operatic’, adding: ‘What is wrong letting his great Concerto for Orchestra - Despite his vaulting energy and ambition, catastrophe every time turning human in writing music to accentuate the scene or begun before the Genesis Suite and finished Shilkret was not a pretentious man, and beings into homeless refugees. words [sic] – Wagner did it all the time’, after it – become, as it were, his noble he was clear from the beginning that what though he also warned her that Schoenberg’s answer to the Cassandra-like darkness and he had in mind was unlikely to end up as a Naturally, some of the composers Shilkret Prelude was ‘a great piece of music but oh – bitterness of this project in which he so deep work of art. What he was thinking invited to take part said no; others never so new in sound’. nearly took part. • Tonight’s Concert 3 Genesis Suite 1945 / note by Neil W Levin Arnold Schoenberg omposed collectively by an commissioner, Nathaniel Shilkret – the of ‘crossover’ has achieved respectability of 1 Prelude assemblage of some of the most least known among its seven composers sorts as nearly its own genre, we can more important émigré figures on the outside the film, popular and other easily appreciate the work’s artistic merits Nathaniel Shilkret contemporary music scene of the 1940s, commercial realms. Its cohesiveness along with its engaging interpretations of 2 Creation the Genesis Suite was neither the first nor derives not from homogeneous substance, the biblical stories. the last instance of combined authorship artistic cooperation or stylistic unity, Alexandre Tansman of a single musical work. Quite a few cases but from its traditionally Judaic yet very Although Shilkret had sought since the 3 Adam and Eve of team composition can be cited in the American ecumenical concept, its dramatic 1920s to appeal sympathetically to diverse history of western music. But few if any are narration, its wartime and immediate musical tastes across a broad spectrum, Darius Milhaud even remotely as lavish or grandiose – even postwar liberal sensibilities, and, of course, ranging from classical to popular to jazz 4 Cain and Abel fustian for some – as the Genesis Suite. its biblical basis. Even more historically idioms, his immediate inspiration for a None have approached either its Hollywood significant was its attempted marriage Genesis project was a poll that indicated Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco grand scale or the degree of its aspirations

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