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London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Sunday 1 February 2015 7.30pm Barbican Hall ONES TO WATCH: DAVID AFKHAM Webern Passacaglia Beethoven Piano Concerto No 3 INTERVAL Brahms Symphony No 2 David Afkham conductor London’s Symphony Orchestra Nicholas Angelich piano Concert finishes approx 9.45pm Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 2 Welcome 1 February 2015 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief Welcome to tonight’s LSO concert at the Barbican. THE LATEST RELEASE ON LSO LIVE It is a pleasure to be joined by David Afkham, who was previously Assistant Conductor of the Orchestra For the latest release on LSO Live, violist for two years after winning the 2008 Donatella Flick Antoine Tamestit and mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill Conducting Competition. During his time with the join forces with the LSO and Valery Gergiev for the LSO, David Afkham assisted in rehearsals and led a next instalment of Gergiev’s revelatory Berlioz series. number of educational projects with LSO Discovery, This new recording features Harold in Italy, which and in later seasons worked with his mentor Bernard uses a solo viola to depict the dreamy Harold’s Haitink. Since then, he has established a successful wanderings through the countryside, and The Death international career and we are delighted to see him of Cleopatra, an experimental cantata. Available to return tonight for his debut in the LSO’s season. pre-order now, on SACD and download. This evening’s concert also features American lso.co.uk/lsolive pianist Nicholas Angelich in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. This marks Nicholas Angelich’s second appearance on the Barbican stage with BBC RADIO 3 LUNCHTIME CONCERTS IN 2015 the Orchestra, and he is also a regular guest at LSO St Luke’s, where he has performed in several Brighten up your Thursday lunchtimes and join us BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concerts. for a new series of BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concerts, beginning at LSO St Luke’s on Thursday 5 February. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our For the first four performances cellist Natalie Clein media partners BBC Radio 3, who are broadcasting curates her own series, joined by some of her this evening’s performance live, and Classic FM, regular musical collaborators. supporters of our ‘Ones to Watch’ series. lso.co.uk/lunchtimeconcerts Please join us again for another LSO concert in the month ahead. For our next performance, on Thursday 5 February, Sir Mark Elder conducts A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS works by Berlioz and Tchaikovsky, with mezzo- soprano Susan Graham as soloist. The LSO offers great benefits for groups of 10+. Tonight we are delighted to welcome: The Hospital Kosher Meals Service Elizabeth Simpson & Friends Anne Parrish & Friends Faversham Music Club Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director lso.co.uk/groups lso.co.uk Programme Notes 3 Anton Webern (1883–1945) Anton Webern Passacaglia Op 1 (1908) Composer Profile PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER Webern’s 1908 Passacaglia is a transitionary work. Born in Vienna in 1883, Anton Webern was GAVIN PLUMLEY is a writer, Composed as the last of his student pieces under introduced to music by his mother, a talented broadcaster and musicologist. the supervision of Arnold Schoenberg, it also amateur pianist. He later studied piano, cello and He has written for The Guardian symbolises the beginning of Webern’s career as an music theory with Edwin Komauer in Klagenfurt, and The Independent on Sunday independent composer, bearing his first official opus and in 1902 enrolled as a student at the University and appeared on BBC Radio 3 number. Formally, it looks back to the contrapuntal of Vienna. From the autumn of 1904 until 1908, and Radio 4. Gavin commissions canons and passacaglias of the Baroque period, in Webern took private composition lessons with and edits the English-language which a succession of variations emerges over the Arnold Schoenberg. The two men became close programme notes for the same repeated ground-bass figure. Yet this 1908 allies, and their pupil-teacher relationship endured Salzburg Festival. piece also has more recent models, such as the long after formal studies were concluded. extraordinary Finale to Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, in turn providing the model for Schoenberg’s brother- With limited experience and no training, Webern ALL COMPOSER PROFILES BY in-law Zemlinsky’s 1897 Symphony in B-flat major. slowly established a career as a conductor, ANDREW STEWART Webern’s chosen tonality of D minor, on the other eventually working at the Deutsches Theater hand, suggests a thoughtful tribute to Schoenberg’s in Prague during the autumn of 1917. The following evocative 1899 tone poem Verklärte Nacht. year he returned to the new Austrian Republic and took lodgings close to Schoenberg in the Vienna Such precedents aside, the work is entirely Webern’s suburb of Mödling. During the 1920s and early 1930s own. The angular theme, stated at the outset by he proved successful as a conductor, working with pizzicato strings, seems, with hindsight, to predict the Mödling Male Chorus, the Vienna Workers’ SERIALISM (or twelve-tone the tone rows of the composer’s later serial output, Symphony Concerts and the Vienna Workers’ Chorus, serialism) is a musical technique, while the work’s dark-hued chromaticism teeters and introducing new scores to his audiences. In pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg on the edge of expressionistic atonality. After the 1929 he toured as a conductor to Munich, Frankfurt, from the 1920s onwards, in which the initial group of lachrymose variations, dominated Cologne and London. His mature works, lyrical and twelve notes of the chromatic scale by sighing woodwind and horn melodies, the beautiful in nature, show a remarkable concision are arranged in a series or sequence. succeeding episodes assume an increasingly violent of thought, with formal procedures governed by In place of traditional major and edge, full of rasping trumpets and cymbals. For all his development of the twelve-tone composition minor keys, these ‘tone rows’ are this Passacaglia’s formal models and contrapuntal method pioneered by Schoenberg. used as the basis of a piece. complexities – the score is strewn with imitative gestures, passed between the various departments Following the Anschluss of 1938, Webern’s post as Schoenberg’s pupils Berg and of the orchestra – this is an emphatically emotive a conductor for Austrian Radio was withdrawn and Webern adopted the method, as did piece. A brief section in D major suggests the his music was largely ignored during the war years. later composers, who also extended sunlit havens of Mahler’s world, before the original During the siege of Vienna in 1944 he and his wife the technique to encompass other minor key returns, triggering ever more ferocious moved to Mittersill, near Salzburg, to be with their elements of music beyond pitch. outbursts, which build, at last, to a blistering climax. daughters. On the evening of 15 September 1945 All horror now unleashed, the Passacaglia draws he was shot and killed by an American soldier to a swift but shivering close, as a final D minor who is believed to have mistaken Webern for a chord brings us full circle, if offering little sense black-marketeer. of homecoming. 4 Programme Notes 1 February 2015 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor Op 37 (1800, rev 1804) 1 ALLEGRO CON BRIO Beethoven’s musical personality is stamped all over 2 LARGO the Third Piano Concerto, most unmistakably in 3 RONDO: ALLEGRO its choice of key. Almost from the beginning of his career, Beethoven had turned to C minor to express NICHOLAS ANGELICH PIANO some of his strongest sentiments, and by the time of this concerto he had already written several By the time the first two piano concertos were powerful works in that key, including the famous published in their final forms in 1801, Beethoven had ‘Pathétique’ Piano Sonata. Ironically, the inspiration for this most recognisable of Beethovenian long been at work on their successor, a piece which, emotional colourings was probably Mozart, whose he claimed, was at ‘a new and higher level’. C minor Fantasy and Sonata for solo piano and Piano Concerto No 24 provide clear anticipations Indeed, his intention had been to perform it at a of Beethoven’s C minor mood. Mozart’s concerto, benefit concert at Vienna’s Burgtheater in April 1800, a work Beethoven is known to have admired, also but in the event it was not ready and one of the appears to have provided some formal pointers. earlier concertos was substituted. It was not until 5 April 1803 that the Third was finally premiered, First Movement PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER at a concert in the Theater an der Wien which also That model is acknowledged in the opening bars, LINDSAY KEMP is a senior included the first performances of the Second where, as in the Mozart, a quiet theme is stated by producer for BBC Radio 3, including Symphony and the oratorio Christ on the Mount the strings in unison. This is the start of what turns programming lunchtime concerts of Olives. Even then the piano part had not been out to be an unusually long orchestral exposition, from LSO St Luke’s, Artistic Director written down: a fellow composer who turned but after an assertive entry it is the soloist who of the London Festival of Baroque pages for Beethoven found that they consisted delineates the movement’s formal scheme, as Music, and a regular contributor to of ‘almost nothing but empty leaves; at the most climactic trills and precipitous downward scales Gramophone magazine. on one page or the other a few Egyptian hieroglyphs, noisily signal the respective arrivals of the central wholly unintelligible to me, scribbled down to development section (characterised by flowing piano serve as clues for him’.