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London Symphony Orchestra Living Music Thursday 12 November 2015 7.30pm Barbican Hall BEETHOVEN’S FIFTH SYMPHONY Beethoven Symphony No 5 INTERVAL Strauss Death and Transfiguration London’s Symphony Orchestra Strauss Closing Scene from ‘Capriccio’ Nikolaj Znaider conductor Soile Isokoski soprano Concert finishes approx 9.40pm Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 Generously supported by Ivan Piercy 2 Welcome 12 November 2015 Welcome Living Music Kathryn McDowell In Brief Welcome to this evening’s LSO concert at the Barbican. APPLICATIONS OPEN FOR THE 2016 We are delighted to be joined by Nikolaj Znaider, PANUFNIK COMPOSERS SCHEME a multi-talented musician who has a long history of working with the Orchestra as a violin soloist and, The LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme is an exciting increasingly in recent seasons, as a conductor. It is initiative offering six emerging composers each year in this latter role that he is with us tonight. the opportunity to write for and work with a world- class symphony orchestra. Nikolaj Znaider opens the programme with Beethoven’s monumental Fifth Symphony, before taking the We are now accepting applications for the 2016 Orchestra on a journey into the afterlife with Strauss’ scheme. The programme begins in February 2016 Death and Transfiguration, followed by the closing and culminates with a public workshop in April 2017. scene from Richard Strauss’ final opera Capriccio, For more details on the scheme and how to apply, in which we are joined by soprano Soile Isokoski. please visit the LSO website. We are particularly grateful to Ivan Piercy for his lso.co.uk/composing generous support of tonight’s performance. I would also like to thank our media partner BBC Radio 3, who broadcast this evening’s concert live. CHRISTMAS DISCOUNTS ON LSO LIVE I hope you enjoy the concert, and can join us again Throughout November and December, LSO Live is next Thursday, when conductor Manfred Honeck running a series of special Christmas offers, including conducts the Ravel Piano Concerto in G major, with hand-picked bundles of CDs and discounted digital soloist Hélène Grimaud, alongside orchestral works downloads. Offers currently include Valery Gergiev’s by Janácˇek and Dvorˇák. Brahms cycle and Sir Colin Davis’ three Haydn recordings, with more being added every Friday. Visit our website for more information. lsolive.lso.co.uk Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS The LSO offers great benefits for groups of 10+ including 20% discount on standard tickets. At tonight’s concert, we are delighted to welcome: Esther Stewart & Friends St Ignatius College lso.co.uk/groups London Symphony Orchestra Season 2015/16 2016 Highlights PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE DAPHNIS AND CHLOE SHAKESPEARE 400: LSO ARTIST PORTRAIT: AN ICON OF LITERATURE LEIF OVE ANDSNES Sat 9 & Sun 10 Jan 2016 Wed 13 Jan 2016 Tue 16 Feb 2016 Sun 8 May 2016 Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande Ravel Le tombeau de Couperin Mendelssohn Mozart Piano Concerto No 20 (semi-staged performance) Dutilleux L’arbre des songes * A Midsummer Night’s Dream Delage Four Hindu Poems with Sir John Eliot Gardiner Thu 12 May 2016 Sir Simon Rattle conductor Dutilleux Métaboles conductor Schumann Piano Concerto † Peter Sellars director Ravel Daphnis and Chloe – Ben Zamora lighting design Suite No 2 Thu 25 Feb 2016 Fri 10 Jun 2016 Strauss Macbeth Works by Sibelius, Beethoven, Produced by the LSO and the Barbican. Sir Simon Rattle conductor with Gianandrea Noseda Debussy and Chopin Part of the LSO 2015/16 Season and Leonidas Kavakos violin * conductor † Concert supported by Baker & McKenzie LLP Barbican Presents. Susan Gritton soprano Sun 28 Feb 2016 Berlioz Romeo & Juliet – Suite with Gianandrea Noseda lso.co.uk conductor 020 7638 8891 4 Programme Notes 12 November 2015 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) Symphony No 5 in C minor Op 67 (1807–08) 1 ALLEGRO CON BRIO Where did it come from? Well, Beethoven was a 2 ANDANTE CON MOTO revolutionary of course, but he was one who worked 3 ALLEGRO within an established tradition, and who was subject 4 ALLEGRO to his fair share of influences. Several of these come together in the Fifth Symphony. One was Mozart, PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER Time and familiarity, those old enemies of innovation, with whom he shared a special feeling for the LINDSAY KEMP is a senior have conspired to mellow the impact of Beethoven’s expressive power of C minor (both men composed producer for BBC Radio 3, including Fifth on the modern ear. This most famous of some of their most emotional and personal works programming lunchtime concerts classical orchestral pieces has often been in danger in that key); another was the large-scale, open- at Wigmore Hall and LSO St Luke’s, of acquiring, from frequent repetition, a cosiness heartedly bombastic music composed for the public Artistic Director of the London and a friendliness that can dull its surprises, soften celebrations of Revolutionary France (that Le Sueur Festival of Baroque Music, its blows. Yet this is the same work which caused had himself been a leading composer of such music and a regular contributor to the French composer Jean-Francois Le Sueur to be lends a peculiar irony to his reaction to the work); Gramophone magazine. so bowled over when he first heard it in 1828 that, and a third was Haydn, his teacher, who time and on reaching afterwards for his hat, he could not find time again had shown in his string quartets and his head. His pupil Berlioz (to whom we owe this symphonies how to construct whole movements anecdote) visited him the next day to be told by an from small but highly pregnant thematic cells. impressed but evidently disturbed Le Sueur that ‘that sort of music should not be written’. FIRST MOVEMENT This last influence is undoubtedly at its most potent Clearly, whatever the Fifth Symphony was to its in the Fifth’s highly dramatic first movement, totally earliest audiences, it was not comfortable. Those dominated as it is by the urgent four-note motif with who took their seats in Vienna’s Theater an der Wien which it opens. Not that it sounds in any way like The 22 DECEMBER 1808 concert on 22 December 1808 for the concert in which the Haydn. The music here is astonishingly terse, pared at the Theater an der Wien is widely work was first performed would doubtless have down to the melodic minimum, and the second considered the most significant of had some idea what to expect. Anyone who had theme is quickly upon us: a relaxed expansion of Beethoven’s career. He composed already heard his Third Symphony, the ‘Eroica’, the main motif on horns, answered by a reassuring all eight works on the programme, or indeed the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony that was also embrace from the violins and woodwind. Yet it is and the evening saw the world premiered earlier in the same concert, would have this consolatory theme which, after a belligerently premieres of no fewer than four of known that Beethoven had greatly expanded the combative development section (in which the music them: Symphonies Nos 5 and 6, the timescale of the symphonic form, raised its level of is at one stage reduced to a stark dialogue of chords Choral Fantasy, and the Fourth Piano seriousness and expressive weight, and brought to it between wind and strings, as if two exhausted Concerto with Beethoven himself an increasingly theatrical, even narrative strain. But warriors were pausing for breath), reappears on the piano. Owing to increasing few can have been prepared for the brusque, almost in swirling, nightmarish transformation in the hearing difficulties, this was visceral assault this unique work was to make on movement’s long and turbulent coda. Beethoven’s final public appearance their senses. as a soloist. lso.co.uk Programme Notes 5 BEETHOVEN on LSO LIVE SECOND MOVEMENT movement (almost unremittingly loud, by the way, There is more than a hint of Haydn’s influence, too, and reinforced for the purpose by Beethoven with Beethoven in the slow second movement, which has the overall trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon) is not even Symphonies shape of one of his favourite forms, the ‘double diverted by the brief, perhaps mocking reappearance Nos 1–9 variation set’ in which two themes are varied in about halfway through of the third movement’s main Bernard Haitink alternation, often in successively diminishing note theme, now gloriously overcome. conductor values. Beethoven’s themes are both in A-flat major, but the second – rather march-like despite being FINALE ‘A towering achievement.’ in triple time – soon modulates unexpectedly to Whether one experiences the Fifth Symphony as The Times C major, where it acquires an extra grandeur and, a journey from darkness to light, a depiction of incidentally, provides a brief foretaste of the mood adversity overcome, or as an emergence from ‘This is the Beethoven set for our of the finale. At the end of this particular movement, some sort of underworld, there is no doubt that time.’ however, it is the more graceful first theme which it has an effect on the listener that goes beyond Chicago Tribune wins the day. the appreciation of its musical and formal niceties. Beethoven himself has left little clue as to what the lsolive.lso.co.uk THIRD MOVEMENT symphony is ‘about’, save for a possibly apocryphal Beethoven does not call the third movement a remark to his friend Schindler about the first movement: ‘scherzo’, though in form and function it is one. But ‘thus Fate knocks at the door’. Yet we know that if there is humour here, it is of a grim cast and beset he thought of many of his instrumental works in by uncertainty.