Sunday 17 February 2019 7–9.15pm Barbican LSO SEASON CONCERT ARTIST PORTRAIT: DANIIL TRIFONOV Rameau Les Indes galantes – Suite Ravel Piano Concerto in G major TRIFONOV Interval Betsy Jolas A Little Summer Suite Poulenc Les biches – Suite Ravel La valse Sir Simon Rattle conductor Daniil Trifonov piano Welcome Latest News On Our Blog and we look forward to his next Artist CENTRE FOR MUSIC DANIIL TRIFONOV IN CONVERSATION Portrait performances. In June, he performs concertos by Beethoven and Shostakovich The LSO, Barbican and Guildhall School have Read our interview with Daniil Trifonov on with the LSO’s Conductor Laureate Michael ambitious plans for a new London concert the LSO Blog to find out about the repertoire Tilson Thomas, and gives a solo recital here hall. The vision for the Centre for Music is he’ll playing in his Artist Portrait series and in the Barbican Hall. to develop a world-class venue for music how Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy sparked his and education. First concept designs for the love of classical music. I hope that you enjoy the performance and project have now been released. that you will be able to join us again soon. • lso.co.uk/blog Following tonight’s concert, the Orchestra • lso.co.uk/news departs for Europe to perform in Vienna, MEET LAHAV SHANI elcome to this evening’s LSO Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Luxembourg A TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP concert at the Barbican, where with Sir Simon Rattle. The LSO then returns Ahead of his LSO debut, conductor Sir Simon Rattle conducts an to the Barbican for a concert on Thursday In January, the LSO welcomed a team of Lahav Shani talks about Kurt Weill, musical eclectic, all-French programme of music 28 February, when Lahav Shani makes his young musicians – Keston MAX Fellows of life in Tel Aviv and what it’s like to step into spanning the 270 years from Rameau to LSO debut conducting a programme of Weill, Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West – Zubin Mehta’s shoes as Music Director of the present day. The most recent piece Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. who spent a week working alongside the the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. in the programme, Betsy Jolas’ A Little Orchestra and taking part in rehearsals, a Summer Suite, was composed in response mock recording session and even performing • lso.co.uk/blog to a commission from Sir Simon Rattle in LSO concerts at the Barbican. after their chance meeting. We are delighted GARDINER’S SCHUMANN: WATCH AGAIN that Betsy Jolas is able to join us tonight for • lso.co.uk/musicacademywest this UK premiere of her work. Kathryn McDowell CBE DL The LSO’s concert with Sir John Eliot Managing Director Gardiner on 7 February was broadcast live on A warm welcome also to Daniil Trifonov, WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS our YouTube channel and is now available for the opening concert in this season’s to watch back for free for the next 90 days. LSO Artist Portrait series, playing Ravel’s A warm welcome to the groups attending Visit our website to find out about future Piano Concerto. Daniil Trifonov made his tonight’s concert: Fatemeh Ebtehaj & broadcasts and how to watch. London debut with the LSO in September Friends, Dr Ian Fyfe & Friends and 2011, shortly after winning the Tchaikovsky Campus Travel Groups. • youtube.com/lso Competition. Since then we have been • lso.co.uk/livestream delighted to watch his career develop • lso.co.uk/groups 2 Welcome 17 February 2019 Tonight’s Concert In Brief / by Jeremy Thurlow Coming Up f there is a thread running through juddering catastrophe. His celebrated and Thursday 28 February 7.30–9.30pm Sunday 10 March 7–9.15pm tonight’s all-French programme, sparkling Piano Concerto of 1931 seems on Barbican Barbican perhaps it is a delight in being some level to embrace the gaiety and the different, in refusing to fit into existing chic of ‘les années folles’, but brings to them PETRUSHKA HAITINK AT 90: BIRTHDAY CONCERT pigeon holes. Jean-Philippe Rameau ruffled Ravel’s own inimitable delicacy, precision plenty of aristocratic feathers when he and nostalgia. The youthful freshness and Weill Symphony No 2 Mozart Piano Concerto No 22 shook up French opera and crammed his knowing wisdom of A Little Summer Suite Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Interval spectacular opera-ballets with characters (2016), written for Sir Simon Rattle by the Interval Bruckner Symphony No 4 and moods of every conceivable colour. His now 92-year old Betsy Jolas, rounds out the Stravinsky Petrushka (1947 version) brief glimpse a few years earlier of visitors programme perfectly. • Bernard Haitink conductor from an unimaginably distant and alien Lahav Shani conductor Till Fellner piano culture (North American Native Chiefs), Simon Trpčeski piano brought to Paris a few years earlier by the Streamed live on the LSO’s YouTube channel long arm of the burgeoning French colonial youtube.com/lso empire, sparked a celebration in Les Indes PROGRAMME CONTRIBUTORS galantes (1735) of exotic otherness whose fabulous distant worlds are in fact entirely Jeremy Thurlow is a composer whose music Thursday 14 March 7.30–9.45pm imaginary, a reflection of the fantasies and ranges from chamber and orchestral to video- Sunday 3 March 7–9pm Thursday 21 March 7.30–9.45pm pleasures of Enlightenment Paris. opera. Author of a book on Dutilleux and a Barbican Barbican frequent broadcaster on Radio 3, Jeremy is a The vigour and fun of this music is echoed Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. PUCCINI MASS HAITINK AT 90: MAHLER SYMPHONY NO 4 in Francis Poulenc’s delightfully naughty ballet Les biches (1923), whose characters Lindsay Kemp is a senior producer for BBC Ponchielli Elegia Dvořák Violin Concerto cheerfully misbehave to a soundtrack Radio 3, including programming Lunchtime Verdi String Quartet (version for full strings) Interval which fizzes with the bright energy of Concerts from LSO St Luke’s, Artistic Director Interval Mahler Symphony No 4 the age of Rameau, nonchalantly cut and of Baroque at the Edge, and a regular Puccini Messa di Gloria re-pasted for the age of the Rolls-Royce contributor to Gramophone magazine. Bernard Haitink conductor and the fashion model. The same era saw Sir Antonio Pappano conductor Isabelle Faust violin Ravel poised between old and new, and Andrew Stewart is a freelance music Benjamin Bernheim tenor Anna Lucia Richter soprano in La valse he celebrates the glories of the journalist and writer. He is the author of The Gerald Finley bass Viennese Waltz while ultimately watching LSO at 90, and contributes to a wide variety London Symphony Chorus his dancers swirl inexorably towards some of specialist classical music publications. Simon Halsey chorus director Tonight’s Concert 3 Jean-Philippe Rameau Les Indes galantes – Suite 1735 / note by Jeremy Thurlow 1 Air pour les esclaves africains — 2 Contredanse ‘Music is a science which should have definite rules; these rules should 3 Air pour I’adoration du soleil 4 Air pour les sauvages be drawn from an evident principle; and this principle cannot really be known 5 Chaconne to us without the aid of mathematics.’ Excerpt from Rameau’s A Treatise on Harmony ameau was turning 40 when he moved to Paris in the early 1720s, — after holding a series of posts as organist in various provincial churches. He the Mitchigamea tribe together with five favours the ‘exotic’ characters over the soon made his name with the publication other Native American chiefs over the Europeans. Rameau’s music is infectiously of a highly original work of music theory • ocean to Paris. On 25 November they met high-spirited, and includes an orchestral whose ideas have continued to underpin the Louis XV and Chicagou pledged allegiance version of his earlier Les sauvages. • teaching of harmony to the present day. He to the French crown. Soon afterwards also began to publish collections of keyboard they appeared in the Théâtre des Italiens music but soon set his sights on the theatre to perform three dances from their native and in 1733, at the age of 50, caused a furore culture. This extraordinary (and from a with his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie. later perspective, poignant) event inspired Les Indes galantes followed in 1735 and at Rameau to compose a rondeau for first its reception was equally stormy: ‘The harpsichord entitled Les sauvages. • A TREATISE ON HARMONY music is a perpetual witchery …’, wrote an anonymous reviewer. ‘I am wracked, flayed, The whole episode fuelled in Parisian society Published in 1722 in Paris, Rameau’s dislocated by this devilish sonata of Les a growing fascination for all things exotic, monumental Treatise on Harmony earned Indes galantes.’ Nonetheless, both subject which is enthusiastically indulged in Les him a formidable reputation and a clear matter and music proved to be extremely Indes galantes. Louis Fuzelier’s libretto revels place as one of the most crucial thinkers popular, and over the following four decades in the colourful allure of distant cultures, in the development of harmonic thinking it received an amazing 320 airings at the presenting four scenes in exotic locales: in Western classical music. The work’s Royal Academy of Music in the Palais-Royal. a Turkish garden, a desert in the Peruvian four volumes address the relationship mountains, a Persian market and the North between harmonic ratios and proportions; The first impulse for the piece can be American forests. They are loosely bound the nature and properties of chords; traced back to 1725, when French settlers together by the Enlightenment idea that love the principles of composition; and the in Illinois sent Chief Agapit Chicagou of conquers all – a principle which occasionally principles of accompaniment.