London Symphony Orchestra Resident at the Barbican Guest Leader: Andrew Haveron Friday 21 & Sunday 23 November 2008 7.30pm Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet (complete score) Valery Gergiev conductor One interval after Act II Concert ends approx 10.30pm Recorded for LSO Live Fri 21 Nov sponsored by Download it LSO concert programmes are now available to download from two days before each concert. Simply go to lso.co.uk/programmes Valery Gergiev and front cover © Alberto Venzago Welcome & News Welcome to the LSO’s concert LSO On Tour with LSO Principal Conductor From 27 November to 10 December the LSO continues its world Valery Gergiev. tour of the Prokofiev cycle with Valery Gergiev in Japan. Sponsored by Takeda, the performances include all the symphonies and This evening the Orchestra performs feature the soloists violinist Vadim Repin, pianist Alexei Volodin Prokofiev’s complete revised score for and cellist Tatjana Vassiljeva in the concertos. You can keep the ballet Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev up-to-date with the Orchestra on its travels by reading the blog sets Romeo and Juliet’s intimate love on lsoontour.wordpress.com scenes against a public life marked by lso.co.uk/lsoontour vicious brawls and intimidating family © Camilla Panufnik demands. He was forced to rewrite his LSO’s on Track! original plan where the young lovers LSO On Track, a new initiative for East London schools and escape death, the version seen performed by the Mark Morris music services, launched last Monday with Take A Bow!, a string Dance Group and the LSO in the Barbican Theatre earlier this extravaganza with players of all ages and standards, from local month. Tonight we hear instead the better known tragic ending schools, LSO string players and LSO Friends and admin. To find with a larger orchestra throughout. out more see page 19 and visit lso.co.uk/lsoontrack LSO On Track is supported by UBS, and DCSF Music Partnership The Orchestra is about to go on tour to Japan but returns to Project grant. Thanks to London Councils and LSO Friends. the Barbican on 14 December with a Brahms concert with Daniel Harding so I hope that you can join us then! LSO Discovery November Video Podcast As we begin a new series of Brahms concerts at the Barbican and LSO St Luke’s, we ask LSO players and conductor André Previn what they think of Brahms; and broadcaster Rob Cowan tells us more about the composer’s life and works. Podcasts from Kathryn McDowell September and October are still available to download, including Managing Director an interview with Royston Maldoom who talks about his Orchestra 2012 project with 120 children and the LSO which took place at the Royal Albert Hall on 1 November (see also page 19). Watch online or subscribe via iTunes. lso.co.uk/videopodcast 2 LSO 2008/09 Season Émigré For more information and to At the Barbican At LSO St Luke’s watch Valery Gergiev discuss the series visit lso.co.uk/emigre Tue 27 & Thu 29 Jan 2009 Thu 22 Jan, 1pm Stravinsky The Rite of Spring Songs by Rachmaninoff and Hahn Bartók Duke Bluebeard’s Castle Elizabeth Watts* soprano lso.co.uk/emigre Katarina Dalayman soprano Thu 29 Jan, 1pm Willard White bass-baritone Stravinsky The Rite of Spring (piano duet) Simon Crawford-Philips & Philip Moore Thu 7 May 2009 Thu 5 Feb, 1pm Stravinsky Symphony in 3 Movements Dvorˇák Quintet ‘The American’ Schoenberg Violin Concerto Škampa Quartet & Maxim Rysanov* viola Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances Thu 12 Feb, 1pm Valery Gergiev conductor Chopin Sonata No 2, Op 35 Nikolaj Znaider violin Cédric Tiberghien piano *Maxim Rysanov and Elizabeth Watts Fri 8 May 2009 are members of BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Artists scheme Stravinsky Symphony in 3 Movements Korngold Violin Concerto Tickets £9 Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances (£7 concessions) Valery Gergiev conductor 020 7638 8891 (bkg fee) Nikolaj Znaider violin lso.co.uk/lsostlukes (reduced bkg fee) All concerts start at 7.30pm Tickets £7 £13 £19 £25 £32 Box office 020 7638 8891 (bkg fee) lso.co.uk (reduced bkg fee) Valery Gergiev © Alberto Venzago Gergiev’s Prokofiev To the world at large, Prokofiev will the LSO’s now legendary cycle of all seven Cantata of 1937. Its LSO performance at always be the composer of the ‘Classical’ Prokofiev symphonies to the world and the Barbican, with Kirov/Mariinsky singers Symphony, Peter and the Wolf and Romeo will continue to do so. among the London Symphony Chorus, was and Juliet, and with good reason: these screened live in the City and subsequently are the works in which he used his gift for He had already taken the musical world televised; the same series, also alerted melody to captivate a wider public. Yet by storm as music director of what was an astonished public to the outlandish there has been no shortage of conductors then Leningrad’s Kirov Opera when he ‘incantation’ of 1917–18 Seven, they to champion the extraordinary depth and announced four new productions of are seven (which Rostropovich had also breadth of Prokofiev’s enormous output Prokofiev operas for the 1991–2 season. featured with the LSO in 1991 – these are as a whole: Gennady Rozhdestvensky While the epic War and Peace was territory surely the work’s only UK performances). and Neeme Järvi with their extraordinary to be more successfully repeated a decade legacy on disc, Sir Edward Downes to make later, David Freeman’s staging of the In 1993 Gergiev alighted in Rotterdam and sure that Britain came to hear as much still-shocking Fiery Angel jolted Russian managed 11 days of concerts devoted to little-known Prokofiev as possible, and the audiences into an awareness of late- music from two decades of Prokofiev’s life, composer’s friend and inspiration, 20th-century style in operatic production. mostly covering the Stalin years. It is safe the late lamented Mstislav Rostropovich, Gergiev, who later remarked ‘what makes to say that no other living conductor in his far-reaching LSO series to mark the me incredibly proud is that I announced could have pulled off such a feat; and 1991 centenary of Prokofiev’s birth. these things and they happened’, was the audiences flocked. A Rotterdam convinced that his previously conservative performance of the complete Romeo and The baton has now passed to Valery singers’ approach to Prokofiev had Juliet in the Royal Festival Hall left critics Gergiev, and in sheer statistical terms, ‘opened their fantasy and improved helpless with superlatives and proved, as he has probably covered more ground their dramatic quality’. had an Edinburgh performance, that this than any of his predecessors. You can be is a Wagnerian narrative that works in the sure, as you listen to the original Fourth Gergiev has always been convinced concert hall – an opera without words. Symphony in the first of his Prokofiev that there was little in the composer’s concerts this autumn, that Gergiev is the later output where ‘you lose the original Gergiev’s performances may be charismatic only conductor in the world who has not Prokofiev language because of the political in the extreme, but Prokofiev still comes only conducted its huge revised version system under which he lived. The most first: ‘I still learn a lot about this composer, but has also been there in the pit for obvious examples are the Fifth and Sixth a lot. I never stop enjoying his fine sense staged performances of its parent work, symphonies, composed by a phenomenal of detail, his incredible harmonies and the ballet The Prodigal Son. A pioneer artist who was at the heart of his artistic enjoyable melodies. It’s an endless wealth in Russia of the works which Prokofiev and creative powers. But he also went on of musical ideas which we call today the composed in unintended exile in the west, in the late 1990s to lead the Kirov company music of Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev. and which had long been discredited in such Stalin-era works as the Soviet And it’s my duty to serve him well.’ as a musical dead-end by the Soviet operas Semyon Kotko and The Story of © David Nice establishment, Gergiev has already shown a Real Man, and the astonishing October 4 Conductor’s Biography Valery Gergiev The London Symphony Orchestra’s Highlights of the 2008/09 season include a Principal Conductor, Valery Gergiev is Prokofiev cycle of staged works (Mariinsky also conductor of the World Orchestra for Orchestra) and the complete symphonies Peace (founded by Sir Georg Solti in 1995), (LSO) at Lincoln Center in New York and a Founder and Artistic Director of the Stars cycle of Prokofiev symphonies and concerti of the White Nights Festival, the Moscow with the LSO in Paris and Tokyo. Easter Festival, the Gergiev Rotterdam Festival, the Mikkeli International Festival, He has taken Mariinsky ensembles to 45 the Red Sea Festival and the New countries, presenting the best of Russian Horizons Festival, the latter of which opera and ballets as well as the complete is a contemporary music festival in the Shostakovich and Prokofiev symphonies Mariinsky Theatre’s new Concert Hall. and Wagner’s Ring. He was the subject of Carnegie Hall’s 2007/08 Perspectives: Valery Gergiev’s inspired leadership Valery Gergiev, in which he gave concerts as Artistic and General Director of the with the Kirov, Vienna Philharmonic and Mariinsky Theatre during the past 20 Met orchestras. In the same season he years has brought universal acclaim to conducted productions of Prokofiev’s War Valery Gergiev © Alberto Venzago this legendary institution, which recently and Peace and The Gambler at the Met.