Wednesday 13 December 2017 7.30–9.30pm Sunday 17 December 2017 7–9pm Barbican Hall LSO SEASON CONCERT SIR SIMON RATTLE Strauss Metamorphosen STRAUSS Interval Mahler Das Lied von der Erde Sir Simon Rattle conductor Simon O’Neill tenor Christian Gerhaher baritone 13 December generously supported by LSO Friends & MAHLER 13 December broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 Wednesday 13 December 5.45pm Barbican Music Library Pre-Concert Talk: Curating Rattle 6pm Barbican Hall LSO Platforms: Guildhall Artists Strauss with the Guildhall Wind Ensemble Welcome LSO News On Our Blog Wednesday's concert is supported by LSO THE LSO’S A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S ALEX WOOLF SHARES HIS EXPERIENCES Friends, and we are delighted to have so DREAM WINS RECORDING OF THE YEAR OF THE PANUFNIK COMPOSERS SCHEME many Friends in the audience this evening. Our thanks go to them for their continued LSO Live's recording of Mendelssohn’s As applications come to a close for the and invaluable support. I would also like to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed with 2018 LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme, take this opportunity to thank our media Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir current participant Alex Woolf tells us partner BBC Radio 3, who are broadcasting and three artists from the Guildhall School, what it’s been like working with players Wednesday's concert live. has been awarded Symphonic Recording from the Orchestra and how the scheme of the Year by two French classical music has influenced his music. The concert on 13 December is preceded by monthly publications, Classica and Diapason. two events: a talk to accompany the Rattle BEHIND THE SCENES A warm welcome to this pair of LSO concerts. Exhibition in the Barbican Music Library, STEP INSIDE THE ORCHESTRA WITH ALICE SARA OTT Tonight the LSO's Music Director Sir Simon and a performance of music by Strauss from WITH LSO PLAY Rattle begins a series of programmes, postgraduate students at the Guildhall On our YouTube channel, Alice Sara Ott plays stretching across the 2017/18 season, which School. These recitals, which are free to Our digital platform LSO Play has been a dazzling, explosive excerpt from Liszt’s focus on the late works of composers ranging ticket-holders for the LSO concert, take place re-designed by original developers Sennep Totentanz, and shows us her talent for from Rameau to Elliott Carter, including on selected dates throughout the season and can now be viewed on smartphones and solving a Rubik’s Cube in less than a minute – three pieces by Mahler that were never and provide a platform for the musicians of tablets. Watch the Orchestra’s performances part of her warm-up routine before a concert. heard by the composer himself. We begin the future. Visit lso.co.uk for future dates. in exquisite detail, choose between multiple with the orchestral song-cycle Das Lied von camera angles, and learn more about the Read our blog, watch videos and more der Erde, for which we welcome baritone I hope you enjoy this performance and that Orchestra and the music at play.lso.co.uk. • youtube.com/lso Christian Gerhaher and tenor Simon O’Neill, you will join us again soon. On Thursday • lso.co.uk/blog who recently joined the Orchestra for 21 December, we perform the second of our LSO FRIENDS PRIORITY BOOKING Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at the BBC Proms. new, short Half Six Fix concerts, for which FOR THE 2018/19 SEASON Sir Simon has assembled a dazzling cast to This evening’s concert opens with another perform Wonderful Town, a musical by the LSO Friends will receive priority booking for late work, Strauss’ Metamorphosen, which LSO’s former President, Leonard Bernstein. the 2018/19 Season when it goes on sale in was completed just three years before the the new year. Find out more about joining composer's death and which was performed the LSO Friends at lso.co.uk/support-us. by the Orchestra for the first time with Sir Malcolm Sargent in April 1954. Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Read our news online Managing Director • lso.co.uk/news 2 Welcome 13 & 17 December 2017 Tonight’s Concert / introduction by Lindsay Kemp Sir Simon Rattle: Coming Up eckoning mortality and the PROGRAMME NOTE WRITERS Thursday 11 January 2018 7.30pm Sunday 14 January 2018 7pm transforming effects of the years are the philosophical substance of Lindsay Kemp is a senior producer for Schubert Symphony No 8, ‘Unfinished’ Janáček Overture: From the House of the Dead tonight’s programme. Strauss’ Metamorphosen BBC Radio 3, including programming Mahler Rückert Lieder Carter Instances for 23 solo strings, created amid the ruins of lunchtime concerts at Wigmore Hall and Handel Three Arias Berg Violin Concerto Germany as World War II ground to its grim LSO St Luke’s; Artistic Director of the Rameau Les Boréades – Suite Bartók Concerto for Orchestra conclusion, was the 80-year-old composer’s Baroque at the Edge festival; and a regular intensely self-conscious elegy for what he contributor to Gramophone magazine. Sir Simon Rattle conductor Sir Simon Rattle conductor feared was a destroyed national culture, Magdalena Kožená mezzo-soprano Isabelle Faust violin complete with a brief but telling allusion Andrew Stewart is a freelance music journalist to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony. But it is and writer. He is the author of The LSO Saturday 13 January 2018 7.30pm Thursday 19 & 26 April 2018 7.30pm more than a moving threnody for German at 90, and contributes to a wide variety music; it is also a searching meditation on of specialist classical music publications. MUSIC OF EXILE Helen Grime Woven Space * world premiere the passing of time. Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Milhaud et al Mahler Symphony No 9 Stephen Johnson is the author of Bruckner Genesis Suite Passing of a different kind is explored in Remembered (Faber) and Mahler: His Life Bartók Concerto for Orchestra Sir Simon Rattle conductor Das Lied von der Erde, the work with which and Music (Naxos). He also contributes Mahler hoped to ‘give God the slip’ (as his regularly to BBC Music Magazine and The Sir Simon Rattle conductor * Commissioned for Sir Simon Rattle and the wife put it) by giving it a name instead of Guardian, and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, Helen McCrory, Simon Callow, London Symphony Orchestra by the Barbican calling it what it actually was – his ninth Radio 4 and the World Service. Rodney Earl Clarke, Sara Kestelman narrators symphony. But although he went on to write Gerard McBurney creative director Sunday 22 April 2018 7pm a ‘real’ Ninth and even start a Tenth, he died Mike Tutaj projection design before any of them could be performed. London Symphony Chorus Tippett The Rose Lake * Das Lied’s subject of implacable death WELCOME TO TONIGHT'S GROUPS Simon Halsey chorus director Mahler comp Cooke Symphony No 10 might seem almost unbearably poignant, London Symphony Orchestra therefore, were it not for the exquisite We are delighted to welcome the following Sir Simon Rattle conductor delicacy and variety of its music, and its groups: World Air-Sea Service, Gerrards Cross Produced by the LSO and the Barbican. Part of final radiant statement of belief in the Community Association (13 December) and the LSO’s 2017/18 Season and Barbican Presents. * Supported by PRS for Music Foundation eternally renewing beauty of nature. Viajes Mundo Amigo (17 December). Resonate Fund, in partnership with the Association of British Orchestras and BBC Radio 3. Tonight's Concert 3 Richard Strauss Metamorphosen 1945 / note by Lindsay Kemp n the spring of 1945, with World War The use of the word tells us two things. First taken form over a number of years. Seen II approaching its conclusion, the of all, this single-movement adagio, lasting in this light, and bearing in mind both its devastation of Germany’s cities was nearly 30 minutes, is one in which the genesis and the text originally associated almost complete. For the 80-year-old Strauss melodic material is subjected to constantly with it, Strauss’ work clearly embodies it was almost too much to bear. The bombing unfolding and intricate development. a much more personal message about of the Munich National Theatre in 1943, where There are four main themes, of which the self-knowledge and the passing of time. several of his operas had been premiered, had drooping, grief-stricken second, heard on a The result is one of his most searching hit him as ‘the greatest catastrophe which pair of violas immediately after the cellos and emotionally intense utterances. • has ever been brought into my life’, and since and basses have given out the chordal first, then the destruction of the opera houses in is the most naggingly obstinate. Its origins Weimar, Dresden and Vienna had reduced lay in a theme Strauss had noted down after him to even greater depths of depression the loss of the Munich Opera House, and just and despair. To him, it seemed as if German before the end of the piece we hear it in its • JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE civilisation itself was coming to an end. final metamorphosis, transformed by cellos and basses into the theme from the Funeral Poet, novelist and playwright Johann Not that this gloomy mood stopped him from March of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony. Wolfgang von Goethe was an important composing. The previous summer he had Strauss maintained that the allusion had figure in early-Romantic German literature. begun work on a setting for male voice choir not been a planned one, but he nevertheless His first novel The Sorrows of Young Werther of a poem by Goethe •, ‘Niemand wird sich wrote the words ‘In Memoriam!’ underneath (1774) is thought to have ignited the Sturm selber kennen’: ‘No one can know himself … it in the score, and the implication seems und Drang period and his tragedy Faust, yet daily he must put to the test what he can clear – that Metamorphosen is a threnody based on the German folk legend, went see clearly and objectively … what he is and for German musical life.