NOSEDA Sunday 9 February 2020 7–8.45pm BarbicanLSO SEASON CONCERT SHOSTAKOVICH NINTH SYMPHONYProkofiev Symphony No 1, ‘Classical' Prokofiev Violin Concerto No 1 Interval Mussorgsky Prelude to ‘Khovanshchina’ Shostakovich Symphony No 9

Gianandrea Noseda conductor Roman Simovic violin

2 Welcome

Welcome NewsBEETHOVEN 250 TIMELINE

Discover key moments in the life and work of this musical titan.

CLASSIC FM RECOMMENDED CONCERTS: SPRING 2020

We are proud to have been Classic FM’s Orchestra in the City of London for over 17 years. Don’t miss our round-up of Classic FM’s recommended concerts for spring and a look at where the music sits in the history of the LSO.

• lso.co.uk/more/blog

WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS

Tracy Hall and friends

Please ensure all phones are switched off. Photography and audio/video recording are not permitted during the performance.

elcome to tonight’s LSO concert at the Barbican. We are delighted to welcome back Principal Guest

Conductor Gianandrea Noseda for this performance, as he continues his cycle of Shostakovich’s symphonies, a major project that began in 2016 and is being recorded for future release on LSO Live.

Tonight’s programme opens with pieces showing two sides to Prokofiev: the First Symphony, with its witty references back to the era of Haydn and Mozart, and the more Romantic Violin Concerto No 1. LSO Leader Roman Simovic’s performance as soloist for this Concerto has been eagerly awaited, after he stepped in at the last minute to play Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Gianandrea Noseda in 2019 – saving the day with half an hour’s notice.

After the interval, Mussorgsky’s folk-infused Prelude to the opera Khovanshchina builds on our season theme of ‘roots and origins’, and the concert concludes with Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, a work written in the closing moments of World War II and which also refers back to an earlier era, described by Gianandrea Noseda as Shostakovich at his ‘most Classical’.

I hope you enjoy tonight’s concert, and that you will join us again soon. At the end of the month, Elim Chan conducts the Orchestra in Ravel and Rachmaninov, alongside a recent work by Elizabeth Ogonek and a premiere by Panufnik composer James Hoyle.

Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director

9 February 2020

It is with much sadness that the LSO heard of the recent death of Caroline O’Neill, a gifted viola player who was a loyal guest musician with the LSO over many years. She had battled bravely with an illness for an extended period, and toured with the Orchestra on many occasions before and during this time. Her cheerful, bright personality and optimism will be missed by everyone who knew her. Our sympathies are with her husband, LSO First Violin Colin Renwick, and her family.

DONATELLA FLICK LSO CONDUCTING COMPETITION

Applications are now open for the 16th Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition in 2021, founded in 1990 by Donatella Flick and celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

• lso.co.uk/more/news

On Our Blog

3Tonight’s Concert

Coming UpTonight’s Concert In BriefPROGRAMME CONTRIBUTORS

David Nice writes, lectures and broadcasts on music, notably for BBC Radio 3 and BBC Music Magazine. His books include studies of Strauss, Elgar, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and a Prokofiev biography, From Russia to the West 1891–1935.

Andrew Stewart is a freelance music journalist and writer. He is the author of The LSO at 90 and contributes to a variety of specialist classical music publications.

Andrew Huth is a musician, writer and translator who writes extensively on French, Russian and Eastern European music.

peaking of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, Gianandrea Noseda says, ‘I can really feel his wish

to go against what was expected of him.’ Composers including Dvořák, Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler completed their catalogue of symphonies with a ninth, so by 1945, there were big expectations. What Shostakovich wrote, though characteristic, is one of his smallest symphonies and is indebted to the neo-Classical stylings of composers like Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

Prokofiev’s First Symphony, the ‘Classical’, opens the concert, before violinist Roman Simovic plays the composer’s lyrical First Violin Concerto, with slow outer movements and a quick scherzo at its heart. Although the concerto was not performed until 1922, it was (like the First Symphony) drafted in 1917, a year of revolution in Russia. Neither piece expresses themes of political upheaval on its surface.

In contrast to Prokofiev’s angular melodies and sarcastic Classical style is the earnest, Romantic mood of Mussorgsky’s Prelude, composed for the unfinished opera Khovanshchina. Evoking dawn over Moscow, it was orchestrated by the composer’s friend Rimsky-Korsakov.

Sunday 1 March 7pm Barbican

SYMPHONIC GOSPEL SPIRIT

Orchestral arrangements of gospel classics and André J Thomas' celebratory Mass.

André J Thomas conductor NaGuanda Nobles soprano Jason Dungee tenor Brandon Boyd piano London Adventist Chorale Community choirs from around London

Saturday 7 March 2.30pm Barbican

LSO DISCOVERY FAMILY CONCERT: HOW TO BUILD AN ORCHESTRA

When it comes to making music, there's nothing for it like an orchestra. Learn how the instruments come together to make on-stage magic. Suitable for ages 7 to 12.

Jessica Cottis conductor Rachel Leach presenter

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Saturday 15 February 7pm LSO St Luke’s

LSO DISCOVERY SOUNDHUB SHOWCASE: PHASE II

Composers on Phase II of LSO Discovery’s Soundhub scheme showcase new music, joined by LSO musicians. LSO Soundhub is generously supported by

Susie Thomson

Thursday 27 February 7.30pm Barbican

DAPHNIS AND CHLOE

James Hoyle Thymiaterion (world premiere) * Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 3 Elizabeth Ogonek All These Lighted Things – three little dances for orchestra Ravel Daphnis and Chloe – Suite No 2 Elim Chan conductor Lukáš Vondráček piano

*Commissioned through the Panufnik Composers

Scheme, generously supported by Lady Hamlyn and The Helen Hamlyn Trust

4 Programme Notes 9 February 2020

1 Allegro 2 Larghetto 3 Gavotte (Non troppo allegro) 4 Finale (Molto vivace)

y 1917, the young Prokofiev was known to his fellow Russians, if not as yet to the world at

large, as the impudent composer of spicy piano miniatures rife with nose-thumbing ‘wrong’ notes, of two piano concertos in which his own talents as a virtuoso were more extensively served, and of a raucous orchestral work, the Scythian Suite, drawn from a ballet rejected by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev.

Prokofiev’s symphonic ambitions were aired in a three-movement student work of 1908, then scaled down in the bright and breezy Sinfonietta the following year. He was never a composer to repeat past successes, and in the May 1917 entry from his revelatory diaries, published now in an English translation by Anthony Phillips (my own is used here), he shows delight at how the ‘Classical’ symphony he has half-composed in his head might court controversy:

‘When our Classically oriented musicians and professors (who are, to my mind, simply pseudo-Classicists) hear this symphony,

then they’ll kick up a fuss about a new Prokofievian audacity, to the effect that he wouldn’t leave Mozart to rest in peace and grabs at him with his dirty hands, smearing pure Classical pearls with his Prokofievian dissonances, but true friends will understand that the style of my symphony is simply true Mozartian Classicism and will appreciate it, while the public will probably just be glad that it is uncomplicated and cheerful and will surely applaud it.‘

It is, perhaps, not so extraordinary that Prokofiev should be venturing into the kind of so-called neo-Classicism supposedly ‘discovered’ by Stravinsky several years later with Pulcinella; after all, Tchaikovsky had time-travelled long before in works like the Variations on a Rococo Theme and his opera The Queen of Spades. What does seem odd is that the ‘Classical’ symphony should have been produced in 1917, the year in which, according to Soviet hindsight, Prokofiev should have been capturing the spirit of revolution with tense, nervous scores.

The simple fact is that in the early part of the year, Prokofiev was reasonably confident about the upheavals. During the February revolution he had been in Petrograd, as his alma mater St Petersburg had been renamed in World War I, dodging the bullets on street corners, and he was glad to get out of the ‘foul city’ in the spring. Yet as the diaries reveal, the ‘happy optimism’ of his character welcomed the form of provisional government proposed by the revolutionaries.

He was buoyant, too, to find a place in the country just a short distance from the dacha zone, where most Petrograders brought their city ways to bear on the peace and quiet. Here, at a simple farm serving up healthy food, he went walking and composed whole stretches of the ‘Classical’ symphony that May ‘without a piano’, exactly the kind of experiment he thought could be applied to ‘a rather simple thing like this symphony’. He resumed further work in June on his return from a river cruise, scrapping the original finale and replacing it with one so

Sergei Prokofiev Symphony No 1 in D major Op 25, ‘Classical’ 1917 / note by David Nicejoyful that it might, he thought, ‘verge on the indecently irresponsible’. He completed the orchestration that September in his mother’s favoured southern health resort of Yessentuki.

The premiere, which Prokofiev conducted the following April in Petrograd just before his departure for the US, proved plain sailing, even though he had anticipated some antagonism from the ‘Revolutionary orchestra’. It was a success, pure and simple. Everyone, after all, took Prokofiev’s self-styled ‘pure Mozartian Classicism’ at face value; the lessons he had learnt from his favourite professor Nikolai Tcherepnin – who inclined more to Haydn than Mozart – and from conducting of a student version of The Marriage of Figaro had gone to good use. Our own interest is much less in the sonata-form workings of the Classical style than in the symphony’s youthful high spirits and surprising good humour.

Its scoring is clean and clear, excelling in the spry dialogues of strings and wind, with only trumpets, horns and timpani used to ballast the handful of louder outbursts. Most of the themes slip comfortably if quirkily in to neighbouring keys (usually in downward steps) before steering back to base. The sidestepping is never at rest in the first

— ‘True friends will understand that the style of my symphony is simply true

Mozartian Classicism and will appreciate it … ’ —

5Composer Profile

movement’s chirruping second subject and the compact gavotte, the first movement to be composed and later losing much of its pointed wit as extended exit music in the 1935 score for Romeo and Juliet.

The poised violin melody of the larghetto seems more secure at first, but has to glide back obliquely over the insistent intervening chatter on its two returns; and what sounds like the most Classical melody of them all, the throwaway flute tune that is the last theme to make its appearance in the finale, has a surprising source. It quotes the heroine’s innocent theme in Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1882 opera The Snow Maiden, no doubt as an affectionate memorial to the older composer, but also as a tribute to the beauty of nature which inspired both works. •

Sergei Prokofiev In Profile 1891–1953

rokofiev was born in Ukraine and was encouraged to study music from an early age by his mother,

a keen amateur pianist. The young Sergei showed prodigious ability as both composer and pianist, gaining a place at the St Petersburg Conservatory at the age of 13 and shortly thereafter acquiring a reputation for the uncompromising nature of his music. According to one critic, the audience at the 1913 premiere of the composer’s Second Piano Concerto was left ‘frozen with fright, hair standing on end’. He left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, but decided to return to Moscow with his wife and family 19 years later, apparently unaware of Stalin’s repressive regime.

Before he left for exile, Prokofiev completed his ‘Classical’ symphony, a bold and appealing work that revived aspects of 18th-century musical form, clarity and elegance. He received commissions from arts organisations in the United States and France, composing his sparkling opera The Love for Three Oranges for the Chicago Opera Company in 1919–20. His engagements as a recitalist and concerto soloist brought Prokofiev to a wide audience in Europe and the US, and he was in great demand to perform his own Piano Concerto No 3. The ballet Romeo and Juliet and the score for Feinzimmer’s film Lieutenant Kijé were among Prokofiev’s first Soviet commissions, dating from the early 1930s. Both scores were subsequently cast as concert suites, which have become cornerstones of the orchestral repertoire.

‘The Fifth Symphony was intended as a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit’: Prokofiev wrote these comments in 1944 as the Russian army marched towards Berlin, reflecting his sense of hope in the future.Sadly, his later years were overshadowed by illness and the denunciation of his works as ‘formalist’ by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1948. •

Profile by Andrew Stewart

IN BRIEF Prokofiev’s Symphony No 1 was written in 1917 and premiered the following year under the baton of its composer. It was well received, owing to its familiar ‘Classical’ style and high spirits, which were all the more appealing to a Russian audience otherwise burdened by revolution and war. Prokofiev had composed this symphony as an experiment in writing away from the piano, and the result shows Prokofiev’s distinctive musical personality, how he used older techniques and styles to sound fresh, vivid and precise.

6 Programme Notes 9 February 2020

Sergei Prokofiev Violin Concerto No 1 in D major Op 19 1917 / note by Andrew Huth1 Andantino 2 Scherzo: Vivacissimo 3 Moderato – Allegro moderato

Roman Simovic violin

ow could it have happened that he did not hear the true music of the Revolution?’ asks Prokofiev’s

dutiful Soviet biographer, Israel Nestyev, of his subject’s role in the crucial year of 1917. It happened because the young composer spent very little time in the cities during the turbulent months leading up to the yet more crucial events that October. Both the Symphony No 1 (‘Classical’) and the First Violin Concerto, alongside a new-found passion for astronomy, occupied his calm thoughts in the country so near to a turbulent Petrograd, and yet so far from its unquiet spirit (he had, admittedly, toyed with the concerto while shooting carried on beneath his window in the city that February).

Arguably it was the limpid purity of Russia’s eastern rivers which found its way into the orchestration of the First Violin Concerto. Travelling southwest to pick up a boat along the Volga to Kazan, he decided with apparent spontaneity to explore the Kama River. His detour took him as far east as the

foot of the Ural Mountains. He described the scenery to his friend Nikolai Myaskovsky as ‘wild, virginal and exceptionally beautiful, with its red mountainous shores covered in dark Siberian pines’.

The virginal and the beautiful aspects could certainly be applied to the opening idea of the concerto, and yet this ‘beautiful, tender theme’ had first occurred to Prokofiev as the start of a concertino back in August 1913. The second subject followed that November, though presumably the adagio he mentions in January 1914 was abandoned, or reallocated; the shock of the new when he saw Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in London that summer (and was asked to compose a hard-hitting score for the impresario) made him ‘cool towards the lyricism of my Violin Concerto’. So only its aggressive scherzo took any kind of shape before the nature idylls of 1917.

Years of displacement and uncertainty intervened before the concerto’s first performance in Paris on 18 October 1923, with the 18-year-old leader of Serge Koussevitzky’s • orchestra, Marcel Darrieux,

as soloist. ‘Now, to be sure, I’d do a lot of it very differently’, Prokofiev told another settler in Paris, the musicologist Pyotr Souvchinsky. What remains significant is the gentle tunefulness in a relatively early work by a composer regarded, whether in 1917 or 1923, as a noise-making enfant terrible. Pure song for the soloist at the very beginning of a violin concerto was nothing new, and the Parisian audience looked down its nose at one possible source of inspiration, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. It seems more likely that Prokofiev had taken note of the shimmering string support for the violinist in the opening bars of the Sibelius Concerto as well as the roving, seemingly improvised quality of Sibelius’ melody.

Prokofiev’s own opening melody, predominantly sweet and dreamy rather than dark and dramatic like Sibelius’, runs for some 44 bars before dissolving its profile in low, irresolute trills. At first, the secondary material that follows, a gavotte rather more contorted than the one in the ‘Classical’ symphony, seems to come from a different world. Yet the magical negotiation back to the silk-spinning of the opening seems perfectly natural. This time, the flute takes over the melody in all its pristine beauty, while the harpist and soloist provide a gleaming reflection which surely owes something to the magic of that summer journey down the Kama, and the spell is cast even more wistfully at the end of the concerto.

Between these fugitive visions, Prokofiev entertains his listeners and the soloist with a scherzo – the movement he liked best in 1923 – running wild with every conceivable violinistic effect: pizzicato, harmonics, spiccato (or staccato bowing) and sul ponticello (playing close to the bridge of the violin). The orchestration snaps back with the resourcefulness of rushing clarinet figurations, pulsing horns and the baleful rearing of the tuba. Although the finale soon gives the impression of treading water before the work’s initial haven can be

— ‘In my view, the composer, just as the poet, the sculptor

or the painter, is in duty bound to serve man, the people. He must beautify human life and defend it.’

Prokofiev —

7Composer Profile

• SERGE KOUSSEVITZKY

Serge Koussevitzky was a Russian-born conductor, publisher and champion of modern music. He published works by Scriabin, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Medtner. He emigrated from Russia in 1920. While in Paris, he organised the Concerts Koussevitzky, a summer concert series featuring new works by many composers, including Prokofiev, Ravel and Stravinsky. He would go on to conduct the premieres of Prokofiev’s Symphony No 2 (1925) and Symphony No 4 (1930) as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Interval – 20 minutes There are bars on all levels of the Concert Hall; ice cream can be bought at the stands on Stalls and Circle level.

77

Wednesday 18 March 6.30pm Barbican HALF SIX FIX: BARTÓK THE WOODEN PRINCE François-Xavier Roth conductor & presenter

Recommended by Classic FM

Thursday 19 March 7.30pm Barbican THE WOODEN PRINCE Bartók Dance Suite Stravinsky Violin Concerto in D major Bartók The Wooden Prince François-Xavier Roth conductor Isabelle Faust violin

6pm Barbican: Free pre-concert recital with Guildhall Artists

Wednesday 22 April 6.30pm Barbican HALF SIX FIX CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA Sir Simon Rattle conductor & presenter

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Thursday 23 April 7.30pm Barbican DUKE BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE Bartók Concerto for Orchestra Bartók Duke Bluebeard’s Castle Sir Simon Rattle conductor Rinat Shaham mezzo-soprano Gábor Bretz bass lso.co.uk/201920

BARTÓKWITH FRANÇOIS-XAVIER ROTH & SIR SIMON RATTLE

reached again, its opening sets up a tension between the violinist’s cantabile melody and the tick-tocking accompaniment – anticipating the ambiguous slow movement of the Second Violin Concerto by nearly two decades. The affecting elaborations of clarinet and flute in the final vision were added in 1924 after early performances, Prokofiev told Myaskovsky, ‘because without some sort of divertissement like that it sounded dreadfully like the overture [Wagner’s Prelude] to Lohengrin’. •

8 Programme Notes

late starter who died far too young, Mussorgsky’s list of works features several projects that were never

properly started, soon abandoned or left incomplete. The biggest and most important of these is the opera Khovanshchina. It is an immensely powerful work, but also infuriating for its waywardness and aching gaps at vital parts of the structure.

The year 1874 was a high point for Modest Mussorgsky. In February, shortly before his 35th birthday, his first completed opera Boris Godunov was staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg; in June, he composed his piano work Pictures at an Exhibition and in November, the song cycle Sunless. The success of Boris spurred him to press on with the composition of another historical opera, this time dealing with the conflicts in Russian society at the end of the 17th century when Tsar Peter the Great was about to take absolute power. Its unwieldy title, Khovanshchina, refers to the intrigues of the powerful Khovansky family, whose private militias are confronted with the rock of religious fundamentalism, and with the modernising tendencies of Tsar Peter and his allies.

Unfortunately, it was also around this time that Mussorgsky began to indulge in the uncontrolled drinking bouts that would kill him at the age of 42, leaving Khovanshchina incomplete and almost none of the music orchestrated. After Mussorgsky’s death, his friend Rimsky-Korsakov prepared a performing edition of the score, filling in the gaps as best he could, orchestrating the music in his own subtle manner (very different from Mussorgsky’s rough-edged but effective style) and smoothing out much of what he considered to be Mussorgsky’s harshnesses in melody and harmony.Another edition, restoring some of the music cut by Rimsky-Korsakov, was commissioned from Shostakovich in 1958 for a film version of the opera.

The Prelude, however, is substantially the same in both rival versions. It was one of the earliest pieces to be composed (as a piano score) in September 1874. Act One of the opera is set in Moscow’s Red Square, and the Prelude is an evocation of dawn breaking over the Moscow River. It is built out of a folk-like melody, expressively extended and decorated, with the sinister tolling of bells hinting at grim events to follow. •

Modest Mussorgsky Prelude to ‘Khovanshchina’ (1874, orch Rimsky-Korsakov 1883) / note by Andrew Huth

9 February 2020

Konstantin Korovin's set design for Khovanshchina: Act I

9Composer Profile

Modest Mussorgsky In Profile 1839–81 / profile by Andrew Stewartodest Mussorgsky was born in Karevo, the youngest son of a wealthy landowner. His mother

gave him his first piano lessons at the age of six, and his musical talent was encouraged at the Cadet School of the Guards in St Petersburg, where he began to compose (despite having no technical training).

In 1857, he met Mily Balakirev, whom he persuaded to teach him, and shortly afterwards he began composing in earnest. The following year, Mussorgsky suffered an emotional crisis and resigned his army commission, but returned soon afterwards to his studies. He was, however, plagued by nervous tension, and this, combined with a crisis at the family home after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, stalled his development quite severely. By 1863, though, he was finding his true voice, and he began to write an opera (never completed) based on Flaubert’s Salammbô. At this time, he was working as a civil servant and living in a commune with five other young men also passionate about art and philosophy, where he established his artistic ideals.

In 1865, his mother died; this probably caused his first bout of alcoholism. His first major work, Night on the Bare Mountain, was composed in 1867, the

same year his government position was declared ‘supernumerary’, a form of de facto redundancy. Despite the associated loss of earnings, his artistic life developed decisively when he was referred to the kuchka (The Five), a group of Russian composers centred around Mily Balakirev. Soon afterwards, fired by the ideas discussed in his new artistic circle, he began his opera Boris Godunov, which he first completed in 1869 while working at the Forestry Department, and continued to revise for several years. He started work on another major work, Khovanshchina, a little while later.

The first production of Boris Godunov in 1874 would prove to be the peak of Mussorgsky’s career. The Balakirev circle had begun to disintegrate and he drifted away from his old friends. In a letter to Vladimir Stasov, he described how bitterly he felt, writing that ‘the Mighty Handful has degenerated into soulless traitors’. Around the same time, Mussorgsky’s friend Viktor Hartmann (whose exhibition would inspire Pictures) died, and his roommate Golenishchev-Kutuzov moved away. For a time, he maintained his creative output, but now divested of many of his former friends, Mussorgsky resumed drinking heavily. By 1880, he was forced to leave government employment and became destitute.

Despite financial support from a few remaining friends, he lapsed still further, desperately declaring to one there was ‘nothing left but begging’. He was eventually hospitalised in February 1881 after suffering a bout of alcoholic epilepsy. During a brief respite, around the date of his 42nd birthday, Ilya Repin painted his famous portrait of the composer (pictured left), but within two weeks of the sitting, Mussorgsky was dead. •

10 Programme Notes

1 Allegro 2 Moderato 3 Presto 4 Largo 5 Allegretto

fter the apocalyptic austerity of his Eighth Symphony, arguably his most towering masterpiece and

an expression of absolute horror composed in the thick of World War II, Shostakovich was expected to provide some kind of Soviet victory ode in 1945. Apparently, he did start work on a choral symphony – reports exist of what the first movement, played through by the composer early that year, sounded like, ‘majestic in scale, in pathos’, according to his reliable musical friend Isaac Glikman – but abandoned it in favour of a short five-movement work.

Sovietspeak still has its fallout in bizarre parroting of Russian composers’ party-line statements: Prokofiev’s disingenuous labelling of his Fifth Symphony’s victory-to-parody trajectory, heard for the first time that same year, as ‘the triumph of the human spirit’, for instance. In this case, it was seen in Shostakovich’s declaration, following completion of his Ninth on 30 August, that while the Seventh (‘Leningrad’) and Eighth Symphonies had been ‘tragic-

heroic in character’, in this conclusion to the trilogy ‘a transparent, pellucid, and bright mood predominates’. Never for long, as it turns out. The symphony is in E-flat major, the key of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’, but any heroism is of the comically tinted opera buffa • variety, and the composer’s definition of that is distinctly awry.

The premiere that November, conducted by Shostakovich’s ideal interpreter Yevgeny Mravinsky •, found praise from those who linked it back to his earlier humour, though there were also criticisms of its grotesqueries. The Ninth’s nomination for a Stalin Prize in 1946 did not result in success. When composers were publicly humiliated and denounced as ‘formalists’ – a multipurpose tag slapped on anything that might not be easily understood by the Soviet people – in front of Stalin’s man Andrei Zhdanov and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Ninth joined the Sixth and Eighth Symphonies as proscribed works.

Essentially the opening is Mozartian or Haydnesque in its buoyance, a downward arpeggio that’s an answer to the upwardly mobile opening of Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ symphony (composed in 1917 at a blissfully rustic distance from the year’s revolutionary upheavals). But the theme has a little twist

in the shape of a trilling grimace, and the second subject has a deadpan trombone and side drum to introduce the piccolo’s circus polka. Heightening the neo-Classical impression is an exposition repeat – the only one in the 15 Shostakovich symphonies. The development is more embattled, brass baring their fangs at the climax, and in a higher-volume return to order, the trombone only succeeds in reinstating the polka theme on the fifth attempt – on solo violin – and there’s more sudden brutality before the final chord.

If Shostakovich’s metronome marks are observed, the second movement is not so much a slow one as a limping waltz, led by clarinet solo, with muted strings moving in chromatic steps towards several anguished peaks, and a genuine adagio, frozen by the piccolo, only in the desolate final bars. So much for the brightness Shostakovich described in his 1945 trailer.

That might apply to the ensuing presto, something of a folk festival at first, in brilliant high frequencies. But a fierce trumpeter may remind us of the Khachaturian parody which drops off the production line of the Eighth Symphony’s terrifying toccata. The Ninth now pays compressed homage to that giant’s

interconnected last three moments. Though instead of crashing into tragedy, this scherzo burns out very quickly in depressive sighs from the strings – which, in turn, are bludgeoned by unison brass at the beginning of the fourth movement. The human plea is made by a bassoon in two free recitatives at the symphony’s lowest ebb.

In the Eighth Symphony, it was the clarinets who led us out of the darkness of the devastating slow movement into C major light, after which a bassoon crawled out from under a stone. Here the bassoon does all the hard work, rousing itself from utter desolation to a cautious and wry dance in E-flat major in another finale which follows without a break. As in the two other faster movements, jollity soon disappears in an ominous build-up of tension. The drama becomes hysterical before the opening dance and its companion return in a military parade that is both swaggering and grotesque: the word can’t be avoided here, and Shostakovich’s critics were right.

Then the music switches dramatically, and without a pause, into a hell-for-leather parade like the circus music that whirls the Sixth Symphony to its surprising conclusion, cocking a snook at the victory parade. Here, Shostakovich becomes once more the Soviet

Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No 9 in E-flat major Op 70 1945 / note by David Nice

9 February 2020

11Composer Profile

Till Eulenspiegel, like Prokofiev at the end of his Fifth Symphony. Both were lucky to escape the hangman’s noose that befalls Richard Strauss’ prankster, but they knew their audiences would be pleased with a final bout of excitement in a resounding major key. •

OPERA BUFFA

• Opera buffa is a genre of comic opera that proliferated in 18th-century Italian opera. Contrasting with opera seria, it represented everyday life (instead of mythological stories) and placed fewer technical demands on singers with simpler music that actors could perform.

YEVGENY MRAVINSKY 1903–88

• Born in St Petersburg, Mravinsky began his musical career as a rehearsal pianist for the Mariinsky Theatre. Recordings reveal he had extraordinary control over dynamics and frequently changed tempo for effect. In the words of critic David Fanning, ‘The Leningrad Philharmonic [played] like a wild stallion … at any moment it may break into such a frenzied gallop that you hardly know whether to feel exhilarated or terrified.’

Dmitri Shostakovich in Profile 1906–75 / profile by Andrew Stewart

ollowing early piano lessons with his mother, Shostakovich enrolled at the Petrograd Conservatory in

1919. He supplemented his family’s meagre income from his earnings as a cinema pianist, but progressed to become a composer and concert pianist following the critical success of his First Symphony in 1926 and an ‘honourable mention’ in the 1927 Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw. Over the next decade, he embraced the ideal of composing for Soviet society and

his Second Symphony was dedicated to the October Revolution of 1917.

Shostakovich announced his Fifth Symphony of 1937 as ‘a Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to just criticism’. A year before its premiere, he had drawn a stinging attack from the official Soviet mouthpiece Pravda, in an article headed ‘Muddle instead of music’, in which Shostakovich’s initially successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was condemned for its extreme modernism. ‘It is leftist bedlam instead of human music’, the article claimed. When the Fifth Symphony was premiered in Leningrad, the composer’s reputation and career were rescued. Acclaim came not only from the Russian audience, who gave the work a reported 40-minute ovation, but also from musicians and critics overseas.

With the outbreak of war against Nazi Germany in June 1941, Shostakovich began to compose and arrange pieces to boost public morale. He lived through the first months of the German siege of Leningrad, serving in the auxiliary fire service.

In July, he began work on the first three movements of his Seventh Symphony, completing the defiant finale after his evacuation in October and dedicating

the score to the city. A microfilmed copy was despatched by way of Tehran and an American warship to the US, where it was performed and broadcast by the NBC Symphony Orchestra and Toscanini. In 1943, Shostakovich completed his Eighth Symphony, its emotionally shattering music compared by one critic to Picasso’s Guernica.

In 1948, Shostakovich and other leading composers, Prokofiev among them, were forced by the Soviet cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, to concede that their work represented ‘most strikingly the formalistic perversions and anti-democratic tendencies in music’, a crippling blow to Shostakovich’s artistic freedom that was healed only after the death of Stalin in 1953. Shostakovich answered his critics later that year with the powerful Tenth Symphony, in which he portrays ‘human emotions and passions’, rather than the collective dogma of communism.

A few years before the completion of his final and bleak Fifteenth String Quartet, Shostakovich suffered his second heart attack and the onset of severe arthritis. Many of his final works – in particular the penultimate symphony (No 14) – are preoccupied with the subject of death. •

12 Artist Biographies 9 February 2020

Gianandrea Noseda conductorianandrea Noseda is one of the world’s most sought-after conductors, equally recognised

for his artistry in the concert hall and opera house. He was named the National Symphony Orchestra’s seventh Music Director in January 2016, beginning his four-year term in the 2017/18 season. In September 2018, his contract was extended for four more years through to the 2024/25 season. In 2019, Noseda and the NSO earned rave reviews for their first concerts together at Carnegie Hall in New York. The 2019/20 season sees their partnership continue to flourish with twelve weeks of concerts at the Kennedy Center – including performances of Beethoven’s nine symphonies – the launch of a new recording label to be distributed by LSO Live and their first overseas tour together to Japan and China in March 2020.

Noseda also serves as Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Principal Conductor of the Orquestra de Cadaqués, and Artistic Director of the Stresa Festival in Italy. In the 2021/22 season, Noseda will become General Music Director of the Zurich Opera House, where he will lead his first Ring cycle. From 2007 to 2018, Noseda served as Music Director of the

Teatro Regio Torino, where his leadership and his initiatives propelled the company’s global reputation.

During the 2019/20 season, Noseda will be a guest conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestre National de France, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Philharmonia Zurich, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Tonhalle Orchestra and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Noseda has an extensive discography of over sixty recordings for Chandos and Deutsche Grammophon, among others. He is closely involved with the next generation of musicians through his work as Music Director of the Tsinandali Festival and Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra, which just concluded its inaugural season, as well as with other youth orchestras, including the European Union Youth Orchestra.

A native of Milan, Noseda is Commendatore al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, marking his contribution to the artistic life of Italy. In 2015, he was Musical America’s Conductor of the Year, and was named the 2016 International Opera Awards Conductor of the Year. •

13Artist Biographies

Roman Simovic violinoman Simovic’s virtuosity and musicality have led to him performing on many of the world’s

leading stages, including the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Mariinsky Concert Hall (St Petersburg), Shlomo Lahat Opera House (Tel Aviv), Victoria Hall (Geneva), the Rudolfinum (Prague), the Seoul Arts Center, Grieg Hall (Bergen), and the Rachmaninov Concert Hall of the Moscow State Conservatoire. He has been awarded prizes at numerous international competitions, including the Premio Rodolfo Lipizer (Italy), the Tibor Varga International Violin Competition Sion Valais (Switzerland), and the Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition (Poland), placing him among the foremost violinists of his generation.

As a soloist, Roman has appeared with some of the world’s leading orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and the orchestra of the Teatro Regio di Torino, with conductors including Valery Gergiev, Sir Antonio Pappano, Daniel Harding, Gianandrea Noseda, Kristjan Järvi, Pablo Heras-Casado, John Wilson, and the late Jiří Bělohlávek. He has performed at numerous festivals, including Verbier (Switzerland), Bergen (Norway), White

Nights (St Petersburg), Moscow Easter Festival, BEMUS and NOVUS (Serbia), and Dubrovnik Summer Festival (Croatia), collaborating with artists such as Leonidas Kavakos, Evgeny Kissin, Yuja Wang, Gautier Capuçon, Antoine Tamestit, Mischa Maisky, Simon Trpčeski and Janine Jansen. He has presented masterclasses in the US, UK, South Korea, Serbia, Montenegro, Israel and Italy. His discography includes three discs directing the LSO String Ensemble, and a recording of the Tchaikovsky and Glazunov concertos with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, completed in 2018, and a recording of Niccolò Paganini’s 24 Caprices for solo violin, captured by LSO Live.

Roman Simovic is the leader of the London Symphony Orchestra. He plays a 1709 Antonio Stradivari violin, generously loaned to him by Jonathan Moulds.

cycle of symphonies gives the complete picture. It’s storytelling of [Shostakovich’s] life, but also

of what was going on in the history of the world in the 20th century. It’s fascinating to see how an artist like Shostakovich reacted to that – how, with art, he tried to be true to himself, while also trying to accomplish the dictates of the Soviets. You have to find your way, to make your personal voice heard. When you listen to Shostakovich, it doesn’t sound out of fashion – it sounds important for our lives today.

Conducting a cycle with one orchestra also allows you to grow together, not just as artists, but in the knowledge of the composer. Shostakovich is one of the most important symphonists. He knows how to use the orchestra, the instruments, the combination of sounds, but because of that the music is incredibly demanding. It requires stupendous virtuosity, and the LSO is that kind of orchestra. You have to keep the emotional charge without losing technical control.

Gianandrea Noseda on Russian RootsPrincipal Guest Conductor Gianandrea Noseda reflects on his Shostakovich symphony cycle and how music speaks to us today.

— Each interpretation tells the story of its own time … because the world is different, because we are different.

—

and to record Shostakovich in 2019 and 2020 is different, because the world is different, because we are different.

Shostakovich speaks equally to us today. I think art has this quality, this strength, to always be fresh. We tell stories that connect with us as human beings. As long as humankind occupies this planet, we will always love each other, hate each other, feel compassion, suffer … the infrastructure of our lives may be different, but we belong to humankind.’ • Listen to the cycle so far on LSO Live, featuring Symphonies Nos 4, 5 and 8. • lsolive.co.uk

In the 2019/20 season, we’ll perform the Sixth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies, which are three of the four ‘War’ Symphonies written during World War II. The Seventh coincided with the Siege of Leningrad, and you can hear the march of the soldiers, the obsessive repetition, a loop you cannot escape. But with the Ninth, Stalin wanted a celebration of the victory of Russia, and Shostakovich came out with a sort of opera buffa symphony – short, witty, lots of sarcasm. I can really feel his wish to go against what was expected of him.

It’s important that we continue to hear and perform this music. It’s not superfluous to create another disc, another cycle, because each interpretation tells the story of its own time. To record Shostakovich in the 1970s

— Shostakovich is one of the most

important symphonists. He knows how to use the orchestra, the instruments,

the combination of sounds. —

‘

JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER ORCHESTRA WITH

Saturday 30 & Sunday 31 May, 7.30pm Barbican

Wynton Marsalis Symphony No 4, ‘The Jungle’

Plus Big Band classics with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle conductor Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis London Symphony Orchestra

WYNTONMARSALIS

ynton Marsalis and Sir Simon Rattle blend jazz, blues and classical music in this crossover

collaboration with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Wynton Marsalis’ Symphony No 4, ‘The Jungle’ is a portrait of New York City in all its dazzling, cosmopolitan glory. Featuring glimpses of ragtime and dance music, its six movements combine rapid and hard-swinging passages with poignant blues-tinged melodies and colourful, plushly orchestrated jazz chords.

The ‘La Esquina’ movement pays homage to the city’s Afro-Latin culture while the work’s finale sees wailing brass spin bold melodies over rhythmic riffs. Like the (second) greatest city in the world, this intoxicating cacophony of sounds, cultures and identities will leave you thinking.

Produced by the LSO and the Barbican. Part of the

LSO’s 2019/20 Season and Barbican Presents.

16 The Orchestra

London Symphony Orchestra on stage tonight

Editorial Photography Ranald Mackechnie, Chris Wahlberg, Harald Hoffmann, Marco Borggreve Print Cantate 020 3651 1690 Advertising Cabbells Ltd 020 3603 7937

Details in this publication were correct at time of going to press.

Leader Carmine Lauri

First Violins Clare Duckworth Ginette Decuyper Laura Dixon Gerald Gregory Maxine Kwok Claire Parfitt Elizabeth Pigram Laurent Quenelle Harriet Rayfield Sylvain Vasseur Rhys Watkins Richard Blayden Dániel Mészöly Hazel Mulligan Zachary Spontak

Second Violins Julián Gil Rodríguez Thomas Norris Sarah Quinn Miya Väisänen Matthew Gardner Naoko Keatley Alix Lagasse Belinda McFarlane Iwona Muszynska Csilla Pogany Andrew Pollock Paul Robson Mariam Nahapetyan Alain Petitclerc

Violas Edward Vanderspar Gillianne Haddow Malcolm Johnston German Clavijo Stephen Doman Carol Ella Julia O’Riordan Robert Turner Luca Casciato Nancy Johnson Peter Mallinson Cynthia Perrin

Cellos David Pia Alastair Blayden Jennifer Brown Noel Bradshaw Eve-Marie Caravassilis Daniel Gardner Hilary Jones Amanda Truelove Judith Fleet Francois Thirault

Double Basses Graham Mitchell Colin Paris Patrick Laurence Matthew Gibson Thomas Goodman Joe Melvin José Moreira Benjamin Griffiths

Flutes Gareth Davies Victoria Daniel

Piccolo Patricia Moynihan

Oboes Juliana Koch Rosie Jenkins

Clarinets Chris Richards Chi-Yu Mo

Bassoons Daniel Jemison Joost Bosdijk

Horns Timothy Jones Angela Barnes Alexander Edmundson Flora Bain

Trumpets Philip Cobb Kaitlin Wild

Trombones Rebecca Smith James Maynard

Bass Trombone Paul Milner

Tuba Ben Thomson

Timpani Nigel Thomas

Percussion Neil Percy David Jackson Sam Walton

Harp Bryn Lewis

9 February 2020

LSO String Experience Scheme Since 1992, the LSO String Experience Scheme has enabled young string players from the London music conservatoires at the start of their professional careers to gain work experience by playing in rehearsals and concerts with the LSO. The musicians are treated as professional ‘extra’ players (additional to LSO members) and receive fees for their work in line with LSO section players. The scheme is supported by: The Polonsky Foundation Derek Hill Foundation Idlewild Trust Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust Thistle Trust