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WelcomeThere has always been so much more to LCO Concerts than just hearing the notes! There is the infectious joy in making and communicating music. But there has also been a belief that musicians and the audience are part of a bigger picture - music changes us and the world.

From its earliest beginnings, LCO concertgoers were challenged to give to different charities. And Rosemary Furniss, the Artistic Director, was involved for many years with Yehudi Menuhin in taking music out to schools. She has enlisted LCO musicians in this over the years. Christopher Warren-Green, as a TV presenter, has long had a role in bringing music to a wider audience.

All these threads have come together in the 08/09 Season as we have launched LCO Kids, LCO New and LCO Live and entered into a really constructive relationship with Barnardo’s. We are all on a voyage of discovery to see how music can in some way change our own lives and the world around us.

It is fitting that we have our Beethoven Cycle. Beethoven certainly intended his music to make an impact on his world and to leave it a better place. We have heard Christopher Warren-Green and the LCO build towards the complete cycle and know that it will be very exciting. It incorporates Christopher’s long experience leading the Philharmonia under some of the greatest conductors of the second half of the 20th century and is also informed by modern performance understanding. And of course, it will be played by some of the finest musicians of the current generation in the great acoustic of St. John’s, Smith Square. It doesn’t get much better than that!

Reverend John Wates frsa

Chairman The London Chamber Orchestra Trust

London Chamber Orchestra

PatronHer Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall

PresidentVladimir Ashkenazy

President of the Patron’s CircleThe Countess of Chichester

Music Director & Principal ConductorChristopher Warren-Green

Artistic Director ConcertmastersRosemary FurnissVasko Vassilev

Series supported by The London Chamber Orchestra Trust

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Wednesday24 September 20087.30pm

Beethoven Piano Concerto No.1 in C Op.15

Beethoven Piano Concerto No.2 in B flat Op.19

Interval 20 minutes

Beethoven Symphony No.1 in C Op.21

Christopher Warren-Green Conductor Maria João Pires Op.19 & Arthur Jussen Op.15

Piano

Thursday25 September 20087.30pm

Beethoven

Piano Concerto No.3 in C minor Op.37

Beethoven

Piano Concerto No.4 in G Op.58

Interval 20 minutes

Beethoven Symphony No.8 in F Op.93

Christopher Warren-Green

Conductor

Maria João Pires Op.58 & Lucas Jussen Op.37 Piano

Wednesday 12 November 20087.30pm

Beethoven Violin Concerto in D Op.61

Interval 20 minutes

Fitkin Agnostic

Beethoven Symphony No.4 in B flat Op.60

Christopher Warren-Green Conductor Vasko Vassilev Violin Mark van de Wiel Clarinet

Friday 5 December 2008*7.30pm

Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola in E flat K364

Interval 20 minutes

Mozart Requiem K626

Christopher Warren-Green Conductor Vasko Vassilev Violin Joel Hunter Viola Talar Dekrmanjian Soprano Annelies Dille Mezzo Soprano Daniel Norman Tenor Stephen Gadd Baritone Tallis Chamber Choir

Wednesday 21 January 20097.30pm

Weber Oberon Overture

Beethoven Triple Concerto in C Op.56

Interval 20 minutes

Beethoven Symphony No.5 in C minor Op.67

Christopher Warren-Green Conductor Augustin Dumay Violin Justus Grimm Cello Delphine Lizé Piano

Wednesday 18 February 20097.30pm

Beethoven Leonore Overture No.3

Weber Clarinet Concerto No.2 in E flat Op.74

Interval 20 minutes

Beethoven Symphony No.6 in F Op.68 “Pastoral”

Christopher Warren-Green Conductor Michael Collins Clarinet

Wednesday 18 March 20097.30pm

Beethoven Coriolan Overture Op.62

Hummel Piano Concerto in A minor Op.85

Interval 20 minutes

Beethoven Symphony No.2 in D Op.36

Christopher Warren-Green Conductor Melvyn Tan Piano

1 2 3 4 5 6 7Wednesday 15 April 2009*7.30pm

Weber Andante and Rondo Ongarese Op.35

Dragonetti Grande Allegro

Hummel Trumpet Concerto

Interval 20 minutes

Beethoven Symphony No.7 in A Op.92

Christopher Warren-Green Conductor Alison Balsom Trumpet Meyrick Alexander Bassoon Stacey Watton Double Bass

Wednesday 6 May 2009*7.30pm

Beethoven Egmont Overture

Beethoven Piano Concerto No.5 in E flat Op.73 “Emperor”

Interval 20 minutes

Beethoven Symphony No.3 in E flat Op. 55 “Eroica”

Christopher Warren-Green Conductor Ricardo Castro Piano

Wednesday 24 June 2009*8pm

Beethoven Symphony No.9 in D minor Op.125 “Choral”

No Interval

Christopher Warren-Green Conductor Tomoko Taguchi Soprano Anne-Fleur Inizan Mezzo Soprano Zeno Popescu Tenor Elias Benito-Arranz Bass Nunc Dimittis

8 9 10Welcome from Christopher Warren-Green Music Director & Principal Conductor

I do hope you enjoyed LCO’s 07/08 season as much as the orchestra and I did. Our philosophy is not just to produce memorable concerts but to leave you, our audience, knowing that you have travelled with us.

Many of you who have heard LCO play Beethoven will know why I decided to create a whole season around his work and associations. It is with huge excitement that we anticipate working with some of the world’s best musicians. In choosing soloists we champion the young but equally admire and applaud those LCO has worked with over a number of years. And so our London season opens on consecutive nights with Maria João Pires and two of her protégés, the young brothers Arthur and Lucas Jussen.

It is also important for us to celebrate the talent within LCO; look out for Meyrick Alexander, Stacey Watton, Joel Hunter, and Vasko Vassilev who

will all be appearing as soloists this season. The celebrated Alison Balsom, until last season LCO’s principal trumpet, will join us as soloist in April.

We do hope, too, that you will enjoy our new association with the Queen Elizabeth College of Music in Brussels. This season our concerts in December and June will feature their young artists.

I should like to extend my personal thanks to everyone who helps us to make LCO performances possible, from the wonderful support given by our Patron Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall to the tireless unsurpassable work from The Countess of Chichester.

My thanks also to a myriad of supporters, sponsors large and small and the many people (LCO Trustees and LCO Advisers included) who, behind the scenes, volunteer their services.

Finally and far from least my thanks goes to the cherished LCO musicians themselves and to you our audience. I look forward to our journey together in 08/09.

*In aid of the I CAN Bill Harrison Assessment Centre - see page 34 Supported by Martin Lovegrove

*6pm LCO New Explore Pre-concert discussion with Graham Fitkin see page10

*In aid of Barnardo’s, working directly with over 100,000 children, young people and their families every year.

*Supported by Christopher Holder In Loving Memory of Maria and Marina

*6pm LCO New Explore Call for Scores Competition. In collaboration with the National Gallery - see page 10

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With his engaging and charming personality, Mr Warren-Green is excellently suited to television and radio appearances, and in Summer 2008 featured on BBC 2’s high profile series ‘Maestro’, in which he coached his celebrity student in the techniques of conducting. Mr Warren-Green’s charisma and talent endear him immediately to the musicians with whom he works, resulting in young artists and established soloists alike holding him in the highest regard.

‘Eradicating poverty, not just in an economic sense but also culturally, should be our first priority. There is no doubt that music makes a lasting difference to people’s lives which reaches beyond the concert hall. In 08/09 you will see LCO continue to reach out through new important charitable associations and creative education initiatives. Through LCO Kids, LCO New, and our collaboration with Barnardo’s, we will hope to make a difference.’

Elsewhere, Mr Warren-Green appeared last season at the Bucharest-based Enescu Festival with the Chamber Orchestra of the Romanian National Radio Society, and this season sees him working with the RTE Symphony Orchestra in Dublin and the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa. Further afield, Mr Warren-Green has conducted the Auckland Philharmonia and the NHK Symphony Orchestra. He works regularly with the Bahia Symphony Orchestra in Salvador, and this season conducts the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

On the personal invitation of HRH the Prince of Wales, Mr Warren-Green was honoured to arrange the music and conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra for the Service of Dedication and Prayer, celebrating the marriage of TRH the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. To mark the occasion of HM the Queen’s 80th birthday at Kew Palace, he conducted a private concert for the entire Royal family. Since 1980 he has conducted many concerts at Buckingham Palace, Highgrove House and St James’s Palace and has accompanied such artists as Radu Lupu and Maxim Vengerov in the presence of HRH the Prince of Wales.

Christopher Warren-Green has recorded extensively for BMG, Philips, Virgin, Chandos and Deutsche Grammophon, and most recently recorded a disc with the London Chamber Orchestra and Han-Na Chang on EMI Classics.

The renowned acoustic and intimate ambiance of St. John’s, Smith Square, its London residence, enable LCO – the oldest chamber orchestra in the UK and the only one resident in London – to give vibrant performances and establish a close rapport with its audiences.

‘…everyone on stage seems to be having a whale of a time and this feeds into a performance in which the music sounds new-minted’ The Guardian

LCO does not exist to create the ‘9-5’ environment where musicians are undervalued and overworked, and restricts its UK performances to 24 public concerts per year. It has performed in La Scala, Milan, Vienna’s Musikverein and on critically acclaimed tours of the

Christopher Warren-GreenA highly experienced musician, Christopher Warren-Green’s wide knowledge of the repertoire and poised command of an orchestra has earned him great respect throughout the music-making world.

He has held the position of Music Director of the London Chamber Orchestra since 1988. In 2004 he succeeded Sir Neville Marriner as Principal Conductor of the Camerata Resident Orchestra of the Megaron Athens. From 1998 to 2005 he was Chief Conductor of the Nordic Chamber Orchestra, and from 1998 to 2001 was Chief Conductor of the Jönköping Sinfonietta.

In the UK, Christopher Warren-Green regularly appears with the Royal Philharmonic, Philharmonia and BBC Concert orchestras. He has worked with the London Philharmonic and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic orchestras, and last season conducted the Royal Scottish National Orchestra to high critical acclaim.

Across the Atlantic, Mr Warren-Green recently made a highly successful debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and has also worked with the National Symphony Washington DC. This season he makes return visits to the Minnesota and Charlotte Symphony orchestras, adding to the list of prestigious orchestras he has already conducted there: the St Louis, Seattle and Vancouver symphony orchestras, to name a few.

London Chamber OrchestraResident at St. John’s, Smith Square

For the last 87 years, the London Chamber Orchestra has nurtured the new and paid tribute to the traditional. For 20 years as Principal Conductor and Music Director, Christopher Warren-Green has brought together the inspirational musicians and repertoire for which LCO is renowned.

‘It is an exciting experience hearing musicians of this calibre playing as if their lives depended on it.’ Hi-Fi News

USA, Japan and Hong Kong. In 2008 LCO international tours will include Korea with Han-Na Chang, Spain with Maria João Pires and two tours of Italy with Melvyn Tan and Pascal Rogé.

‘The... ensemble plays with taut precision and, matched evenly from top to bottom, produces a remarkably big sound.’ Los Angeles Times

Innovation is at the heart of LCO, which has given more than 100 UK premières of works by composers ranging from Mozart to its own celebrated composer in residence Graham Fitkin. In 2006 LCO premièred Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Golden Rule, written to mark The Queen’s 80th birthday, and in 2008 gave the London

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première of Hess’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra commissioned by The Prince of Wales.

This season sees the continuing development of LCO’s ground-breaking initiatives: LCO Kids reaches out to the young; LCO New presents a fresh look at contemporary music; and LCO Live captures the ambiance, interaction and exhilaration of LCO performances through recordings of each live concert at St. John’s, Smith Square.

‘Utterly ravishing...gloriously unforgettable...This is my recording of the year, some of the greatest of all British music given performances that are unforgettably inspirational.’ Gramophone

It is LCO’s philosophy, as an elite ensemble with an enviable reputation, to share its excellence in a socially aware environment – this it achieves through its education work and many important charitable associations. LCO continues to enjoy significant support from private donors, enthusiastic audiences and corporate sponsors. Priding itself on independence from public subsidy, LCO relies on impeccable performance credentials to attract its advocates.

Principal Conductor Christopher Warren-Green, LCO’s musicians and management aim to uphold LCO’s world class stature and its mission to educate, enlighten and entertain.

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LCO The MaestroLCO LCO New LCO New Explore encourages and facilitates new relationships between listeners, performers and composers. Through a series of informal concerts, the scheme aims to demystify contemporary music, giving new and existing audiences the confidence to try a new listening experience.

Inherent to LCO New Explore is LCO’s Call for Scores initiative. Offering young emerging composers the chance to write for a world-class orchestra, it enables the experimentation and development of their ensemble writing skills.

‘Creativity is an important aspect of life... It’s all about renewal. New times throw up new forms, more resonant modes of creating; and anyway, if we’d followed the principle ‘that’s enough now’ in 1850, we wouldn’t have Debussy, Stravinsky, Picasso, Hitchcock, The Beatles or Jazz.’ Graham Fitkin – LCO Composer in Residence

‘Fantastic. A rare experience, invaluable for young composers!’ Philip Ashworth – young composer, Royal College of Music

‘Many congratulations on the success of LCO New. I was bowled over by the standard... A great initiative. Well done.’ Iain Burns – Classical Music Homepage

Call for Scores 08/09 Composing Through ArtA collaboration between LCO and the National GalleryStudy Day 20 November 2008Public workshop / recording May 2009SJSS concert 6 May 2009National Gallery concert 5 June 2009

Further information about LCO New Explore and Composing Through Art can be found on LCO’s website www.lco.c.uk, or please contact Isobel Waller-Bridge [email protected] / 020 7105 6205

Thanks to the following supporters of Composing Through Art 08/09 Carmel Arts (Principal Sponsor)Bob & Elizabeth BoasClassical Music HomepageThe London Chamber Orchestra Trust

New commissions New relationships New ideas for new music

Kids play Kids listen Kids inspired

LCO Kids ‘A Musical Adventure’ was piloted by LCO during their 07/08 season in three schools: Bunbury (Cheshire), Duke of Kent (Surrey) and Millfield (Somerset). In 08/09, in partnership with the children’s charity Barnardo’s, LCO will develop ‘A Musical Adventure’ further with a view to full implementation in the 09/10 season. Working again in partnership with schools such as Millfield in Somerset, LCO with Barnardo’s will seek to change children’s lives for the better.

‘It has been a privilege and a joy to work with the 3 schools on our ‘Musical Adventure’. I feel that the work we are doing in schools is nurturing self-esteem and creativity. It is very rewarding for us and quite humbling.’ Rosemary Furniss – Director LCO Education

‘It is difficult to overestimate the importance of engaging children in the world of music. Millfield School has been building a new arena for such activity over the last few years and now, in a really exciting collaboration with LCO, is reaching out to satellite schools. We very much look forward to LCO’s return working in partnership with Barnardo’s in June 2009.’ Ben Charles – Director of Music, Millfield School, Somerset – June 08

‘How can we ever thank you enough for the wonderful experience you gave the children. They are absolutely buzzing and so thrilled to have had this opportunity.’ Teacher – Invited School, Bunbury, Cheshire – Feb 08

Further information about LCO Kids can be found on LCO’s website www.lco.co.uk, or please contact Ella Roberts [email protected] / 020 7105 6205

LCO Kids ‘A Musical Adventure’ would like to offer special thanks to:

The London Chamber Orchestra Trust The Versatile Flooring Company Ltd Peter and Anna George Bunbury Aldersey CE (aided) Primary School (Cheshire) Duke of Kent School (Surrey) Millfield School (Somerset)

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Lucas Jussen (15) Piano

Lucas Jussen also began taking piano lessons with Lenny Bettman at the age of five. Three years later he was one of five finalists in the Rotterdam Pianodriedaagse at the Doelen in Rotterdam. He performed in the Main Hall of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, accompanied by Camerata Amsterdam. During the fifth anniversary concert of the Young Pianist Foundation he performed in the Recital Hall of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Lucas won First Prize at the InterProvinciaal MuziekConcours, and won the Liszt Prize in his category. In 2004 Lucas won First Prize at the National Competition of the Foundation for Young Musical Talent in the Netherlands. At the Prinsengracht-concert in Amsterdam in 2006, Lucas played with Lang Lang.

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Belgais, a centre for the study of the arts. She is now taking the philosophy and teaching of Belgais to Bahia in Brazil.

In 2005 she formed an experimental theatre, dance and music group, Art Impressions, and together they have produced two projects “Transmissions”, and in 2007 “Schubertiade”.

Arthur Jussen (11) Piano

Arthur Jussen began taking piano lessons with Lenny Bettman at the age of five. In 2004 he won the DNM-Music competition of the Bussum school of music. That same year he won First Prize at the National Competition of the Foundation for Young Musical Talent in the Netherlands and was chosen ‘Young musical talent of the year’. Like his brother Lucas, Arthur’s hobbies include football and tennis.

Maria João Pires PianoMaria João Pires was born on 23 July 1944 in Lisbon. She gave her first public performance in 1948. In Portugal she studied with Campos Coelho and Francine Benoit, later continuing her studies in Germany with Rosl Schmid and Karl Engel.

Pires recorded with the Erato label for 15 years and subsequently, for the last 17 years, with Deutsche Grammophon.

Since 1970 Maria João Pires has dedicated herself to reflecting on the influence of art on life, community and education, and in trying to develop new ways of implementing pedagogic theories within society. She has researched new forms of communication that respect the development of the individual, as opposed to the destructive and materialistic logic of globalisation. In 1999 Maria João Pires created

Ludwig van Beethoven(1770-1827)

Piano Concerto No.1 in C Op.15I Allegro con brioII LargoIII Rondo: Allegro scherzando

Beethoven wrote this concerto to make his musical début in Vienna in March 1795. He had arrived in the city two and a half years previously to study with Haydn. At the age of 24 he would have wanted to impress, and it’s not surprising that the piece strikes a fine balance between paying homage to the Viennese masters of the recent past, with whom his audience would have been so familiar, and striking out on his own.

First among those masters was Mozart, whose piano concertos Beethoven first encountered in Vienna. The difference in his writing once he did is plain when you compare it with the Second Piano Concerto. The conversational nature of the concerto is especially Mozartian: strings and wind often take it in turns to ‘talk’ to the piano and to offer contrasting ideas. A crisis point arrives halfway through the first movement with a longer-breathed dialogue between the winds, underneath which the piano adds its own fretful commentary. It ripples up and down scales as if looking for where to go next – and here Mozart is forgotten, for the

music subsides to the piano and horn echoing the same motif before the tension breaks with a downward sweep, and a short orchestral storm returns us to the opening. Reworked and concentrated, the same procedure becomes a stroke of genius in the first movement of the “Eroica” Symphony.

His friend Franz Wegeler reported that Beethoven wrote the finale only two days before the concerto’s first performance while feeling under the weather, and this may in part account for its edgy nature. Sometimes the music seems hardly able to wait for itself to be over, and the three principal themes tussle with each other in a jazzy vibe that is, at last, entirely Beethoven.

Piano Concerto No.2 in B f lat Op.19I Allegro con brioII AdagioIII Rondo: Molto allegro

Mozart was still alive when, in 1787, Beethoven started work on a piano concerto in B flat: only 13 years later would it finally be played in the form we hear it today. During that time Beethoven’s life and work had undergone a sea-change: a concerto in C major had been written and published (which is why the B flat is known as No.2) and he had travelled miles, physically and emotionally, from an eager-to-please lad in Bonn to a young turk in Vienna. It would

take a novelist to trace this journey through the concerto, but we can hear clearly enough the sophistication of the finale’s repartee in comparison with the more abrupt turns of event of the first movement. Off the piano runs and the orchestra chase after, before apparently offering more weighty second thoughts. Nothing loth, the piano proposes an even more skittish idea – and later twirls the orchestra round its finger still further with loopy jumps and stamping accents on the wrong beat of the bar. We’re even left to think that the concerto will sign off with a shrug before good order is finally restored.

But more quietly original still is the tiny recitative for the piano at the end of the slow movement. This has proceeded in a gently contained, almost Mozartian fashion from its hymn-like opening (though without the older composer’s concentration on the wind instruments: here, everyone is subordinate to the composer/keyboard), elaborating and decorating, and moving into some unexpected keys, the last of which brings the orchestra to a head. In response, the pianist explores a return to the theme, third by third, helped by the orchestra. When fully appreciated by both performers and audience, it is a moment of true, Beethovenian communion.

Symphony No.1 in C Op.21I Adagio molto – Allegro con brioII Andante cantabile con motoIII Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace – TrioIV Finale: Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace

The symphony cycle which gave rise to the very idea of symphony cycles opens with a slap in the face. The playbill says we are in C major, the key of Mozart’s last symphony: continuity is assured, no? But we are not. We are in F. Then we move to G. Big deal? Well, yes. The music itself sounds puzzled, and we should be too. It’s only the first of many sophisticated musical tricks which litter the symphony, reminding us not only that Beethoven was 25, with a young man’s desire to shock and impress and amuse, but also that he had the mastery to do so.

The Allegro brings its own surprise, one to which contemporary listeners would have to accustom themselves many times in Beethoven’s music. The main theme is less a melody as understood by Haydn and (especially) Mozart and more a collection of rhythmic cells. What we hear is not rudimentary, however, but full of energy, because of the adventurous harmonic journey on which Beethoven takes those rhythmic units, slowing them down, changing their key, speeding them up. This is even truer in the Scherzo, where motifs persistently refuse to mesh, but instead tumble

over barlines, every which way. Beethoven names it a minuet, but anyone trying to dance to this as they might to one of Haydn’s minuets would be flat on their face. And what are we to make of the Trio? Are the hieratically poised wind chords in dialogue with the scurrying strings, or do they interrupt each other?

In the finale the unit of musical currency is a scale, nothing more, nothing less. It is ‘found’ note by note in the slow introduction as though a weighty proposition was being uncovered – but when the Allegro races off, it can be heard at every turn; not always in the most obvious place, but present somewhere. A return to first principles is palpable. Nothing can be taken for granted on this symphonic journey. Everything is open to question, even the obligatory ‘slow movement’. There isn’t one here, and whatever one makes of Beethoven’s metronome marks (sometimes so swift as to defy sense), the tread of the second movement’s opening string phrases demands cognisance of Beethoven’s ‘con moto’ marking. The opening bars present a microcosm of the symphony’s focused progression: a fourth becomes a third becomes a second. This is economy of which Gordon Brown would be proud, with a smile on its face into the bargain.

© Peter Quantrill 2008

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Since February 2007 the London Chamber Orchestra’s concerts at St. John’s, Smith Square have been recorded. This season, in partnership with the recording company Floating Earth and Signum Records, LCO Live will be releasing the first of these recordings.

This exciting new partnership will allow LCO audiences worldwide access to these dynamic live concert recordings. LCO joins a prestigious list of regularly recorded artists in Signum’s catalogue and looks forward to a long and fruitful collaboration.

‘I suggested recording LCO’s series of concerts at St. John’s, Smith Square because as an audience member it seemed to me a crying shame that such vital music making could not be shared beyond the hall. As a long standing fan of the work of Christopher Warren-Green and LCO I am delighted to bring their name together with Signum, a record label which we believe quintessentially stands for excellence’

Steve Long Managing Director Signum Records

LCO Live

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Now hear the magic of LCO’s live, dynamic and inspirational concerts on Signum Records

RECORDING Please note that all concerts will be recorded. We would appreciate your co-operation in minimising any unnecessary noise. Thank you.

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Piano Concerto No.3 in C minor Op.37I Allegro con brioII LargoIII Rondo: Allegro

For all that C minor is known as Beethoven’s ‘tragic’ key, it would be more useful to look not forward to the molecular detonations of the Fifth Symphony but backwards to Mozart’s only piano concerto in this key, No.24. Around the time that Beethoven was composing the Third Piano Concerto in the summer of 1799, he took a walk in a Viennese park with his pianist friend, Johann Cramer. As they strolled, they heard an al fresco performance of the Mozart, and Beethoven (according to Cramer) turned to him and said ‘Cramer, Cramer! We shall never be able to do anything like that!’ Cramer could have replied ‘But you will, Ludwig, you will’ – for the first movement’s theme could only have been written by someone who spent hours every day in front of the piano. It has three parts, all of them keyboard-doodle variants on Mozart’s theme: a C minor arpeggio, a scale back down to C, and a drumbeat between C and the fifth below it, F.

That said, the power and length of the orchestral introduction is pure Beethoven, as is the attention-grabbing entry of the pianist in imposing runs. All three parts

of the main theme are explored in opposition to the more lyrical second theme until we reach the crisis point of the cadenza. Where this would conventionally end with keyboard fireworks handing over to the orchestra, Beethoven finally deploys the drumbeat motif on drums while the piano heads towards a quiet and provisional conclusion: another masterstroke from Mozart’s concerto.

The Largo stands at a contemplative distance, as though we had forsaken a tense drawing-room confrontation for the calm of an adjoining garden. The main theme blooms in many different ways, often accompanied by a downward progression in the lower winds and strings, and the gentle pulsing of horns. This idyll seems to be singing itself to sleep – until the last, loud chord of the movement turns out to be the upbeat to the hectic Rondo finale. A military blast from brass and drums, a little fugue in the strings, a looser clarinet episode; all these episodes are hedged round by the persistent main theme which not is not only dramatic in its own right, but seems always to press ahead towards something more threatening. This ‘something’ arrives with a juddering chord to presage the cadenza – which quickly twists to a bright and not entirely convincing C major.


Piano Concerto No.4 in G Op.58I Allegro moderatoII Andante con motoIII Rondo: Vivace

Much has been made of the supposedly radical opening, which dispenses with a rhetorical introduction and leaves the soloist to pose a question which the rest of this long movement will be occupied in answering. In fact Mozart got there 30 years previously, with his ‘Jeunehomme’ Concerto of 1777. What has been underestimated is the newness of the rest of the concerto: the soloist takes up residence at the top of the piano and rarely leaves; the sheer richness of melodic incident, presenting the other side of the coin to the contemporary Fifth Symphony – though both make valuable use of repeated notes; and its persistent gaze above the storms and stresses that are the everyday traffic of Classical music, towards the lofty contemplation of his last piano sonatas. In common with them, the concerto gives the trill a new and discrete identity as an ambiguous expressive device. The trill had previously signalled tension – vacillation (which note is it?) before resolution, as so often heard at the end of cadenzas. And was it uncertainty or improvisatory bravado that caused the composer to dream up no fewer than five cadenzas for

this movement at one stage and another?

It was Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny who first ‘explained’ the slow movement as a dialogue in which the piano as Orpheus gradually tames the Furies of strings. Beethoven is unlikely to have had any truck with the idea – though his self-instructed Classical education is not to be underestimated when considering the influence of Greek myth and tragedy upon his work – if for no reason other than that it crudely instantiates what otherwise remains elusive: not least the loud trill (again!) of dischord, and dying, rising falls (I know, you can’t have a rising fall. I think you can if you’re Beethoven. The music rises while its goal falls away) which hardly suggests that Orpheus’s song has gained its object. And from which the finale emerges almost surreptitiously, taking some bars to pirouette back onto the home key of G from the slow movement’s E. Here, too, paradoxes confront us everywhere: the dotted, repeated-note idea that has no military character at all; the solo cello pedal (imitated at points by the woodwind) that has entirely sloughed off its old Baroque promise of certainty; the pianist’s spinning reels of semiquavers (even harder to play than they look) spilling over to the gruff counterpoint of the cadenza.

September 25Ludwig van Beethoven(1770-1827)

Symphony No.8 in F Op.93I Allegro vivace e con brioII Allegretto scherzandoIII Tempo di Menuetto – TrioIV Finale: Allegro vivace

Composed in 1811, the Eighth hangs on the coat-tails of the Seventh, at least in terms of chronology and in the estimation of many listeners who have preferred its weightier and more exuberant predecessor. One was foolish enough to ask Beethoven why he thought this was so. ‘Because it’s so much better’ came the reply, which we can presume sent the impertinent interlocutor away with a flea in his ear.

Listening to the Seventh, there is not one superfluous note; and yet the Eighth strips away even more musical connective tissue; we are left with something bald, uncompromising and gleaming, a musical skull. Earlier commentators found it bubbling over with wit and high spirits; the conductor Michael Gielen is nearer the mark when he identifies the humour of the Eighth as ‘the humour of Rumpelstiltskin, full of wrath and suppressed violence, and without a hint of merriment.’

Although it stands at the end of the sequence of instrumental symphonies, and more than a decade before the epoch-making Ninth,

the tendency towards compression seems rather to leapfrog the Ninth, finding its truest home with the enigmatic ambivalence of the final piano sonata, Op.111, and string quartet, Op.135. Just as we arrive apparently in the thick of things – no grand introduction – so the first three movements do not so much finish as stop. There is no slow movement. The second movement ticks like one of Beethoven’s new metronomes that briefly tickled his fancy, with a couple of explosions along the way. Only the Minuet offers brief respite from the tension, but it dances with two left feet. Try marking the first beat of the bar, where the stress should be; much of the time, it is not. The absence of upper strings at the start of the Trio lends the horns’ theme an echoing, lonely quality which the ceaselessly searching bass line does nothing to dispel, especially when it rises to prominence and dies away with equally sudden unpredictability.

Beethoven has saved up all his endings for the overweening force of the finale – itself the longest symphonic finale that he had composed until then – which hammers home the key of F on 51 separate chords. Overkill? No, because of the twists and turns that the harmonic path has taken to get there. That jagged little shard of a theme asks its questions in any number of foreign places; sometimes it unlocks the door on a new key; at other times the door is slammed in its face.


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‘According to Pires, the brothers Arthur and Lucas Jussen are the greatest piano talents in the world’.

Conducted by Jaap van Zweden and accompanied by the Dutch Radio Chamber Philharmonic and the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in turn, Lucas and Arthur played Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos in Muziekcentrum Vredenburg in Utrecht and in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. In the Ridderzaal (the Dutch seat of Parliament) they gave a concert in honour of the silver jubilee of the reign of Queen Beatrix, broadcast live on national television. They also took part in the anniversary broadcast of the Princess Beatrix Foundation.

The brothers were portrayed in the documentary ‘Help, I am talented!’ on AVRO Television.

In May 2007, in the 20th anniversary concert of the Master Pianist series in the Main Hall of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Lucas and Arthur performed Ma Mère l’Oye by Ravel, to great critical acclaim. Their performance was part of a replacement programme for Martha Argerich, who had to cancel at the last moment.

In December 2007 Arthur and Lucas were invited by Maria João Pires to do a masterclass with her in Brazil. These masterclasses were the subject of a television

documentary produced by NHK Japan.

In the same month, Lucas performed the Piano Concerto No.2 by Chopin with the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jaap van Zweden in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

In the 2008/2009 season Arthur and Lucas make their debut with the Residentie Orchestra and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra as well as LCO. In the following season they make their debut in the United States with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jaap van Zweden.

Lucas and Arthur are studying with Maria João Pires, Ton Hartsuiker and Jan Wijn.

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Vasko VassilevViolinVasko was born in Sofia in 1970. By eight, he was already a star prodigy violinist and the star actor in an international award-winning film. In his teens, he won top prizes in three major international violin competitions (Jacques Thibaud, Carl Flesch and Paganini) and embarked on a worldwide solo performing career. Since becoming the youngest and first ever concertmaster at the Royal Opera House (where his ceiling-height photograph by Mario Testino adorns the reception), Vasko has continued to widen his artistic horizons. Aside from the classical arena, he has also enjoyed artistic collaborations in various capacities, not limited to violin playing, with many musical names from other sectors such as Vanessa-Mae, Ronnie Wood, Sting, Paco Peña and Erasure, to name but a few.


Violin Concerto in D Op.61 I Allegro ma non troppo II Larghetto – III Rondo: Allegro

Writing a concerto that you were not going to play yourself was still a bold move in 1806. The Telemanns and Vivaldis of this world conjured every combination of solo instruments under the sun, but the keyboard concertos of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven conformed to a tradition of vehicles designed for their composers’ instrumental prowess. So did the many concertos of the French composer-violinist Louis Viotti, and Beethoven, himself a barely competent fiddler, must have noted the noble, even placid character of Viotti’s first movements. Yet his new work broke the mould of the concerto in much the same way that the ‘Eroica’ had redefined the symphony three years previously. The timpani’s quiet taps make an opening no less audacious than the symphony’s brusque calls to attention, and the scale of what follows outstrips all previous concertos for the instrument.

Beethoven had used a Larghetto marking for the slow movement of his D major symphony, No.2, and the two pieces share a tender radiance that many also identify in the works written at the same time as the Violin Concerto, the Fourth

Symphony and Piano Concerto. Beethoven, however, is the prime example of why it does not do to snoop for clues about the music around the messy dustbins of a composer’s private life. He was facing deafness and contemplating suicide as he wrote the Second Symphony; and towards the end of 1806 he was in the throes of a passionate but unfulfilled attachment to a Hungarian countess, Therese von Deym, and falling out with one of his richest and most devoted patrons, Count Lichnowsky. In October he had stormed out of the count’s castle with the legendary (and possibly apocryphal) brush-off, that ‘You are what you are through an accident of birth. What I am, I am through my own efforts. There have been thousands of princes and there will be thousands more; there is only one Beethoven!’

The final rondo is a rustic dance raised to sublimity through simplicity. The main theme is played at the bottom, then at the top of the violin’s compass; and so it is on every return. The whole concerto’s apparent simplicity is deceptive, for it remains among violinists an Everest, not just in terms of sheer size but in registering its many quiet strokes of genius and giving its many repetitions the intended sense of culmination. At the first performance the soloist resorted to playing his own cadenza with the fiddle held upside down; tonight’s soloist will, mercifully, refrain from such gamesmanship.

Graham Fitkin (b. 1963)

Agnosticfor solo clarinet, strings and percussion Questioning, justifying and requestioning seem to me to be part of our daily lives in this country. Gone are the days when blind faith seemed to give us easy answers. The questioning of war efforts might result in conscientious objection, or the treatment of animals in a decision to not eat meat. It may be the questioning of those in authority whose words in the past have been treated as absolute truth, or doubting the latest medical opinion which reliably informs us that consuming vast quantities of cream and alcohol might help prevent a disease which we had not realised existed.

A belief which needs no justification appears to me increasingly rare and even when the desire for tangible answers is met, natural fence-sitters like myself flounder in a mist of increasing uncertainty as to their truth.

AGNOSTIC was commissioned by the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in 1997 for David Campbell and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Graham Fitkin July 1997


Symphony No.4 in B f lat Op.60I Adagio – Allegro vivaceII AdagioIII Menuetto: Vivace – TrioIV Allegro ma non troppo

Beethoven was hard at work on what we now know as the Fifth Symphony when a friend of his patron, Prince Lichnowsky, heard the Second and asked him for another. With 500 florins to encourage him, Beethoven changed tack – though not entirely, for fragments of the Fifth’s DNA make it a blood-brother to both the Fourth and Sixth. The descending thirds of the opening seem to grope towards a key centre as the opening of the First Symphony did, but their shape (in abstract) is identical to the opening of the Fifth.

And just as he is the first great composer to release the basses from their literally supporting role in a musical argument, in both the Fourth and the Fifth he reimagines the drums as an agent of change rather than reinforcement. In the gloom of the Fifth’s scherzo they find the C major which irresistibly propels us towards the finale; in the first movement of the Fourth, it is the timpanist’s singular assertion of B flat that leads the development away from distant harmonic peregrinations and back to the home key. Then remember that the drum-

led Violin Concerto was the next orchestral work after the Fourth.

But ask bassoonists about the Fourth and they too may wryly claim it as ‘their’ symphony. When the bassoon articulates the little rocking figure that grounds the Adagio (and animates its contrasting passages when played upside-down), it prompts a clarinet reply, merely a descending, four-note scale, elevated by its colouring and context into a wonder of suspended beauty at the heart of a long and soulful movement. But it’s the finale where bassoonists really earn their fee, especially when taken anywhere near Beethoven’s precipitate metronome mark.

Still others have declared the Fourth to be Beethoven’s ‘Upbeat’ symphony – in both senses of the word. To deal with its strictly musical sense first, the long, indeterminate wind chord proves to be one outsize upbeat to a whole series of them, culminating in grand statements that themselves function as launch-pads to spring into the main allegro. The sense of continuity and of becoming in the Fourth is very strong, which is why its points of arrival – the timpani roll mentioned earlier, the scherzo’s mysteriously emphatic close, the finale’s race to the finish line – are so devastatingly effective. The upward rush at the start of the Scherzo is really an involved upbeat to the chains of dialogue between string and wind choirs, and Beethoven’s trick of halting the momentum of the finale near its conclusion is even

November 12

Mark van de WielClarinetMark van de Wiel is established as one of Britain’s leading, and most versatile, clarinettists. As principal clarinettist of the Philharmonia Orchestra (since 2000), the London Sinfonietta (since 2002), the London Chamber Orchestra, Endymion Ensemble (founder principal) and as a well-known soloist, he performs at major venues throughout the world.

Please see insert for full biographies

3more elaborately staged than in the First and Second symphonies. It’s an old joke of Haydn’s, told with a new vigour that entirely belies the old reputation of the Fourth as evidently more graceful or feminine than the heroic statements of the Third and Fifth.


6pm LCO New Explore Pre-concert discussion with Graham Fitkin see page10

Delian M

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Vasko VassilevViolin

Talar Dekrmanjian Soprano

Annelies Dille Mezzo Soprano

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola in E f lat K364I Allegro maestosoII AndanteIII Presto

Mozart wrote the Sinfonia Concertante in Salzburg around 1779–80. This hybrid form of symphony and concerto was a popular one at the time, evolving from the Baroque concerto grosso – in which a string band supports a variety of soloists – and the symphony with its own genesis from operatic overtures. The attractions of the viola and its rougher, darker range of tone colours would have appealed both to Mozart as composer and as performer, but would it be able to project over the orchestra and match the violin for prominence? He achieves this by asking the violist to tune his strings half a tone higher than usual, giving tauter strings and so a brighter and clearer sound, as well as an easier and more resonant key to play in.

Ease and generosity of gesture are evident from the outset with a dialogue between horn and oboe, supported by plucked strings: the orchestral strings are kept down to heighten the impact of the two soloists, who slide in almost imperceptibly. Their relationship

in the outer movements moves tantalisingly between conversation and competition, with themes tried out by one, improved by the other, and further elaborated by the first. But it’s the minor-key Andante that tends to live in the memory long after the final Presto has romped away. Only in the later string quartets and quintets does Mozart find a similar eloquence for violin and viola combined, as each contribution from one seems to draw something richer and still more passionate from the other, culminating in a tangle of harmony that only the most serene of cadenzas can resolve.

Requiem K626I Introitus: Requiem aeternam; KyrieII Sequenz: Dies Irae; Tuba mirum; Rex tremendae; Recordare; Confutatis; LacrymosaIII Offertorium: Domine Jesu; HostiasIV SanctusV BenedictusVI Agnus DeiVII Communio: Lux aeterna

Bald as the title above is, it only deceives. And what a tangled web they wove, all the heroes and villains in this famous story of art imitating life, of a man apparently writing the music for his own death. Deception lies at its heart; so does tragedy.

The first deception arrived at Mozart’s door in July 1791, the grey-

cloaked stranger who asked for a Requiem from the composer and deposited with him a handsome sum, with the promise of more later – on the condition that Mozart kept stumm and did not ask who this Requiem was for. Never known to turn down a tidy sum, the 35-year-old composer accepted with alacrity.

The first tragedy had occurred on 14 February that year. The young wife (she was 20) of a rich Count, himself only 28, died. Count von Walsegg determined on a mausoleum for his Anna in the grounds of his castle at Stuppach; and, as a keen amateur musician, knew who to approach for a lasting musical memorial. He sent his steward, Leitgeb, to commission a Requiem as he had commissioned other composers before, under similarly anonymous conditions.

Skip four months. Mozart had composed two operas in the interim but had not touched the Requiem. The stranger had given him more money, but his self-imposed pressure of work was such that he cannot have begun to systematically put pen to paper until October, after he had finished the Clarinet Concerto. Superstitious procrastination? Possibly. He may well have known that the Requiem would not be needed until the anniversary of Anna’s death. On 20 November, he took to his bed with the onset of kidney failure, complicated by various other conditions. He went through what he had composed so far with three pupils, Eybler, Freystadler and Süssmayr, and when he became too

weak to write himself, supervised their work. Two weeks later he was dead. Only too aware of what the Requiem’s commissioner might say when he found there was no money and no Requiem, Mozart’s widow Constanze asked Eybler to finish the job. He tried, and returned the score, saying it was beyond him. Süssmayr was only fourth on Constanze’s list, but he took a more pragmatic approach, and finished it in the form you hear tonight.

Only the first movement is all Mozart, and the last movement largely recycles it (Mozart had apparently suggested this to Süssmayr, and it’s hardly a cheap trick: Bach had done the same with the B minor Mass). Most of the rest is written in what could be called a detailed short score – with vocal parts and a figured bass line that provide or imply the harmonies in between. Süssmayr said that he ‘prepared’ or composed the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei.

Most of the Requiem is vintage Mozart. Bassoons, basset-horns (not clarinets, or basset-clarinets, but another obsolete close relation) and trombones set a sepulchral scene from the outset. The five-note bassoon theme, echoed by the basses, recurs in almost every movement. The Sanctus recycles the Dies Irae, slowed down and turned to the major: heaven from hell. It is reported that the bed-ridden Mozart teased Süssmayr about standing before him ‘like a duck in a thunderstorm’, slow on the uptake: but Süssmayr probably had

sketches from Mozart for these three movements and recycles them in a largely sympathetic fashion. Only the trite ease of the Benedictus goes through the motions.

Walsegg wanted to present the Requiem as his own; only Constanze’s quick action in passing to a publisher this palimpsest of a manuscript – overlaid with four composers’ thoughts – stopped him from eventually doing so. Since then the deceptions surrounding Mozart’s work – whose Requiem is it anyway? – have only gradually unravelled. Mozart had a rich lineage of Requiem writing in Austria to draw upon, from Biber (pre-Bach) to the more contemporaneous Michael Haydn, and his graphic illustrations of the pains and consolations of death and archaic use of counterpoint show a desire to fit into that tradition.

When Mozart had heard in April 1787 that his father Leopold (another hero and villain combined) was on his deathbed, he wrote to him, in one of the tenderest examples of their rich correspondence: ‘As Death is the real purpose of our life, for several years I have become so closely acquainted with this true and best friend of our life, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me but rather something very soothing and comforting.’ Listening to the Recordare, with its gentle plea to ‘grant me a place among the flock’ who could deny that here, at last, is the truth?© Peter Quantrill 2008

December 5

Joel Hunter Viola

Daniel Norman Tenor

Stephen Gadd Baritone

Tallis Chamber Choir Please see insert for biographies

4In aid of the I CAN Bill Harrison Assessment Centre – see page 34 Supported by Martin Lovegrove

Delian M

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Delphine Lizé PianoDelphine Lizé was born in Nice in 1979. She began learning the piano when she was 6 and studied with Odile Poisson, Brigitte Engerer and Jacques Rouvier, winning numerous First Prizes. She moved to Hamburg to study with the Russian pianist, Grigori Gruzman, and graduated from the Hochschule there in 2008.

Spotted by such eminent pianists as Evgeni Koroliov, Abdel Rahman el Bacha and Elisso Virssaladze, she has won financial support from Steinway in Hamburg and the Masefield Foundation in 2006, Berenberg Bank in 2007 and Ebel-Preis in 2008.

Her first CD release was in 2006 and had brilliant reviews.


Augustin Dumay ViolinFor the majority who have heard him recently, Augustin Dumay is one of the most polished and intelligent violinists of our times. European audiences discovered him thanks to his encounter with Herbert von Karajan, his concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, his recordings for EMI and his strong media presence.

Over the last years, at a time when marketing often occupies a central role, he has gone against the flow and chosen to dedicate a large part of his time to developing the great classical and romantic repertoire.

Augustin Dumay performs regularly with the leading orchestras of the world under the direction of the greatest contemporary conductors as well as a soloist and conductor with the best chamber orchestras.

Justus Grimm CelloBorn in Hamburg in 1970, Justus Grimm was five when his father gave him his first ‘cello lesson. In 1994 Mr. Grimm earned the First Prize as ‘cellist from the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne and was a prize-winner at the Higher Inter-Conservatoires Competition in Germany.

In 1999 Mr. Grimm was appointed First Solo ‘Cellist of the Opera Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. He has been heard with the orchestra as soloist under the baton of Antonio Pappano and Kazushi Ono. With an active international chamber music career, he collaborates with with artists such as Abdel Rachman el Bacha, Gerard Causse, Augustin Dumay, Daniel Blumenthal, David Grimal, Katia & Marielle Labeque.

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)

Oberon Overture

With the opening horn calls, as the very embodiment of nascent German romanticism, you could be forgiven for thinking we were still in the sinister Wald-world of Der Freischütz, magic bullets and devilish pacts and all. But no: this is quite another woodland scene, as the soft carpet of strings and flitting woodwind figures bring us safe to Titania’s bower. Further elucidation is provided by an exquisite little march figure, before a yearning theme on lower strings. It stretches out in impossible languor – before an abrupt awakening reminds us that this is merely the overture, and we have the true musical subject to attend to, one of the highest good humour. Oberon’s horn-call and the fairies return to introduce one of Weber’s loveliest melodies, first heard on the clarinet.

All told, the opera is dogged by a tragedy that is utterly belied by what you hear of its irrepressible spirits. The overture has the best tunes, which is just as well given the stilted (English libretto) has prevented the opera from gaining more than a toe-hold on the repertoire. Weber was already dying of consumption as he composed it, and the experience of travelling to London, rehearsing and staging it at Covent Garden broke him: he died less than two months after the triumphant first night.


Triple Concerto in C Op.56I AllegroII LargoIII Rondo alla polacca: Allegro

The genre of sinfonia concertante was still popular enough at the beginning of the 19th century for Beethoven to contemplate following the examples of (most famously) Haydn and Mozart – but with a twist. He hardly needed to stress to his publishers the novelty of making a piano trio the protagonists, but perhaps he retained doubts about its popular appeal, doubts that turned out to be well-founded, for the first performance had to wait four years after Beethoven completed the concerto in the spring of 1804. It was poorly received, and audiences have been unsure what to make of it ever since.

This is a shame. Beethoven’s Op.1 of 1792 is a set of three piano trios, in which he had already far outstripped the exemplar of Haydn by enlarging an apparently intimate, domestic genre of music-making with a grander formal ambition and range of expression. Sixteen years later – in 1808, the year of the concerto’s first performance – he offered the two piano trios of Op.70 to his publisher while noting (ruefully, or with commercial canniness?) that ‘such trios are now rather rare’.

So we can be sure that the soloists, projected on an orchestral canvas, will be well-matched, both with each other and their accompaniment. The discursive nature of the sinfonia concertante is upheld by an expansive first movement, and with a theme that promises dramatic tension but transpires to deliver more in the way of relaxed celebration. The principal contrast to this mood comes some time later with a plaintive C minor melody – introduced by the cello, as is nearly every theme in the concerto, as to compensate cellists for the lack of their own Beethoven concerto.

As with the contemporaneous Fourth Piano Concerto and ‘Waldstein’ Piano Sonata, the slow movement is all the more mysterious and treasurable for its brevity and muted hush, with the cello singing high in its register and the violinist as a feminine counterpart. In similar wise, Beethoven wishes not so much to break the tension as dissolve it with a finale that only gradually assumes its festive character. This is in the rhythm of a polonaise – slower than we are used to for a concerto finale, and bearing the genteel marks of its popularity as a formal, even aristocratic dance.


Symphony No.5 in C minor Op.67I Allegro con brioII Andante con motoIII Scherzo: Allegro – TrioIV Allegro – Presto ETA Hoffmann (writer of the tales thereof) pretty much invented the profession of music journalism when he declared, at the end of a long article on the Fifth Symphony, that ‘Beethoven’s music induces terror, fright, horror and pain and awakens that endless longing which is the essence of Romanticism.’ No musical work in history has been more identified with meanings, messages and ideals (with the possible exception of the same composer’s Ninth Symphony). ‘Fate knocking at the door’ and ‘V for Victory’ are just two of the most prominent slogans on the palimpsest of reception assembled in the 197 years since Beethoven gave the upbeat for the most famous four notes in history as part of the mammoth 1812 concert at the Theater an der Wien which also included the premieres of the Sixth Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto. ‘V for Victory’ would have rung pretty hollow in the ears of his small and sceptical audience, suffering as they were the privations of a police state in between the two Napoleonic occupations of the city in 1805 and 1809.

Perhaps it is enough to note that the symphony’s famous trajectory from C minor to C major is not uncomplicated. The relentless proliferation of that four-note molecule in the first movement contrasts with a more relaxed model of growth in the second. The dark march of the Scherzo and its spectral return on plucked strings presage the famous C major burst of light in the finale – but the Scherzo music comes back again, as though it has never been vanquished. Shrinks and couches were yet to make Vienna famous as the birth of psychoanalysis, but modern ears can hear Beethoven’s balancing of energies – the relentless celebration of C major in the coda as the necessary counterbalance to the unrelieved C minor of the first movement - in the context of another composer with more than a passing interest in politics and psychology, Michael Tippett, and the words of his oratorio A Child of our Time: ‘I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole’.


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Michael Collins Clarinet ‘…that most persuasive of clarinettists, Michael Collins….’ The Independent

Michael Collins’ dazzling virtuosity and sensitive musicianship have made him one of today’s most sought-after soloists. At 16 he won the woodwind prize in the first BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition and at 22 made his American début at Carnegie Hall, New York. Since then he has performed as a soloist with many of the world’s major orchestras, including the Philadelphia, NHK Symphony, Sydney Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, City of Birmingham Symphony, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, BBC Symphony and Philharmonia Orchestra. Indisputably one of the leading clarinettists of his generation, Collins has formed close alliances with conductors such as

Rattle, Dutoit, Sinopoli, Salonen, Slatkin and Otaka. Last year, he won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist of the Year Award, placing him amongst past recipients of the award who include Itzhak Perlman, Mitsuko Uchida, Murray Perahia and Andras Schiff.

Michael Collins has done much to expand the clarinet repertoire, commissioning and premiering repertoire by some of today’s most highly regarded composers. Such performances have included the world premiere of John Adams’ Clarinet Concerto Gnarly Buttons with the London Sinfonietta conducted by the composer and since performed many times. He has also given the UK and Dutch premières of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Concerto and Mark Anthony Turnage wrote his concerto Riffs and Refrains for him. Commissioned by the Hallé Orchestra and premiered in February 2005, Collins has given further performances of the work this season with the Residentie Orkest, Royal Flanders Philharmonic, Helsinki Philharmonic and London Philharmonic. Other highlights of this season include the UK premiere of Brett Dean’s Ariel’s Music with the BBC Symphony; the world premiere of Elena Kats-Chernin’s Clarinet Concerto with North Carolina Symphony and, subsequently, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia and Tasmanian Symphony.

Please see insert for full biography


Leonore Overture No.3 Op.72a

One of the starkest opening chords in all music: a unison G – major or minor? – held only by the winds as if in aftershock, and then a risky masterstroke, a simply descending scale. It could land on C and the overture would be over, its musical purpose complete. But it descends further, to a murky F sharp, and we are in the dungeon, where, at the beginning of Act 2 of Fidelio, the political prisoner Florestan is held captive. The point of the opera and of this overture (the drama in microcosm, like no overture before or since) is to show how he escapes into the blinding light of C major. Clarinets and bassoons give us ‘his’ theme, songful and hopeful but limping between semitones.

The history of these overtures is as complex as that of the much-revised opera itself. Publication dates have confused matters still further: this is probably the second of the four overtures Beethoven wrote, after Leonore II, which is completely overshadowed by its slow introduction on Florestan’s theme. In composing what we now know as No.3, Beethoven evidently had more symphonic ambitions in mind, for we reach the quick, main, aspiring theme – in confident arpeggios and plain C major – sooner, permitting richer development of the two

ideas and others besides, before the climactic arrival of the trumpet fanfares which, in the opera, signal salvation for Florestan in the person of Don Fernando, the governor.

We’re left with both the first full-blown symphonic poem – standing so proud of the original opera that Beethoven eventually jettisoned it in favour of a much shorter overture – and with the door of a great composer’s workshop wide open for all to gaze and learn. Schumann had a good look around: ‘How he changed, how he discarded, ideas and instrumentation, how the first three bars of Florestan’s aria are drawn through the entire composition…how he does not rest so that his work may reach the perfection we find in the Third.’


Clarinet Concerto No.2 in E f lat Op.74I AllegroII Romanza: Andante con motoIII Alla polacca

Be careful what you wish for, or Take That! could be the unwritten text to the soloist’s first phrase, written by a composer who said he was always happiest with a libretto to set. A three-octave plunge into the most flowing and flexible of melodies is Weber’s answer to the plea of Heinrich Baermann, who

requested two concertos after a fruitful collaboration at a concert sponsored by the Grand Duke of Munich, of whose orchestra Baermann was principal clarinettist. Weber wrote both in 1811 – and then found himself in demand for similar creative favours from other principals of the orchestra!

The second of these concertos works along clearer, more Classical lines than the first, which is not to say that the solo part is in any way contained: it continues as it started, with a relaxed character (in accomplished hands) that belies its fiendish demands. The central Romanza opens and closes with a tiny, haunting motif on plucked cellos, enclosing a bitter-sweet aria that in itself contains two brief recitatives of still more melancholy mood, leavened by brighter contributions from the orchestral woodwinds. Elusive in detail yet deeply memorable in character, this movement is a perfect example of why Weber should be better known and yet isn’t.

Somehow, however, the finale has attained popular currency, with a melody that doesn’t quite sit predictably – in the then-fashionable, would-be ‘Polish’ metre - and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands of semiquavers from a very busy soloist. The second theme hints at the triumphant outcome, lovers united, of his best-known opera, Der Freischütz, and round it the clarinet weaves ever more sugar-spun decoration.


Symphony No.6 in F Op.68 “Pastoral” I Pleasant feelings, which are awakened in Mankind upon arrival in the country: Allegro ma non troppoII Scene by the brook: Andante molto mossoIII Peasants’ merrymaking: AllegroIV Thunder. Storm: AllegroV Shepherds’ Hymn. Beneficent feelings after the storm joined with thanks to the deity: Allegretto

More the expression of feeling than painting. These are the words directly appended (in German) to the Sixth Symphony on the playbill of its first performance, at one of the most famous concerts in history, in an unheated Theater an der Wien, on 22 December 1808. While we can all hear the nightingale at the end of the Scene by the Brook, clumping boots in the Scherzo sent in flight from thunderclaps and a rustic drone-bass in the finale, it is worth bearing Beethoven’s injunction always in mind when listening to one of his loveliest and most profound works.

While it may well have inspired Berlioz to bring the novel to the symphony with his Symphonie Fantastique, the form of the Sixth is less radical than it appears. The Storm is the ‘extra’ movement in number, but counts as a transition

between Scherzo and finale of the sort that Beethoven had already devised in the Fifth. What’s revolutionary about the Pastoral is its conservatism. This is far and away his most diatonic symphony: meaning that when the score says F major (a key for pastoral thoughts in music by Bach and beyond), it sets a path and sticks to it. The tempo marks Beethoven added when the metronome habit was upon him are strikingly similar for the first two movements. Where, then, is variety, freshness? How will repetition be avoided? It will not be avoided, but embraced, and become the very earth and sky of the piece. Everywhere within his self-imposed limitations, Beethoven uses patterns and chains of rhythms to a degree unprecedented even for him.

The second bar of the opening theme – dum da-da dum dum – is the undercurrent of the first movement, patterned against flowing quavers and a pedal to create a ‘development’ section that has excited the imaginations of many modern composers, including György Ligeti, for its evocation of a world where everything changes and yet stays the same with the most minimal of means.

Such minimalism (anticipating and frankly trumping the American school that bears its name) is even more germane to the Scene by the Brook. Beethoven sets his scene in motion – the murmur of the brook in the strings, the song of the earth in the winds, off-beat horns between – and lets his elements interact

with a slowly intensifying hypnosis thereafter found only in the late works of Sibelius. This may be the most religious music composed by a deeply religious man – obviously not in the sense of adumbrating any Christian doctrine (which he was at pains to obscure even in the Missa solemnis) but in its harmony achieved between man and nature.

It is Beethoven’s orchestration (so admired by Berlioz) that peoples his landscape, nowhere more vividly than the Scherzo. The Scotch snap on the clarinet of the Trio is a red-nosed peasant straight out of Breughel, but the one F minor chord in the entire symphony is saved for the beginning of the storm. Beethoven has entirely withheld drums and trombones until this point, imparting to the storm its always unexpected vehemence. Now Beethoven introduces his only ‘found object’ of this nature-symphony, a shepherds’ call such as Brahms found for the same crucial point of his own First Symphony. Once more, energy is accumulated patiently, adding instruments towards one swell which subsides to prepare for another, each more intense, until the last is capped with a radiant horn sunset.

After all this juice and all this joy, the close is the most abrupt gesture in the whole work, the simplest of tonic cadences. Only the Missa solemnis and one or two of the late quartets travel so far and bring us home almost before we knew we were there.© Peter Quantrill 2008

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Melvyn Tan PianoBorn in Singapore and resident in the UK since 1978, Melvyn Tan began his studies at the Yehudi Menuhin School, where his teachers included Vlado Perlemuter, Nadia Boulanger and Marcel Ciampi. At the Royal College of Music he studied both piano and harpsichord and intrigued by the sound of early keyboards, soon focused his attention on the fortepiano. Melvyn Tan rapidly built a formidable international reputation for his performances on the fortepiano and his exclusive contract with EMI Classics produced a series of groundbreaking recordings, including the complete Beethoven Sonatas and Concertos.

2007/8 sees appearances in a wide repertoire ranging from Mozart to Messiaen across Europe and Australasia. Last season Melvyn celebrated his 50th birthday, an occasion marked by concerto

appearances with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, a recital at Wigmore Hall, collaborations with cellist Steven Isserlis, violist Tabea Zimmerman and pianist Ronald Brautigam, and a major international recital series including the complete Mozart Sonata cycle. In early 2008 Melvyn toured Australia with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

He has given complete cycles of the Beethoven Sonatas, Debussy and Chopin Preludes, in New York, Tokyo and London, and has performed at leading concert halls around the world, including: the Barbican; the Wigmore Hall, London; New York’s Lincoln Centre and Frick Collection; Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris; Vienna’s Musikverein and Konzerthaus; Salzburg’s Mozarteum; Die Glocke in Bremen and the Philharmonie in Cologne. Festival appearances include: Salzburg (summer festival and the Mozartwoche); Mondsee; Cheltenham; Bad Kissingen, La Roque d’Anthéron, City of London; Spitalfields; Bath; Oxford and Beijing. In addition to Roger Norrington his concerto partners have included conductors Bruno Weil, Leonard Slatkin, Frans Brüggen, Nicholas McGegan, Herbert Soudant, Libor Pešek, Marin Alsop, Emmanuel Krivine and Jaap van Zweden.

Orchestras with which he has worked include the BBC Symphony, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra,


Coriolan Overture Op.62

Beethoven wrote his overture in 1807 to a play by Heinrich van Collin which, like Shakespeare’s drama of the same name, drew on the story of a Roman tribune recounted by Plutarch. Collin was one of several playwrights with whom Beethoven laboured now and again to fashion an opera. The appeal of this subject to the composer is obvious. Coriolan, victorious in battle but spurned by his own citizens, takes the side of the people he recently conquered. He leads them practically to the gates of Rome, but is stopped in his tracks by envoys from the city. They are led by his mother and his wife, who beg him to show mercy. Forced to choose between his family and his pride, Coriolan retreats, broken.

It is a thoroughly political story, one which Beethoven (never mind Collin) turns to his own ideas of manliness and bravery. There is no suicide in Beethoven’s overture as there is in Collin’s play; rather there is what the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler so prized: ‘Beethoven unfolds destiny for the listener. The ability to give utterance to destiny is undoubtedly greater and more powerful than the mere ability to make music.’

The Overture can be viewed, then, as telling no story but evoking the moment of decision in Coriolan’s mind and its psychological consequences. A military man, proud and implacable: this much is clear at the outset. His state of mind, in the restless main theme that repeatedly seeks resolution and just as repeatedly falls back on itself. The gently beseeching appeal in the violins which strives, more and more urgently, to tame the pervasive, violent mood. The reiteration of the opening motif at the moment of crisis: Coriolan gives in and this colossus of a theme limps into silence and annihilation. Beethoven composed no more dramatic music but also no music that chimes more resonantly with modern preoccupations of futility and failure. Maybe that’s what the French perfume house Guerlain meant when they launched their Coriolan fragrance for men in 1998, claiming that it ‘expresses the character of the modern-day hero’. Then again...

Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837)

Piano Concerto in A minor Op.85I Allegro moderatoII Larghetto III Rondo

It may not take long – the first five minutes, perhaps – to appreciate how fast Hummel was with the triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Hummel’s father was the director of the orchestra that gave the first performance of The Magic Flute; Mozart met his eight-year-old boy and gave him not only music lessons but free board and lodging for two years (what he must have seen and heard, as an impressionable fly on those walls!). Five years later, Hummel was in London, touted hither and yon by his father as a teenage virtuoso (sound familiar?). Haydn, on holiday from his aristocratic prison at Eszterhazy, heard him, composed a sonata for him, and gave him a guinea for his pains. A few years after that and Hummel was in Vienna, taking lessons from Haydn, a finer pianist than ever, but still not one who could endure the onslaught of Beethoven’s arrival on the scene with equanimity: in despair at the younger man’s prodigious abilities in a cut-throat world, he went to pieces. An inauspicious beginning, however, bloomed into friendship, and it was at Beethoven’s request that Hummel played at his memorial service. All these influences are apparent, one way and another, in the A minor piano concerto that he composed around the year 1816. Grandeur is the keynote, lifted by fresh and sweet melodic inspiration, with little of the soul-searching that one expects from Mozart or Beethoven when writing in a minor key (A minor is, we are reminded, just one flattened B away from the bright

and festive C major). For all that the throbbing accompaniment to the brief slow movement owes something to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.21, the dash and dazzle of the finale (which follows Beethoven’s example in easing directly out of the Larghetto), with its coquettish turns of harmony, are more prescient of Chopin’s piano concertos.


Symphony No.2 in D Op.36 I Adagio – Allegro con brioII LarghettoIII Scherzo: Allegro – TrioIV Allegro molto The benefit concert of 1812 which featured the Fifth and Sixth symphonies and much else besides may be a famous flop, but the Theater an der Wien also played host to a much more successful event nine years previously. This included his first two symphonies, his Third Piano Concerto and oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, all except the First Symphony receiving their premieres and all to favourable reactions, providing a welcome fillip to Beethoven’s wallet and maybe even his prickly self-esteem.

With the Eroica on the horizon, the Second was the longest and most powerful symphony ever

written. The slow introduction is of a grandeur then rivalled only by Mozart’s ‘Prague’ Symphony, and with far bolder strokes of modulation – the rogue B flat that heads the string scales in the second part of the introduction returns to cause mayhem in the Scherzo and finale – that build up a head of steam so violent, the main section of the movement is propelled forward on puffs of Brownian semiquavers, and not even the length of the coda, nor its abrupt contrasts of loud and soft, can contain the music’s spectacular progress which culminates in the trumpets ripping through the fabric of the full orchestra.

The slow movement must be of Schubertian length and peacefulness (hence the charges of banality and uneventfulness that have, not entirely unjustifiably, been levelled against it) to counterbalance such exhilaration, and indeed to provide a respite when it returns to darker and more subversive purposes in the last two movements. With the third movement, Beethoven brings the Scherzo to the symphonic form for the first time, and it throws heavy punches at the old minuet form before the explosive opening to the finale pummels previous notions of symphonic largesse and good humour into submission. Yes, there are high spirits at work, but they are those of a musical Muhammad Ali, who floats like a butterfly but stings like a bee.


Sheila R

ock

March 18Academy of St Martin in the Fields, City of London Sinfonia, London Mozart Players, Stuttgart Radio, Netherlands Symphony, Stavanger Symphony, Budapest Concert Orchestra, Salzburg’s Camerata and Mozarteum Orchestras, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, St Paul Chamber Orchestra, Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Symphony, New World Symphony, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Melbourne Symphony and Australian Chamber Orchestra. He recently toured France with Emmanuel Krivine and Chambre Philharmonique de Paris.


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Alison Balsom TrumpetA highly acclaimed artist, Alison was named Best Young British Performer at the 2006 Classical Brit Awards and was honoured with the Classic FM Listener’s Award at the September 2006 Gramophone Awards. The Echo Klassik Awards recently hailed Alison “Rising Artist of the Year 2007”.

This season’s highlights include concerto appearances with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Irish Chamber Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Konzerthausorchester Berlin and Orchestre de Paris.

Whilst represented by the Young Concert Artists Trust, Alison caught the ear of EMI Classics, for whom she now records exclusively. Alison’s latest disc was released in September 2008 to great critical acclaim.


Andante and Rondo Ongarese Op.35

The halting march rhythm in the accompaniment over which the bassoon winds a graceful but uneasy melody is gradually revealed to be the same, minatory idea as the most famous symphonic opening of them all – Beethoven’s Fifth – and in the same key of C minor. Weber composed this in 1809, the year after the symphony, when the four notes would have had a catchy familiarity without the iconic status that now ossifies them in popular imagination. The melody and the march rhythm undergo ever more strenuous variation before the orchestra brings back Beethoven’s rhythm in uncompromising declamation.

After which the tripping good humour of Weber’s rondo can only come as something of an anti-climax, though seeing whether the soloist makes it to the end without running out of puff is all part of the fun. What makes it ‘Hungarian’? There is the faintest hint of a gypsy style in the springing rhythms of the accompaniment, but the explanation is more likely to lie in the cachet enjoyed by all things Hungarian – music, stories and food principal among them – while Middle Europe was still licking its wounds from the protracted Napoleonic wars.

Domenico Dragonetti (1763-1846)

Grande Allegro

It was Widor who remarked that Beethoven would have been the perfect composer to write a concerto for the double bass. Beethoven might riposte that in passages such as the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony and the Storm of the ‘Pastoral’, he had indeed done so. Certainly he demanded more from the instrument than anyone had before, liberating it from its lowly status as faithful guard-dog over the basic harmony of a work, barking out the home key at intervals and left to growl along when things got exciting.

But, as ever, it took a virtuoso performer to really show other composers what could be done. Domenico Dragonetti was that man, no great composer in his own right but in receipt of an education that saw composition as an extension of performance, as Bach and Vivaldi and thousands of others had before him. He was finally lured away from his home town of Venice in 1794, aged 31, by the vibrant artistic scene of London, and there – here – he made hay for half a century. His talents as both musician and businessman enabled him to amass wealth like no ‘orchestral’ musician before him (and make fine collections of paintings, snuff-boxes and dolls along the way). In 1825 he turned down the Royal Philharmonic Society while they

were fixing the UK premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth: the fee was too low.

This Grande Allegro was composed in London as a showpiece pure and simple: an amplified string quartet backs the soloist in unobtrusive fashion while it hurtles through a theme with ever more elaborate variations, making particular use of string harmonics to give the illusion of an oversized violin.

Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837)

Trumpet ConcertoI Allegro con spirito II Andante III Rondo

The slightly garrulous introduction doesn’t give much away, perhaps to save the spotlight for our brave protagonist who must negotiate the fireworks devised by the 25-year-old Hummel in 1803. Spectacular and virtuosic as it often is, the trumpet writing of Bach (and all other composers pre-1800) bears the imprint of the human voice; Anton Weidinger moved the goalposts. This Viennese instrument-maker designed and built the first valved trumpet, capable of playing in any key and with possibilities for modulation and tone colours unthinkable on the old, ‘natural’ trumpets. Even the concerto that Haydn wrote for Weidinger’s new

instrument is rooted in Baroque expectations (if liberated from the limitations): Hummel was the first to conceive a work for trumpet as though it were a piano. Thus the rattling runs and awkward leaps of the first movement; the slow movement’s melody that could come straight from a Mozart piano concerto (as well as the throbbing accompaniment); the rapid-fire stopped notes of the finale with its jaunty, military character; all brightened further by some colourful (and off-colour) modulations of key. Weidinger should have given Hummel a royalty: the Saatchi brothers themselves couldn’t have come up with a more alluring advertisement.


Symphony No.7 in A Op.92I Poco sostenuto – VivaceII AllegrettoIII Presto – Assai meno prestoIV Allegro con brio

Wagner called the symphony ‘the apotheosis of the dance’; Weber said that Beethoven was now fit for the madhouse. Yet they are, in essence, hearing the same piece and reacting to it in the same way. For the symphony carries to extremes – for Weber, self-parody perhaps – Beethoven’s obsession with rhythm.

In many of Beethoven’s late works short melodies spring from rhythmic figures and then become longer, more dominant ones. In the Seventh, written at the end of his ‘middle period’ in 1811-12, the rhythmic impulse is truly King. Much of the slow introduction is built from simple scales in the strings and arpeggios in the winds. They are gradually concentrated to a single note. It is repeated, goes down the octave, then up, then down again. Bar by bar, a figure is developed, long-short-short, as if the music was composing itself in front of you. It becomes the engine room for the rest of the movement, to be heard in almost every bar played by one instrument or another – and at the two climaxes of the movement, hammered out by the whole orchestra. Mad? Maybe a little.

The not-really-slow movement is similarly fixated. The long-short-short figure has a long-long appended to it: a dactyl and a spondee, the two classic rhythmic cadence of a good Homeric line of poetry. The Greeks divided drama into comedy and tragedy, and in the implacable tread of this Allegretto, built on the same structural plan as the Eroica Symphony’s Funeral March, it is clear which Muse is ascendant.

The symphony as a whole, however, inclines the other way (and by comedy I mean more As You Like It than Only Fools And Horses). More scales, sudden leaps between registers – and more repeats: lots of repeats (maybe a bit like Only

Mat H

ennek

April 15Fools and Horses, then). The trio presents apparently more solemn music, hardly less quickly. Back to the Scherzo again, then back to the Trio, then the Scherzo... One critic alleged that Beethoven must have been drunk to write such stuff – and anyone who has been pinned in the corner of a party by a loud mouth with slopping wine-glass may know what he meant.

But of course this is not the work of a drunk, or a madman; it is just that our concert halls and our heads are sometimes too small to encompass Beethoven’s imagination, and the overreaching wildness of the finale. From the tiny, bar-long motifs of a call to attention and a subsequent flourish on the violins, the whole finale derives a monstrous momentum. All variation and contrast is spun from clothing the motifs in different orchestrations and harmonies, most dramatically towards the close. There are four lines to follow here, each with its own rhythmic groove and rate of harmonic change. The bass line, refusing to sit on the home tonic; slowly descending scales in the winds; a furious tag that bounces around the upper strings like a pinball machine in hyperdrive – and trumpet and drums, ticking away inside this infernal machine. Even once the trumpet has pointed towards the home key and the rest of the orchestra is engaged in frantic celebration, the bass continues to cast shadows. Finally, all is dazzling A major light.


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Stacey Watton Double Bass


Meyrick Alexander Bassoon

This concert is in aid of Barnardo’s, working directly with over 100,000 children, young people and their families every year – see pages 28/29.

The concert will commence with a short performance by the winning choir from the Barnardo’s Choir of the Year Competition.

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10253 Orchestra ad_2.indd 2 13/8/08 13:52:54 10253 Orchestra ad_2.indd 3 13/8/08 13:53:03

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Ricardo Castro Piano

The outstanding Brazilian pianist Ricardo Castro received world wide acclaim when he won the 1993 Leeds International Piano Competition, the first Latin American winner in the Competition’s history.

Winning at Leeds launched Ricardo Castro on an international career, giving recitals in the world’s major concert halls and performing concertos with some of the world’s finest orchestras including the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Bournemouth Symphony, English Chamber Orchestra, Tonhalle Orchestra, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, Warsaw National Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Mozarteum of Salzburg, Suisse Romande and


Egmont Overture Op.89

Beethoven was asked in 1809 for music to accompany a Viennese production of Goethe’s eponymous play. He complied, fired with enthusiasm for its themes of national liberation and personal heroism, though not so much so that he could meet the deadline: the overture was only ready for the play’s fourth night in June 1810. The story is set in 16th-century Flanders. Egmont, a Flemish nobleman, is in love with Clärchen. His attempts to moderate tyrannical rule of the Duke of Alba meet only with arrest and execution; grief-stricken, Clärchen poisons herself. Egmont’s death becomes both tragedy and triumph because his spirit lives on to inspire the successful uprising of his people against their oppressors.

Beethoven’s response is inspired both by his love for Goethe and his enthusiasm for the post-Revolutionary wave of French composers, which lent to his works around this time (notably the ‘Emperor’ Piano Concerto and Fifth Symphony) their temperament and sometimes even their ideas. Beethoven owned a copy of Cherubini’s opera Medée, for example, and his overture owes more than its key to the Frenchman’s.

But really the differences are much more striking than the similarities. Where Cherubini is all bustle, a domestic scale for a domestic tragedy, the huge, slashing chords of Beethoven’s opening, the painful chromaticism of its introduction, groping for resolution, and the sledgehammer chords that punctuate its harried Allegro theme: these are universal in ambition. The sledgehammers don’t even let up from the second theme in the woodwinds, shapely but never without the sense of fate pressing close on its heels. It is those chords that finally overwhelm all lyrical impulse: the execution is graphically achieved. And at the moment of lowest despair is the highest suspense, where a new tonic is found, C after the F minor darkness, and the ‘Victory Symphony’ rings out with unstoppable ebullience. This is music of the barricades.

Piano Concerto No.5 in E f lat Op.73 “Emperor”I Allegro moderatoII Andante con motoIII Rondo: Vivace

How bitterly Beethoven would have laughed at the nickname bestowed on this work by an English publisher in search of a catchy strapline. After an ‘Eroica’ Symphony, why not an ‘Emperor’ Concerto? But that is to reckon without Beethoven’s furious withdrawal of the subtitle to the

symphony, and without the passage of time that so savagely justified Beethoven’s contempt for the man, Napoleon, once he had declared himself Emperor. He laid siege to Vienna in 1809, and Beethoven took refuge in the cellar of his brother’s house. Even through his deafness the noise of the guns pained him and he had to cover his ears. He described it later as ‘a disturbing, wild life all around me, with nothing but drums, cannons, men and misery of all sorts.’

The massive chords of E flat that opened the first movement also close it, acting as a framing device much as they do in the first movement of the ‘Eroica’. The same note recurs at the top of the first chord of the slow movement – as D sharp, in the distant key of B major. In this Adagio perhaps more than any by Beethoven, players and listeners alike are drawn in like communicants to the board. The linkage to the finale is stronger still: the bass drops a semitone from B to a sustained B flat, over which the piano muses on an arpeggio of E flat major, in what immediately process to be an anticipation of the springing principal theme of the Rondo. And when the exuberance is finally worn out, to leave only the piano with an insistent drumbeat: do we hear ‘nothing but drums and cannons’ in a prefiguration of the war-torn episode of the Agnus Dei in the Missa solemnis? Or the recurrence of a device used to pregnant but peaceful effect in the C minor Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto and the dawn breaking on to the triumph of the Fifth Symphony’s finale?

Symphony No.3 in E flat Op. 55 “Eroica”I Allegro con brioII Marcia funebre: Adagio assaiIII Scherzo: Allegro vivaceIV Finale: Allegro molto

For Leonard Bernstein, we are ‘Face to face with Beethoven the giant, Zeus with his thunderbolt, Thor with his hammer!’; for Arturo Toscanini, however: ‘Is-a-not Napoleon! Is-a-not Mussolini! Is Allegro con brio!’ Of course, both of them can be right. But if ever a work was forged within the crucible of its times, this was it. A myth, a tradition, a person: the kindling to fire Beethoven’s imagination. The myth is of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and brought it to men. Beethoven had composed a ballet in 1801 for the Habsburg Imperial Court, called The Creatures of Prometheus, about two statues turned to humans and shown, by Prometheus, all the beauties of civilisation: it was neither very well performed or well received, and Beethoven made it his first and last excursion in the genre. Its principal theme became that of the finale of the ‘Eroica’. He had already used the theme a decade earlier, however, in a dance for an entertainment called a Ritterballet. This is where the tradition comes in: at such dances it was customary for masters and servants to dance together. The original dedication to Napoleon, torn up when Beethoven learnt that the French general had declared himself Emperor, clinches the deal: this is a

Revolutionary Symphony. There is a subtext to the work which the last movement of the Ninth Symphony would make explicit: that all men shall be brothers.

But if it is a Revolutionary Symphony (Bernstein), then it is also a revolutionary one (Toscanini). That Allegro con brio is longer by itself than the first three movements of Mozart’s last symphony put together. Its opening pair of E flat major chords seem initially to signal a call to arms. Only 690 bars later do we realise that they, with their counterparts at the very end of the movement, form a gigantic frame, and all the scenes of tension, terror and triumph within count towards justifying their return. The real battle takes place in the development section, culminating in a crushing wall of dissonance. The basses limp away and the narrative resumes with an entirely new theme – an unprecedented manoeuvre at this stage.

If the symphony really is a portrait of a hero, many have chosen to identify the composer himself as the subject of his own work, beset by deafness and despair and winning through in a heroic act of self-renewal. How, then, are we to view the Funeral March? Certainly, its weight and bottomless grief must mark the death of a hero. The timpani, so often reserved for moments of crisis and affirmation, here take their place as an integral part of the texture. Even in this Adagio, sforzandi and accent markings slash across the score, as

May 6if to make the whole orchestra one huge death-march drummer. At the movement’s end, the music literally falls apart.

So revolutionary was this heavy weighting towards the first two movements that composers have been struggling with the problem of what to do with the remaining two ever since. Like the Eroica, many have chosen to begin from silence, as if the music was hardly there at all. Its momentum once gained, however, is unstoppable; it falls over itself in the final stretch. In between the portions of the scherzo, the three horns (Beethoven had only ever used two before) have their moment of glory in the trio. The ‘Promethean’ finale presses on with a sweeping gesture that seems to dismiss everything that had gone before it – used again so memorably in the finale of the Ninth Symphony. Even then, there are two variations on the theme before it makes its appearance: the first of many revolutionary gestures in a finale which is several different kinds of finale rolled into one. A slower section introduces a wind quintet of infinite pathos, surpassed only by the nobility of the horns’ restatement of the theme in its full glory. The sweeping gesture returns to bookend the variations, and a new, euphoric order (one, presumably, without philosophers) is established without question: Prometheus Unbound.


96pm LCO New Explore Call for Scores Competition. In collaboration with the National Gallery. See page 10

Tokyo Philharmonic. He has also worked with some of the world’s major conductors including Sir Simon Rattle, Yakov Kreizberg, Leif Segerstam, Alexander Lazarev, Gilbert Varga, Markus Stenz, Kazimierz Kord and Libor Pesek

The 2003 season saw the beginning of an exciting new collaboration with Maria João Pires. Together they have given concerts in the most important cities around the world. In January 2005 a new CD with Maria João Pires for Deutsche Grammophon was released with Schubert’s works for four hand and solo piano. In 2005/2006 the duo made their debut in Amsterdam (Concertgebouw) and Paris (Théâtre des Champs Elysées) with sell out concerts.

Artistic Director of the Bahia Symphony Orchestra since January 2007, Ricardo Castro is in charge of the implementation of the world acclaimed Venezuelan system of youth orchestras in Bahia where, in collaboration with FESNOJIV, he started the programme NEOJIBÁL (Núcleos Estaduais de Orquestras Juvenis e Infantis da Bahia). He also teaches at the Fribourg Conservatory in Switzerland and is involved in many social projects for children in his native Brazil.


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Tomoko Taguchi Soprano

Anne-Fleur Inizan Mezzo Soprano

Elias Benito-Arranz Baritone

Nunc Dimittis


Symphony No.9 in D minor Op.125 “Choral”I Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso II Scherzo: Molto vivace – Trio: Presto III Adagio molto e cantabile – Andante moderato IV Presto – Recitativo – Allegro assai – Choral finale based on Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’

Beethoven wrote his first eight symphonies within the space of 15 years, 1797 or thereabouts to 1812. Another 12 would elapse before the next, and last, was complete. And yet Beethoven had the idea of setting Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ a full 30 years previously, before the First Symphony was even a glint in his eye. Whole books have been written about the premiere of the Ninth in Vienna on 7 May 1824, how the composer/conductor had to be turned round by the leader to face the applause, deafly oblivious to the spontaneous enthusiasm that was not only most unusual for his music but hardly tempered in subsequent press reports. Many critics admitted to being baffled by the scale of the symphony, and most obviously its introduction of voices; but the fatuous name-calling and scorn were gone: they knew they had heard something important.

Given the divisive nature of the man and his music, it’s ironic that Wagner can take the praise or blame for making from the Ninth a cultural artefact to be wheeled out when celebrations or reinforcements of Universal Brotherhood are called for. With his annual performances of the work in Leipzig during the 1840s, Wagner instituted both the idea of the Ninth as the summit of serious music, and the modern concept of the maestro as the architect of its recreation. Until the early years of the last century, London performances of the Ninth were commonly heard without the finale – more down to logistical obstacles than musical objections, though there were plenty of those: another piquant irony, given that the Ninth could never have been written without the gift to Beethoven of 100 sovereigns by the Royal Philharmonic Society of London when its members heard of the composer’s precarious financial state.

What has made the Ninth popular then and now, are the same qualities that have stimulated those objections mentioned earlier; that, to quote William Walton on Mahler’s Third, it’s all very well, but you can’t call it a symphony.

Symphonic innovation on an unprecedented scale is evident from the outset: modern commentators may indulge talk of a world or a work creating itself as mere sentiment, but imagine the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold without it. And as creation begets evolution,

so Beethoven must dispose of the formal convention of the exposition repeat (a move Brahms only dared to repeat in the last of his own symphonies, 40 years later), in order to hasten the development of his two main themes towards their inevitable (but hopefully unsignposted, and always shocking) collision and immolation at the movement’s climax – after which the movement’s world must be forged anew – only to result in the final reiteration of its tenebrous opening and uncompromised, uncompromising assertion of D minor.

No longer is the Scherzo a ‘joke’: learned fugue has expanded its dimensions, while many and abrupt silences contract its rhetoric. Rising cello phrases towards the end of the trio describe an idyll that the music itself is reluctant to forsake, being finally tugged away by the scherzo’s implacable return. Withholding the slow movement until now has heightened its pathos, and so do Beethoven’s lengths in drawing out his late slow-movement style of two complementary tempi and themes – the second slightly faster than the first. Imagine the loss of impact to the finale’s opening ‘Schreckensfanfare’ – horror fanfare, as the Germans call it – had the Scherzo come third!

And so, with the return of chaos from the opening movement and its ‘discussion’ in the subsequent cello recitative, we are drawn inevitably towards voices as (re)presenting the only possible (re)solution.

This is where lots of people perk up, with the tune so long awaited. It’s a fine theme, but we shouldn’t gull ourselves into treating the finale as a breezy exultation. Its qualities – whether or not these are consciously appreciated – stem more from a summoning of the creative spark (of at times desperate intensity) that places him in the line of John Taverner and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: and a fierce, aggressive, even violent exhortation to rejoice in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What, otherwise, did the preceding three-quarters of an hour count for?

Then look at Schiller’s text. What kind of universal celebration of brotherhood can it be in which he who is without a friend or a family or a soul ‘must steal away weeping from this assembly’? – and there’s something rather creepily blithe and elegant about the setting of this line, as though the weeping souls were being surreptitiously booted out by immaculate heavies and told not to make a fuss. Without wishing to push you into their number, I draw your attention to the brash fanfares that punctuate the end of each line when the ‘Joy’ theme is finally thundered out by full choir and orchestra, and to the ‘Turkish’ percussion of cymbal and side-drum in the following episode: specifically military in character, they don’t need over-emphasis to reveal a violence that might easily be understood by an audience and a nation-state still smarting from Napoleon’s progress across their lands. The voices have moved the

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Zeno Popescu Tenor

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symphony as a form forwards, but the many episodes and straightforward harmonies of the finale draw it back, way past the agonised dissonance of the first movement.

Therein lies its appeal. What can you do, Simon Rattle has asked, with a symphony that starts like Bruckner’s Ninth and ends like The Magic Flute? What indeed, but the comparison reveals a path of understanding the Ninth that thumps no tubs, and lets joy be unconfined, in a progress that, both musically and spiritually, is not so much striking into the future but stepping surely back towards the ideals of the 18th-century Enlightenment.


Supported by Christopher Holder. In Loving Memory of Maria and Marina

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Supporting LCO

LCO creates imaginative opportunities for collaboration and association which stretch out beyond the concert hall. LCO Kids, LCO New and LCO Live, featured on pages 9, 10 and 11 of this programme, all present creative and exciting ways of getting involved. You may have noticed LCO’s growing charitable and social programme: last season’s immensely successful support of the children’s hospice charity Helen & Douglas House and, this year, a major commitment to work with the children’s charity Barnardo’s across a wide range of LCO activity, both inside and outside the concert hall.

We have encouraged some of this year’s concert sponsors to personalise their association further by supporting a charity of their choice and are pleased to be working with I CAN and the Maria and Marina Foundation, helping them to raise both funds and profile.

Ticket sales alone do not cover the cost of presenting this wonderful orchestra. We ask you, as a member of LCO’s audience, to consider extending your support. We will endeavour to make your association personal and exciting and something

which you will enjoy and value into the future. By supporting LCO you have the opportunity to know you are enabling musicians to perform great concerts within an important social context.

Please do get in touch: we will be more than willing to take you through the existing options of supporting LCO; better still, we challenge you to devise something that you would like to call your own and to collaborate with us in making it happen.

Petro-Canada is delighted to continue its association with the London Chamber Orchestra and wishes it every success for its 08/09 season

Petro-Canada is one of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies, operating in both the upstream and downstream sectors of the industry in Canada and internationally.

We create value through the responsible development of energy resources and provide world class petroleum products and services.

Our strategy is to deliver profitable growth, with a focus on long-life assets.

We have a strong reputation for ethical conduct, environmental responsibility and corporate citizenship.

Our International & Offshore business is based in London and focuses on new growth opportunities and production in the North Sea, East Coast Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, Libya and Syria.

“ For the first time since we began this journey we felt our daughter was in safe hands. The team were better than excellent, with absolute confidence in their specialism. I can’t put into words how this made us feel. Finally we have clarity.” Lucy’s Mum

Communication is the essential 21st century life skill – the foundation on which children learn, achieve and make friends.

I CAN works to develop the speech, language and communication skills of every child, with a particular focus on those who find communication hard.

One in ten children have a communication difficulty – almost three in every UK classroom. These children find learning to talk and understanding language a struggle. This year, in some deprived areas, as many as 40-50% of children will start school with poor language, putting them at a disadvantage from day one.

The reality is that children who find communication hard, find life hard. There is a clear link between poor communication skills and a range of issues, from youth offending, to unemployment, behavioural and mental health problems.

I CAN directly helps children through a network of nurseries, schools and specialist centres and indirectly through advice, training and support to families, teachers and mainstream schools.

We are delighted to be working with the London Chamber Orchestra at the Christmas Concert on Friday 5 December and are using this fantastic opportunity to raise funds for the Bill Harrison Assessment Centre at I CAN’s Dawn House School. This is a new service providing families with a joined-up picture of their child’s communication difficulties and the type of educational support that will best meet their needs. We hope you will lend us your support.

To find out more about I CAN or to make a donation, please visit www.ican.org.uk or call our information line on 0845 225 4073.

The children’s communication charity.

I CAN

I CAN is a registered charity no. 210031

In maintaining a policy of not seeking public subsidy, the London Chamber Orchestra relies on its enviable artistic reputation to attract vital funding and a network of essential supporters.

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LCO gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the following:

LCO Musician’s Chair Sponsorship Schemes

Platinum Members Petro-Canada Christopher Holder Martin Lovegrove

Première Members Critical Eye Nicholas & Matti Egon Endeavour Energy UK Limited Lazard Lockton International Companies

Concertmaster Chair Mr Fred Davis

Principal Cello Chair Mr & Mrs Philip Stephens

Principal Double Bass Chair Mr Rick Watson

Principal Flute Chair Marta Kinally

Principal Oboe Chair Ann & Stanley Lowy

Principal Clarinet Chair Joan & Richard Price

Principal Horn Chair Rev. John Wates

Principal Trumpet Chair Christopher Holder

Orchestra Chair Mr & Mrs Chris Nicol

LCO Benefactors Mr & Mrs M Arnold Mr & Mrs Peter Barton Peter Bowring CBE Richard Brooks Emma Cole Mrs Maureen Everett Brian Malsberger Wendy & Michael Max Hugh & Mavis Ogus Dr Liz Poyner Mr & Mrs Graham Turner

LCO Trust - Board of Trustees Rev. John Wates (Chairman) The Earl of Chichester Lady Browne-Wilkinson The Lady Runcie Hubert Best Simon Elliot John Hancock

The London Chamber Orchestra Trust registered charity no: 297852

LCO Advisers Matthew Blagg Richard Brooks Iain Burns Hywel Davies Christopher Holder Neil Jeffares Peter Jamieson Peter Johnson Peter Kallos Martin Lovegrove Rupert Merson Keith Robson Saul Haydon Rowe Philip Stephens David G Williams Isobel Williams

LCO would also like to thank Paul Davies, General Manager, and his team at St. John’s, Smith Square for all they do in making LCO’s residency such a success.

Managing Director Ian Pressland

General Manager Step Parikian

Administrator Ella Roberts

Animateur - LCO New Isobel Waller-Bridge

Public Relations Isobel Williams

Librarian Jacqui Compton

Design Studio Dempsey

Programme Notes Peter Quantrill www.quantrillmedia.com

For information on the different ways in which you can support LCO, please telephone 020 7105 6205 or email [email protected]

Find out more about LCO – take a look at our website www.lco.co.uk

LCO TeamSt. John’s, Smith Square, London SW1

In accordance with the requirements of Westminster City Council persons shall not be permitted to sit or stand in any gangway. The taking of photographs and use of recording equipment is strictly forbidden without formal consent from St. John’s. Smoking is not permitted anywhere in St. John’s. Refreshments are permitted only in the Footstool Restaurant in the Crypt.

Please ensure that all digital watch alarms, pagers and mobile phones are switched off.

During the interval and after the concert The Footstool Restaurant is open for licensed refreshments and post-concert suppers. Please note The Footstool Restaurant will be closed to the Public after some of the concerts.

Box Office Tel: 020 7222 1061. Website: www.sjss.org.uk.

For details of future events at St. John’s please send £8.00 annual subscription to the Box Office.

St. John’s Smith Square Charitable Trust, Registered charity no: 1045390. Registered in England. Company no: 3028678 General Manager: Paul Davies.

John Donat

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