PAPPANOThursday 12 December 2019 7.30–9.30pm Barbican

LSO SEASON CONCERT BRITISH ROOTS

Tippett Concerto for Double String Orchestra Elgar Sea Pictures Interval Vaughan Williams Symphony No 4

Sir Antonio Pappano conductor Karen Cargill mezzo-soprano

Supported by LSO Friends Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3

6pm Barbican LSO Platforms: Guildhall Artists

Vaughan Williams Phantasy Quintet Howells Rhapsodic Quintet

Portorius Quartet

2 Welcome

Welcome

LSO STRING EXPERIENCE SCHEME

We are delighted to appoint 14 players to this year’s LSO String Experience cohort. Since 1992, the scheme has been enabling young string players from London’s music conservatoires to gain experience playing in rehearsals and concerts with the LSO. They will join the Orchestra on stage for concerts in the New Year.

LSO DISCOVERY IN TOKYO

In November, LSO players Amanda Truelove and Robert Turner, and musical animateur Rachel Leach, visited Tokyo to lead workshops for young people with learning disabilities at the British Council in Japan. Many thanks to All Nippon Airways for providing flight support.

BELA BARTÓK AND THE MIRACULOUS MANDARIN

Against a turbulent political background, Bartók wrote his pantomime-ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, which a German music journal reported caused ‘waves of moral outrage’ to ‘engulf the city’ when it premiered in Cologne.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR OUR 2018/19 LSO JERWOOD COMPOSER+ ARTISTS?

We talk to Daniel Kidane and Amir Konjani about their time as LSO Jerwood Composer+ artists and their future plans, and hear from incoming composers Hollie Harding and Des Oliver about their experience so far.

•  Read more at lso.co.uk/blog

WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUP

We are delighted to welcome Linda Diggins and friends to tonight’s concert. Please ensure all phones are switched off. Photography and audio/video recording are not permitted during the performance.

News

elcome to this evening’s LSO concert at the Barbican. It is a pleasure to be joined by Sir Antonio

Pappano, a long-standing friend and regular guest conductor with the Orchestra, for the first of two concerts this season. He begins an exploration of music by English composers of the 20th century, opening with Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra and Elgar’s evocative Sea Pictures. We are pleased to welcome mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill for this performance, who returns to the LSO following her acclaimed appearance in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at the BBC Proms in 2017. In the second half, Sir Antonio Pappano conducts Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony, a dramatic work that illustrates the darker side of the composer’s music.

Thank you to our media partners: BBC Radio 3, who broadcast the performance live, and Classic FM, who have recommended the concert to their listeners. We also extend sincere thanks to the LSO Friends for their important support of this concert; we are delighted to have so many Friends and supporters in the audience tonight.

Ahead of tonight’s performance, the Guildhall School’s Portorius Quartet gave a recital of music by Vaughan Williams and Howells on the Barbican stage. These performances, which are free to attend, provide a platform for the musicians of the future, and take place throughout the season.

I hope that you enjoy the concert and that you will join us again soon. Sir Antonio Pappano returns on 15 March, conducting Britten’s Violin Concerto and Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No 6, and you can hear more music by Tippett on 14 June, as Alan Gilbert closes the season with the oratorio A Child of Our Time.

Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director

12 December 2019

On Our Blog

3Tonight’s Concert

Thursday 16 January 7.30pm

RATTLE: BEETHOVEN 250 BEETHOVEN & BERG

Berg Seven Early Songs Berg Passacaglia Berg Three Pieces for Orchestra Beethoven Symphony No 7

Sir Simon Rattle conductor

Dorothea Röschmann soprano

Sunday 19 January 7pm

RATTLE: BEETHOVEN 250 CHRIST ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES

Berg Violin Concerto Beethoven Christ on the Mount of Olives

Sir Simon Rattle conductor

Lisa Batiashvili violin

Elsa Dreisig soprano

Pavol Breslik tenor

David Soar bass

London Symphony Chorus

Simon Halsey chorus director

Part of Beethoven 250 at the Barbican

Thursday 9 January 7.30pm

STUTZMANN MENDELSSOHN VIOLIN CONCERTO

Wagner Overture and Venusberg Music from ‘Tannhäuser’ Mendelssohn Violin Concerto Brahms Symphony No 1

Nathalie Stutzmann conductor

Alina Ibragimova violin

Wednesday 15 January 6.30pm

HALF SIX FIX BEETHOVEN & BERG

Berg Violin Concerto Beethoven Symphony No 7

Sir Simon Rattle conductor

Dorothea Röschmann soprano

Supported by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne Part of Beethoven 250 at the Barbican

In the New Year The LSO at the Barbican

PROGRAMME CONTRIBUTORS

Oliver Soden is the author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019).

Stephen Johnson is the author of Bruckner Remembered. He contributes regularly to BBC Music Magazine and The Guardian, and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and World Service.

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

Stephen Connock MBE is the author of Toward the Sun Rising – Ralph Vaughan Williams Remembered. He is also Chairman of Albion Music, which is dedicated to publishing books on English music and poetry.

lthough it was composed on the eve of World War II, the subject matter reflected in Tippett’s

Concerto for Double String Orchestra is totally musical. Following in the footsteps of Stravinsky and BartÓk, Tippett picked up the trend of writing an orchestral concerto using elements of a Baroque ‘concerto grosso’, with no soloist and with groups of instruments passing around musical ideas. The piece is melodious, with dance rhythms and harmonies characteristic of the folk-inspired style of his English contemporaries. Then, before the interval, is Elgar’s Sea Pictures, a full-bodied suite of orchestral songs showing the composer’s full expressive range.

Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony finishes the concert. It was written in 1934 in the composer’s 60s – a fierce and dissonant piece that contradicted his reputation as a pastoralist. Commenting on the symphony, Vaughan Williams said, ‘I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant.’ He also avoided any explanation of what inspired the music, though many have heard the Fourth Symphony as a cry of pain at World War I and the looming threat of another, possibly worse, war to come.

Tonight’s Concert In Brief

4 Programme Notes

1 Allegro con brio 2 Adagio cantabile 3 Allegro molto

n the summer of 1943, Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra was performed

at Wigmore Hall. The composer was absent, ‘circumstances beyond his control’ preventing his attendance. In truth, he was in a cell in His Majesty’s Prison Wormwood Scrubs, where he had been jailed for defying the terms of his military exemption as a conscientious objector, and where he still was when the Concerto was recorded in a London studio. Benjamin Britten stepped in as producer.

World War II had interrupted the Concerto’s birth in other ways. The premiere, scheduled for late 1939, had been cancelled. Tippett’s publishers, Schott, were German, making release of the score all but impossible (to say nothing of paper rationing). A handful of performances over the following decade seemingly did little to elucidate the piece, which bristles with all the hallmarks of Tippett’s first mature style, drawing on a wide range of influences – Beethoven, blues, Bartók, bagpipes – and displaying a complex rhythmic innovation that would take English orchestras some time to

master. The BBC dismissed the music as ‘unattractive’ and refused broadcast. Tippett was very little known as a composer, having given over much of his composition in the 1930s to political activism. Not until the 1950s, when Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt conducted a performance with sympathy and understanding, did the Concerto begin to take its place among the acknowledged masterpieces of 20th-century string writing.

The piece does not pitch a soloist against an orchestra; it is more a ‘concerto grosso’, the form of Baroque music that passes material between a group of soloists and orchestra. Tippett’s forces, however, are two equal string orchestras, of five parts each. They form a complementary partnership, from which Tippett spins an astonishing number of textures and effects, as the two orchestras kick the music joyfully back and forth, each winding in and out of the spotlight. The Concerto clearly owes a debt to the music of folk-inspired English composers: Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro and Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis (also written for two string orchestras). But Tippett was suspicious of any exclusively pastoral school of British music, and wove into his Concerto a seductive rhythmic gallop, redolent not only of Stravinsky and Bartók but of the

Tudor madrigalists. The string parts are rhythmically disinhibited, refusing to be contained by bar lines, and paying scant attention to the eight-beats-in-a-bar time signature. Each melodic line freewheels downhill, as if improvising, beating time by irregular and unpredictable accents that Tippett derived from the syncopation of jazz. ‘One could fill pages’, reads one liner note, ‘on just the opening ten seconds.’

Tippett took the structure of the Concerto from Beethoven. The first movement is an allegro in sonata form; the slow movement (in Tippett’s words) is ‘explicitly modelled on the song-fugue-song layout of the andante of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor, Op 95’; and the final movement is a sonata rondo with a coda. The central movement has a part for solo violin, based on the folksong ‘Ca’ the Yowes’, that is taken up by the whole orchestra to form a slow, yearning interlude, indebted to the blues songs of Bessie Smith. Tippett worked on the movement during the breakdown of a fiery and all-consuming love affair.

The Concerto’s dedicatee, Jeffrey Mark, was a composer severely traumatised by his experiences in World War I. Mark was certain, in his advice to Tippett about the Concerto, that British orchestral music

should incorporate melodies and rhythms of English folk-songs and dances. So the third movement regains all the vitality of the first, and Tippett includes snatches of a Northumbrian bagpipe tune which, as each of the orchestras spurs the other on to greater and greater heights, lead the Concerto to bursting point. The strings tauten, as if winding up a spring that, when released, propels the movement to a burst of melody that ends the piece in burnished joy, after a final whoop from the cellos. •

Michael Tippett Concerto for Double String Orchestra 1938–39 / note by Oliver Soden

12 December 2019

5Composer Profile

Michael Tippett in Profile 1905–98 / by Oliver Soden

ichael Tippett was born on 2 January 1905 into a precariously wealthy family that was politically aware

(his mother was imprisoned as a suffragette) but relatively unmusical. As a child, and maybe as an adult too, he was something of the perennial outsider, at odds with, even ahead of, the beliefs and taboos of the times.

Tippett was eventually acclaimed as a composer of international stature and importance, but his career was slowburning, and his originality slow to develop. After studies at the Royal College of Music, there followed almost a decade of ambitious amateur music-making alongside involvement in left-wing politics.

From 1940 to 1951 he was an enterprising Head of Music at Morley College, in South London. On the outbreak of war Tippett’s Trotskyist politics gave way to a committed pacifism, and in August 1943, having refused to fulfil the conditions of his exemption from war service as a conscientious objector, he served a three-month sentence in Wormwood Scrubs.

Works such as his String Quartet No 1 (1935) and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939) displayed for the first time – and in all its originality – the rhythmic imagination and blues-inflected lyricism of his hard-won compositional maturity. In 1944, Benjamin Britten, who had become a close friend, helped organise the premiere of Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time (1939–41).

The oratorio’s success seemed almost to unravel the following decade when Tippett’s first opera, The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52), was greeted with bafflement and dislike. The breakdown of his Second Symphony’s premiere, in 1958, only added to the suspicion in which his music could be held. A younger generation of performers eventually offered up such pieces new minted to a fresh and devoted audience, and Tippett began to enjoy considerable success. He was knighted in 1966.

After Britten’s death in 1976, Tippett had no real competition for the title of Britain’s ‘greatest living composer’, an accolade to which he lived up for a two-decade Indian summer that saw no decline in energetic output. His was a career of constant reinvention. The lyricism that book-ended his oeuvre contained a period of violent and fragmented mosaics, not least his war-blasted Homeric opera King Priam (1958–61). His third opera, The Knot Garden (1966–69), was shot through with jazz and electric guitar, while the Symphony No 3 (1970–72) turned both to Beethoven and to blues for spiritual and emotional solace.

Much of Tippett’s late music has yet to fasten its hold on the repertoire, but Birmingham Opera Company’s revival, in April 2015, of his fourth opera, The Ice Break (1973–6), thrillingly re-imagined the work for the 21st century. A final opera, New Year (1985–8), remains unrecorded and awaits reappraisal. In his 80s, now a member of the Order of Merit, Tippett produced a handful of last, luminous works: a large-scale setting of Yeats’ Byzantium (1989–90); the last of his five string quartets (1990–91); and The Rose Lake (1991–93), which crowned a 60-year career that, as for all innovators, has been greeted with consternation and with jubilance alike. •

— ‘I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music

and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.’

Michael Tippett —

6 Programme Notes

1 Sea Slumber Song 2 In Haven (Capri) 3 Sabbath Morning at Sea 4 Where Corals Lie 5 The Swimmer

Karen Cargill mezzo-soprano

ritten in 1899, Elgar’s Sea Pictures is now established as one of the classics of the English orchestral

song repertory. Yet even today it’s rare to find a concert programme note or CD booklet essay that doesn’t grumble about the poetry Elgar chose to set. Granted, none of it is first-rate, and Adam Lindsay Gordon’s ‘The Swimmer’ in particular lends itself all too easily to parody. Was Elgar’s literary taste at fault? No, he had a clear idea what he was doing. Vera Hockman, a close friend in Elgar’s final years, remembered that Elgar ‘used to say that it is better to set the best second-rate poetry to music, for the most immortal verse is music already’.

Another great song composer, Gustav Mahler, would have agreed wholeheartedly. Setting a sublime poem to music was, Mahler once said, a form of sacrilege: ‘As if a sculptor chiselled a statue from marble and a painter came along and coloured it.’ Simply read aloud, Gordon’s opening line,

‘With short, sharp violent lights made vivid’ is a consonantal nightmare; but sung with gusto, as Elgar set it in the last of the Sea Pictures, it can be tremendously rousing – those same consonants like whip-cracks pushing the music forward. The moral for listeners is: don’t try reading the poems off the page; listen to how Elgar sets them, and to the wonderful orchestral images he creates in response to key words and phrases.

One of the finest of those orchestral images occurs right at the beginning of the first number, ‘Sea Slumber Song’: the rising and falling string phrases capture the swell of the sea as vividly and atmospherically as the menacing, quiet brass chords in the first of Britten’s Four Sea Interludes – though the mood is quite different. Elgar was so proud of this that he quoted it in his cantata The Music Makers, where it accompanies the words ‘Wand’ring by lone sea-breakers’. Especially effective is the way the singer picks up the violas’ descending triplet and

intensifies it at the words ‘shadowy sand’. Then comes a gorgeous contrasting major key section: ‘I, the Mother mild, / Hush thee O my child’. Slow string figures suggest another kind of sea-swell, enhanced by harp, quiet timpani and gong played ‘with sponge stick’. Vaughan Williams clearly had this passage in mind when he set the words ‘With sad incessant refrain’ in the finale of his own Sea Symphony, a decade later.

Elgar had already set words by his wife Caroline Alice Elgar in the ‘Lute Song’ of 1897, but he felt the song could be developed. Alice rewrote the text to make it a ‘sea picture’: ‘In Haven’, the new subtitle ‘Capri’ connecting it with memories of a visit to the island before her engagement to Elgar.

The scoring is lighter, more transparent than ‘Sea Slumber Song’, but it’s curious how the orchestration brings the accompaniment – originally unconnected with nautical

imagery – close to the world of the first ‘Sea Picture’. The delicate upward arpeggio (for pizzicato strings) of ‘In Haven’ then becomes the ardent rising figure that opens ‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’ – the centre-piece of the cycle. Elgar doesn’t mark any of the ideas in this song with his favourite instruction nobilmente, but the sentiment is clearly there in the molto maestoso full orchestral theme that follows the line ‘Of holding the day glory’.

Still more striking is the way Elgar twists the music back to the home key at the words ‘Creator on creation’. The rising and falling ‘swell’ from the opening ‘Sea Slumber Song’ joins as the song builds to its climax, ‘And on that sea commixed with fire’. The molto maestoso theme appears to hold sway at the end, but then comes a sudden hush and a magical final cadence.

In a fine piece of formal symmetry, another lighter, more delicate song, ‘Where Corals Lie’, separates the weightier third and fifth movements. This was the hit of the cycle and it soon began to enjoy a life of its own in Edwardian parlours and public song recitals. But it clearly ‘belongs’ in this cycle, not just for its structural role, but for the subtle connections with that all-important first song. At the beginning of the third verse,

Edward Elgar Sea Pictures Op 37 1897–99 / note by Stephen Johnson

12 December 2019

— ‘It is better to set the best second-rate poetry to music,

for the most immortal verse is music already.’ Edward Elgar

—

7Composer Profile

‘Yes, press my eyelids close, ‘tis well’, the vocal line recalls the strings’ falling phrases originally associated with ‘I, the Mother mild, / Hush thee, O my child’.

Finally comes the stormy ‘The Swimmer’, glancing back occasionally to the earlier songs, but eventually pressing on towards a new resolution: ‘I would ride as never a man has ridden’. For Elgar in his Sea Pictures – just as for Vaughan Williams in his Sea Symphony – the sea is the element in which the artist finds a new sense of self and, with it, a new, heroic determination. •

lgar’s father, a trained piano-tuner, ran a music shop in Worcester in the 1860s. Young Edward, the

fourth of seven children, showed musical talent but was largely self-taught as a player and composer. During his early freelance career, which included work conducting the staff band at the County Lunatic Asylum in Powick, he suffered many setbacks.

He was forced to continue teaching long after the desire to compose full-time had taken hold. A picture emerges of a frustrated, pessimistic man, whose creative impulses were restrained by his circumstances and apparent lack of progress. The cantata Caractacus,

Edward Elgar in Profile 1857–1934

commissioned by the Leeds Festival and premiered in 1898, brought the composer recognition beyond his native city.

At the end of March 1891 the Elgars were invited to travel to Bayreuth for that summer’s festival of Wagner’s operas, a prospect that inspired Elgar immediately to compose three movements for string orchestra, the Serenade. The Variations on an Original Theme, ‘Enigma’ (1898–99) and his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius (1900) cemented his position as England’s finest composer, crowned by two further oratorios, a series of ceremonial works, two symphonies and concertos for violin and cello.

Elgar, who was knighted in 1904, became the LSO’s Principal Conductor in 1911 and shortly before the end of World War I entered an almost cathartic period of chamber-music composition, completing the peaceful, slow movement of his String Quartet soon after Armistice Day. The Piano Quintet was finished in February 1919 and reveals the composer’s deep nostalgia for times past.In his final years, he recorded many of his works with the LSO • and, despite illness, managed to sketch movements of a Third Symphony. •

Composer Profile by Andrew Stewart

•  ELGAR AND THE LSO

By the time the London Symphony Orchestra was established in 1904, Elgar was a major figure in British musical life. His ‘Enigma’ Variations were performed in the LSO’s first concert and he first conducted the Orchestra in 1905.

From 1911, he was Principal Conductor and he continued to appear with the Orchestra after this. A number of Elgar’s most important works were premiered by the LSO, including his Introduction & Allegro and the Cello and Violin Concertos.

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

8 Texts

Texts

12 December 2019

1 Sea Slumber Song by Roden Noel (1834–94)

Sea-birds are asleep, The world forgets to weep, Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song On the shadowy sand Of this elfin land;

I, the Mother mild, Hush thee, oh my child, Forget the voices wild! Hush thee, oh my child, Hush thee.

Isles in elfin light Dream, the rocks and caves, Lulled by whispering waves, Veil their marbles Veil their marbles bright. Foam glimmers faintly faintly white Upon the shelly sand Of this elfin land;

Sea-sound, like violins, To slumber woos and wins, I murmur my soft slumber-song, my slumber song Leave woes, and wails, and sins.

Ocean’s shadowy might Breathes good night, Good night … Leave woes, and wails, and sins. Good night … Good night … Good night …

2 In Haven (Capri) by Caroline Alice Elgar (1848–1920)

Closely let me hold thy hand, Storms are sweeping sea and land; Love alone will stand.

Closely cling, for waves beat fast, Foam-flakes cloud the hurrying blast; Love alone will last.

Kiss my lips, and softly say: Joy, sea-swept, may fade to-day; Love alone will stay.

3 Sabbath Morning at Sea by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

The ship went on with solemn face; To meet the darkness on the deep, The solemn ship went onward. I bowed down weary in the place; For parting tears and present sleep Had weighed mine eyelids downward.

The new sight, the new wondrous sight! The waters around me, turbulent, The skies, impassive o’er me, Calm in a moonless, sunless light, As glorified by even the intent Of holding the day glory!

Love me, sweet friends, this sabbath day. The sea sings round me while ye roll afar The hymn, unaltered, And kneel, where once I knelt to pray, And bless me deeper in your soul Because your voice has faltered.

And though this sabbath comes to me Without the stolèd minister, And chanting congregation, God’s Spirit shall give comfort. He who brooded soft on waters drear, Creator on creation.

He shall assist me to look higher, He shall assist me to look higher, Where keep the saints, with harp and song, An endless sabbath morning, An endless sabbath morning, And on that sea commixed with fire, On that sea commixed with fire, Oft drop their eyelids raised too long To the full Godhead’s burning. The full Godhead’s burning.

9Texts

4 Where Corals Lie by Richard Garnett (1835–1906)

The deeps have music soft and low When winds awake the airy spry, It lures me, lures me on to go And see the land where corals lie. The land, the land where corals lie.

By mount and mead, by lawn and rill, When night is deep, and moon is high, That music seeks and finds me still, And tells me where the corals lie. And tells me where the corals lie.

Yes, press my eyelids close, ‘tis well, Yes, press my eyelids close, ‘tis well, But far the rapid fancies fly The rolling worlds of wave and shell, And all the lands where corals lie.

Thy lips are like a sunset glow, Thy smile is like a morning sky, Yet leave me, leave me, let me go And see the land where corals lie. The land, the land where corals lie.

5 The Swimmer by Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–70)

With short, sharp violent lights made vivid, To southward far as the sight can roam, Only the swirl of the surges livid, The seas that climb and the surfs that comb. Only the crag and the cliff to nor’ward, The rocks receding, and reefs flung forward, Waifs wreck’d seaward and wasted shoreward, On shallows sheeted with flaming foam.

A grim, gray coast and a seaboard ghastly, And shores trod seldom by feet of men - Where the batter’d hull and the broken mast lie, They have lain embedded these long years ten.

Love! Love! when we wandered here together, Hand in hand! Hand in hand through the sparkling weather, From the heights and hollows of fern and heather, God surely loved us a little then.

The skies were fairer, the shores were firmer – The blue sea over the bright sand roll’d; Babble and prattle, and ripple and murmur, Sheen of silver and glamour of gold. Sheen of silver and glamour of gold.

So, girt with tempest and wing’d with thunder And clad with lightning and shod with sleet, And strong winds treading the swift waves under The flying rollers with frothy feet.

One gleam like a bloodshot sword-blade swims on The sky line, staining the green gulf crimson, A death-stroke fiercely dealt by a dim sun That strikes through his stormy winding sheet.

O brave white horses! You gather and gallop, The storm sprite loosens the gusty rains; O brave white horses! You gather and gallop, The storm sprite loosens the gusty rains;

Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shallop In your hollow backs, on your high-arched manes. I would ride as never man has ridden In your sleepy, swirling surges hidden;

I would ride as never man has ridden To gulfs foreshadow’d through strifes forbidden, Where no light wearies and no love wanes. No love, Where no love, no love wanes.

10 Programme Notes

1 Allegro 2 Andante moderato 3 Scherzo: Allegro molto 4 Finale con epilogo fugato: Allegro molto

he Fourth Symphony astonished its first audiences in 1935. Here was a composer in his 60s unexpectedly

unleashing a torrent of dissonant anger that utterly contradicted his reputation (however partial and misleading it was) as a reflective pastoralist. There had been hints of the symphony’s harshness in other music conceived around the same time – Satan’s music in Job and the chromatic counterpoint in the Piano Concerto – but the Fourth Symphony far surpassed these in its vehemence.

The first three symphonies had names, not numbers – A Sea Symphony, A London Symphony, A Pastoral Symphony – but with the Fourth there is no name, and Vaughan Williams obstinately avoided offering any explanation of what lay behind the music. There are some self-deprecating comments (‘I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant’) and the more explicit ‘I wrote it not as a definite picture of anything external, but simply because it occurred to me like this’, and that was all. His own programme note does little more than list the themes

and their relationships. But although a composer determines what goes into his music, he has little control over how it will be received. What everyone heard, and still hears, in the Fourth Symphony is a cry of rage and pain at World War I and the looming threat of another, possibly worse, war to come.

In whatever way it reflects the troubled atmosphere of the 1930s, it is very much in the line of post-Beethoven conflict symphonies, and is Vaughan Williams’ most ‘classical’ in its shape: a sonata-form first movement, slow movement and scherzo all building up to resolution in a finale. The violence and dissonance come with a punch right at the beginning. Much of the symphony’s intensity comes from an almost obsessive concentration on the two motives heard after the grinding semitone clash of the symphony’s opening: one is the four-note figure E – E flat – F – E natural (the same shape as the familiar BACH motive, but more compressed, beginning and ending

with the same note); the other is one of rising fourths, first heard a few bars later in the brass. The scoring is for much of the time deliberately thick and harsh, though the first movement’s coda fades away with hazy, muted strings, preparing for the emotional limbo of the slow movement.

The scherzo and finale contain types of more ‘popular’ themes, but there’s an element of menace – even malice – here too. Vaughan Williams took trouble over these themes. In December 1933, he wrote to Gustav Holst •, who had closely followed the symphony’s composition, ‘The ‘nice’ tunes in the Finale have already been replaced by better ones (at all events they are real ones). What I mean is that I knew the others were made-up stuff and these are not.’ Some 30 years earlier, in an essay entitled ‘The Soporific Finale’, Vaughan Williams had asked, ‘Why does everyone go to sleep over the last movement?’ going on to complain that many finales lack excitement because

everything has already been said in the first three movements, ‘leaving the poor finale the thankless task of bringing down the curtain.’

It’s a just criticism of so many second-rate symphonies that try to follow Beethoven’s manner without having his strength, but there’s no chance of sleeping through the finale of the Fourth Symphony, which is an implied challenge to the optimism expressed in the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The link between scherzo and finale in Vaughan Williams’ symphony recalls the similar passage in Beethoven, but where Beethoven’s finale bursts into a triumphant C-major march, one of his most affirmative movements, Vaughan Williams’ march-like idea gives little comfort

Beethoven’s type of symphony depends on direction and resolution of tension. Vaughan Williams’ world doesn’t allow this, nor do his two recurrent motto themes, which are designed to avoid a clear sense of tonality. The nearest Vaughan Williams comes to resolution is a frantic fugal epilogue in which the themes are thrown recklessly together, and which spills out into the grinding dissonance of the symphony’s opening, as though a single moment of vision had been concentrated into its 30-minute span. •

Ralph Vaughan Williams Symphony No 4 in F Minor 1934 / note by Andrew Huth

12 December 2019

— ‘I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant.’

Ralph Vaughan Williams

—

11Composer Profile

orn in Gloucestershire on 12 October 1872, Ralph Vaughan Williams moved to Dorking in Surrey at the

age of two, following the death of his father. Here, his maternal grandparents, Josiah Wedgwood – of the pottery family – and his wife Caroline, who was the sister of Charles Darwin, encouraged a musical upbringing.

Vaughan Williams attended Charterhouse School, and in 1890 he enrolled at the Royal College of Music, becoming a pupil of Sir Hubert Parry. Weekly lessons at the RCM continued when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1892. Vaughan Williams’ first composition to make any public impact, the song ‘Linden Lea’, was published in 1902.

Ralph Vaughan Williams in Profile 1872–1958

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS & HOLST

•  Ralph Vaughan Williams first met composer Gustav Holst (1874–1934) in 1895, beginning a lifelong friendship.

In 1921, the two friends both had music featured in the Three Choirs Festival, held in Hereford. Vaughan Williams conducted his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, while Holst conducted his The Hymn of Jesus, which he dedicated to Vaughan Williams.

After the festival, they went on holiday together and undertook long walks in the Herefordshire countryside, sometimes extending for more than ten miles.

His ‘discovery’ of folk song in 1903 was a major influence on the development of his style. A period of study with Maurice Ravel in 1908 was also very successful, with Vaughan Williams learning, as he put it, ‘how to orchestrate in points of colour rather than in lines’. The immediate outcome was the song-cycle On Wenlock Edge. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, using a tune he had studied while editing The English Hymnal, was first performed in Gloucester Cathedral in 1910. With these works, he established a reputation which subsequent compositions, such as the Symphony No 3 (‘Pastoral’), Flos Campi and the Mass in G minor, served to consolidate.

In 1921, he became conductor of the Bach Choir, alongside his professorship at the RCM. Over his long life, he contributed notably to all musical forms, including film music. However, it is in his nine symphonies, spanning a period of almost 50 years, that the greatest range of musical expression is evident. Vaughan Williams died on 26 August 1958, just a few months after the premiere of his Ninth Symphony. •

Composer Profile by Stephen Connock

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS ON LSO LIVE

Roman Simovic LSO String Ensemble

This disc brings together three English masterpieces: Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and Elgar’s Introduction & Allegro, which was composed for and premiered by the LSO in 1905.

lsolive.co.uk

12 Artist Biographies

ir Antonio Pappano has been Music Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden since

2002, and Music Director of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome since 2005. He was nurtured as a pianist, repetiteur and assistant conductor at many of the most important opera houses of Europe and North America, including at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and several seasons at the Bayreuth Festival as musical assistant to Daniel Barenboim for productions of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal and The Ring Cycle. Pappano was appointed Music Director of Oslo’s Den Norske Opera in 1990, and from 1992–2002, served as Music Director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. From 1997–99 he was Principal Guest Conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Internationally, Sir Antonio Pappano has worked with the Metropolitan Opera New York, the State Operas of Vienna and Berlin, the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Théâtre du Châtelet and the Teatro alla Scala. His repertoire at the Royal Opera House has been wide-ranging, generating acclaim in productions including Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, Berg’s Wozzeck, Verdi’s Falstaff and Turnage’s Anna Nicole.

Highlights of the 2019/20 season include revivals of Puccini’s Tosca and Madame Butterfly, a tour of Japan with performances of Verdi’s Otello and Faust, and new productions of Beethoven’s Fidelio and Strauss’ Elektra, featuring luminary singers including Jonas Kaufmann, Nina Stemme, Karita Mattila, Gerald Finley, Anna Netrebko and Bryn Terfel.

Pappano has appeared as a guest conductor with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras, including the Berlin, Vienna, New York and Munich Philharmonic Orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Chicago and Boston Symphonies, the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras and the Orchestre de Paris. He also has a strong commitment to nurturing young singers and instrumentalists, and the summer of 2020 will see him deepening his connections with the Aldeburgh and Verbier Festivals, leading concerts and masterclasses.

Pappano has been an exclusive recording artist for Warner Classics (formerly EMI Classics) since 1995, and his discography features numerous complete operas, including Puccini’s La rondine, Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, Massenet’s Werther, and most recently Verdi’s Aida. These have been hailed as ‘unmissable’ (The Sunday Times),

‘a triumph’ (BBC Radio 3) and ‘a magnificent achievement’ (Gramophone).

As a pianist, Antonio Pappano accompanies singers including Joyce DiDonato, Diana Damrau, Gerald Finley and Ian Bostridge. He has also partnered singers and instrumental soloists on disc, including in operatic recitals with Nina Stemme, Placido Domingo, Anna Netrebko and Joyce DiDonato.

Antonio Pappano was born in London to Italian parents, and moved with his family to the United States at the age of 13. He studied piano with Norma Verrilli, composition with Arnold Franchetti and conducting with Gustav Meier. In 2012, he was made a Cavaliere di Gran Croce of the Republic of Italy, and a Knight of the British Empire for his services to music, and in 2015 he was named recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal. •

Sir Antonio Pappano conductor

12 December 2019

13Artist Biographies

cottish mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and

was the winner of the 2002 Kathleen Ferrier Award. Current season highlights include Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust with DSO Berlin and Robin Ticciati, and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Hannu Lintu; Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård and Bach’s B Minor Mass with Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. In opera, Karen appears as Judith in Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle with Opera North and as Mère Marie in Poulenc’s Les dialogues des Carmelites at the 2020 Glyndebourne Festival. She will return to the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 2021.

Karen regularly sings with the Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Rotterdam and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, Dresden Staatskapelle, London Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Danish Radio Symphony and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestras working with conductors including Donald Runnicles, Bernard Haitink, Sir Simon Rattle, Daniele Gatti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Daniel Harding, Robin Ticciati, Edward Gardner and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Opera highlights have included

appearances at the Royal Opera Covent Garden; Metropolitan Opera New York; Deutsche Oper Berlin; Montpellier Opera, singing Wagner roles including Waltraute in Götterdämmerung, Erda in Das Rheingold and Siegfried, and Brangaene in Tristan and Isolde. Karen has also made appearances as a soloist at major festivals including the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh International Festival.

Highlights with her regular musical partner Simon Lepper include recitals at Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Kennedy Center Washington and Carnegie Hall, New York as well as regular recitals for BBC Radio 3. With Simon she recently recorded a critically acclaimed disc of lieder by Alma and Gustav Mahler for Linn Records for whom she has also recorded Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and La mort de Cléopâtre with Robin Ticciati and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

In July 2018 Karen was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She is also Patron of the National Girls’ Choir of Scotland. •

Karen Cargill mezzo-soprano

2019/20 with theLondon Symphony Orchestra

Sir Simon RattleBerg & Beethoven’s Seventh 16 January 2020

Beethoven: Christ on the Mount of Olives 19 January & 13 February 2020

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony 12 & 16 February 2020

Bartók: Duke Bluebeard’s Castle 23 April 2020

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony 26 April 2020

Percy Grainger 4 June 2020 Produced by the LSO and Barbican. Part of the

LSO’s 2019/20 Season and Barbican Presents.

Gershwin, Ives, Harris & Bernstein 6 June 2020

François-Xavier RothElgar’s Cello Concerto with Alisa Weilerstein 19 December 2019

Half Six Fix: Bartók 18 March 2020

Bartók & Stravinsky with Isabelle Faust 19 March 2020

Dukas 22 March 2020

Panufnik Composers Workshop 26 March 2020

Artist Portrait: Antoine Tamestit

Jörg Widmann’s Viola Concerto with Daniel Harding 19 April 2020

Berio Voci with François-Xavier Roth 11 June 2020

Walton Viola Concerto with Alan Gilbert 14 June 2020

BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concerts: Antoine Tamestit & Friends 8 & 15 May, 5 & 26 June 2020 LSO St Luke’s

LSO Chamber OrchestraRameau, Purcell, Handel 15 December 2019 Milton Court Concert Hall

Gianandrea NosedaShostakovich’s Ninth 30 January & 9 February 2020

James MacMillan: St John Passion 5 April 2020

Explore the season at lso.co.uk/201920season

16 The Orchestra

London Symphony Orchestra on stage

Leader Roman Simovic

First Violins Clare Duckworth Ginette Decuyper Laura Dixon Gerald Gregory Maxine Kwok-Adams William Melvin Elizabeth Pigram Laurent Quenelle Harriet Rayfield Sylvain Vasseur Julian Azkou Richard Blayden Lyrit Milgra Mariam Nahapetyan Julia Rumley

Second Violins David Alberman Sarah Quinn Miya Väisänen Matthew Gardner Julián Gil Rodríguez Naoko Keatley Alix Lagasse Iwona Muszynska Csilla Pogany Andrew Pollock Paul Robson Hazel Mulligan Helena Smart Erzsebet Racz

Violas Edward Vanderspar Gillianne Haddow Malcolm Johnston German Clavijo Stephen Doman Robert Turner Luca Casciato Nancy Johnson Kimi Makino Felicity Matthews Cynthia Perrin Sofia Sousa Silva

Cellos Charles-Antoine Duflot Alastair Blayden Jennifer Brown Noel Bradshaw Eve-Marie Caravassilis Daniel Gardner Hilary Jones Laure Le Dantec Ghislaine McMullin Deborah Tolksdorf

Double Basses Sam Loeck Colin Paris Patrick Laurence Thomas Goodman Joe Melvin José Moreira Simo Väisänen Adam Wynter

Flutes Gareth Davies Patricia Moynihan

Piccolo Sharon Williams

Oboes Juliana Koch Rosie Jenkins

Cor Anglais Christine Pendrill

Clarinets Arthur Stockel Chi-Yu Mo

Bass Clarinet Laurent Ben Slimane

Bassoons Rachel Gough Joost Bosdijk

Contra Bassoons Dominic Morgan

Horns Timothy Jones David McQueen Paul Gardham Alex Willett Jake Bagby

Trumpets David Elton Toby Street

Trombones Isobel Daws James Maynard

Bass Trombone Patrick Jackman

Tuba Ben Thomson

Timpani Nigel Thomas

Percussion Neil Percy David Jackson

Harp Bryn Lewis

Organ Bernard Robertson

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

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

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

12 December 2019