Wednesday 13 February 2013 St. John's Smith Square 7.30 pm Joseph Swensen Conductor/violin Simon Callow Narrator WAGNER Siegfried Idyll SIBELIUS PellĂŠas et MĂŠlisande, Op. 46 INTERVAL
BRAHMS Violin Concerto in D Major, Op.77
The LMP is funded by the London Borough of Croydon
Members of the audience are reminded that it is prohibited to smoke in the auditorium or take sound recordings or photographs in any part of the performance. Any noises such as whispering, coughing, rustling of sweet papers and the beeping of digital watches are very distracting to the performers and fellow audience members. Please make sure mobile phones or pagers are switched off during the performance. LMP and St. John's, Smith Square are registered charities.
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LONDON MOZART PLAYERS Founded by Harry Blech in 1949 as the UK’s first chamber orchestra, the London Mozart Players (LMP) is regarded as one of the UK’s finest ensembles. Under the leadership of Music Director Gérard Korsten, the orchestra is internationally renowned for its outstanding live performances and CD recordings, and is particularly known for its definitive performances of the core Classical repertoire. The LMP also plays an active part in contemporary music, giving many world premières and commissioning new works, especially by British composers. In recent years, the LMP has premièred new works by composers including Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Tarik O’Regan, Sally Beamish, Cecilia McDowall, Lynne Plowman, and Fraser Trainer. In March 2011 the LMP appointed Roxanna Panufnik as Associate Composer. Since 1989, the LMP’s home has been Fairfield Halls, Croydon, thanks to generous funding from the London Borough of Croydon. This residency includes a series of subscription concerts at the hall and numerous education and community activities throughout the borough. Touring is a major part of the orchestra’s schedule, with regular appearances at festivals and concert series throughout the UK and abroad. It has strong relationships with other major UK venues, including Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton, and is the Orchestra in Residence for Grayshott Concerts. Overseas, the LMP has visited Spain, Belgium, France and Germany. The 2012/13 season marks the third year of conductor Gérard Korsten’s term as the LMP’s fifth Music Director, continuing the strong Classical tradition developed by Andrew Parrott, Matthias Bamert and Jane Glover. The season sees the orchestra continuing to work with established artists including Howard Shelley and Anthony Marwood, whilst building new relationships with bright new stars including Nicola Benedetti and Leonard Elschenbroich. Acclaimed young violinist Chloë Hanslip performed with the LMP in the celebrations of Fairfield Halls’ fiftieth anniversary, and we welcome back exciting young conductor Nicholas Collon in April 2013. The LMP’s association with Korsten also continues the introduction of some of the best European soloists to our concerts.
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The LMP has developed an extensive and highly regarded education, community and audience development programme, LMP Interactive, and is particularly committed to developing new audiences in outer London boroughs as well as rural areas across the nation. Its association with the South Holland district in Lincolnshire brings the orchestra into the heart of the Fenland communities. Working with educational institutions also brings inspiring and valued relationships, providing a professional grounding for young musicians. The LMP is associated with Royal Holloway University of London, Wellington College, Wimbledon College, Portsmouth Grammar School and the Whitgift Foundation Schools in Croydon. Recent projects include ‘Side-by-side in Shepshed’ that saw composer and animateur Fraser Trainer work with seven schools in Leicestershire to build a new youth orchestra for the area, which performed alongside the LMP in a family concert. In Croydon, a Start project funded by the Prince's Foundation for Children & the arts, includes children from primary and special needs schools working together to perform at the LMP’s annual Schools’ Concert in Fairfield Halls. Other ongoing ventures include visiting care homes and concert demonstrations in primary and secondary schools. The LMP receives project funding from Arts Council England, Orchestras Live and South Holland District Council. In addition, the LMP receives grants from trusts, foundations and many individuals, particularly the Friends of the LMP in Croydon. Recording has played a major part in the orchestra’s life for many years. Its acclaimed Contemporaries of Mozart series with Matthias Bamert for Chandos numbers over 20 CDs to date, with the latest release of Boccherini proving a success with the critics. A recording with Canadian pianist Alain Lefèvre of works by Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Mathieu for Analekta was awarded a Canadian Juno Award. The LMP has an online CD shop, www.shop.lmp.org, which has a large range of LMP's recordings on sale. Full details of forthcoming concerts and more information on the orchestra’s activities are available on the LMP website: www.lmp.org.
ORCHESTRA 1st Violins Thomas Bowes Victoria Sayles Nicoline Kraamwinkel Ann Criscuolo (Chair supported by David & Beatrix Hodgson)
Martin Smith
(Chair supported by Debby Guthrie)
Richard Blayden Anna de Bruin Catherine Van der Geest 2nd Violins Andrew Roberts Jeremy Metcalfe
(Chair supported by Noël & Caroline Annesley)
Jayne Spencer Adrian Dunn Stephen Rouse Raja Halder
Violas Judith Busbridge Cian Ó Duíll (Chair supported by Anonymous)
Flutes Robert Manasse
(Chair supported by Brian & Doreen Hitching)
Joanna Marsh
Oliver Wilson
(Chair supported by Barbara Tower)
Michael Posner
Oboes Gareth Hulse
(Chair supported by Anonymous)
(Chair supported by Stuart & Joyce Aston)
Cellos Sebastian Comberti Julia Desbruslais
(Chair supported by Jeanne & Gordon Lees)
Sarah Butcher
(Chair supported by Valerie Butcher)
Ben Chappell
(Chair supported by Anonymous)
Basses Stacey Watton
(Chair supported by Pat Sandry)
Katie Clemmow Clarinets Marie Lloyd Emma Canavan
(Chair supported by Christopher Fildes)
Horns Caroline O' Connell Martin Grainger Richard Lewis Jocelyn Lightfoot Trumpets Bruce Nockles Peter Wright Timpani Ben Hoffnung Percussion Scott Bywater
Bassoons Sarah Burnett
(Chair supported by Alec Botten)
Emma Harding
(Chair supported by Louise Honeyman)
Tim Amherst
(Chair supported by Toby & Eira Jessel)
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Get to know your player as you see them perform. Take a look at what goes on behind the scenes with access to rehearsals. See your name in the programme alongside your chosen chair.
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Joseph Swensen currently holds the posts of Conductor Emeritus of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and Founder and Artistic Director of Unity Hills Arts Centers International (U-HAC). Swensen was Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Adviser of the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris (formerly known as the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris) from 2009 – 2012. He was Principal Conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from 1996 – 2005, and has also held positions at the Malmö Opera (2008 – 2011), Lahti Symphony, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Swensen is a busy guest-conductor throughout the world (from Europe, to the USA, Japan and Australia), enjoying long-established relationships with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, with whom Swensen recently completed a Mahler cycle spanning ten years, and the London Mozart Players, amongst others.
© Eric Richmond
JOSEPH SWENSEN Conductor/Violin
As principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Joseph Swensen and the orchestra toured extensively in the US, UK, Europe and the Far East. They have performed together at the Mostly Mozart festival in New York, Tanglewood and Ravinia Festivals, the BBC Proms, the Barbican and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Swensen and the orchestra have also made several recordings including a series of CDs for Linn records where he is featured as violin soloist. Joseph Swensen was born in 1960 in Hoboken, New Jersey and grew up in Harlem, New York City, an American of Norwegian and Japanese descent.
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SIMON CALLOW Narrator
Simon Callow was born in 1949 in London. He lived in Africa for three years, studied at the London Oratory School on his return and subsequently spent a year at Queen’s University, Belfast, from which he ran away to become an actor. After three years training at the Drama Centre, he made his debut at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973, playing the front end of a horse in Büchner’s Woyzeck. In 1979, he created the part of Mozart in the first production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. He has appeared extensively with the RSC, the National Theatre (most recently in Twelfth Night), at the Royal Court, in the West End and all over the country. Over the years he has done a number of one-man shows including The Importance of Being Oscar, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Being Shakespeare (in London, New York and Chicago), and two sold-out seasons of A Christmas Carol at the Arts Theatre. His films include Amadeus, A Room with a View, Shakespeare in Love, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Phantom of the Opera, Chemical Wedding, Late Bloomers (recently programmed at the Berlin Festival), No Ordinary Trifle and Acts of Godfrey in which he plays God. He has directed over thirty shows, including Carmen Jones and the premieres of Shirley Valentine and Single Spies at the National Theatre, as well as many operas, most recently The Magic Flute at Opera Holland Park. He also directed the film The Ballad of the Sad Café, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Rod Steiger and has has written and presented two documentaries for television, Callow’s Laughton and Orson Welles Over Europe.
starting with Being an Actor and recently continuing with My Life in Pieces, which won the coveted Sheridan Morley Award. His biography of Dickens, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, was released last year. Callow has been very closely involved in music, working with orchestras including the LSO, LPO, LMP, Philharmonia, Glyndebourne, the Hallé under Jurowski, Elder, Gergiev, Bruggen, Nagano and Järvi, and with instrumentalists and singers that include Carole Farley, Steven Isserlis and Steven Hough. He has recorded works by Isserlis, Elgar, Schoenberg, Rawsthorne and Hallgrimsson, and been involved in the premieres of pieces by Jonathan Dove, Roxanna Panufnik and Per Nørgård. His dancing has been confined to a production of The Soldier’s Tale, in which he danced the Devil; the violin was played by Pinchas Zuckerman.
Simon Callow has written 13 books, including a memoir, Love is Where It Falls, biographies of Charles Laughton and Orson Welles (two volumes so far, one to come), and a number of books about the theatre, www.lmp.org
RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883)
Siegfried Idyll Born in 1813 in Leipzig into a theatrical family, Wagner studied music at school but taught himself composing by studying opera scores and the symphonies of Beethoven. He started work as a choir master and moved from job to job, becoming conductor, then opera director. From the age of 20, he wrote operas and dedicated his life to the cause of opera. In 1864, he was in danger of being imprisoned for his debts, but was rescued by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was a great admirer. The King set him up in Munich with facilities for opera production. Here he fell in love with Franz Liszt’s daughter Cosima, who was married to the conductor Hans von Bülow. When Cosima abandoned her husband, who condoned the liaison, and married Wagner, the subsequent scandal forced him to flee to Switzerland. He soon returned to Germany and settled in Bayreuth, a small town in Bavaria, where he built his own opera theatre. Siegfried Idyll was not taken directly from a stage work, and was introduced in neither the opera house nor the concert hall, but in the intimate surroundings of Wagner's home, ‘Tribschen’, just outside Lucerne, on Christmas Day 1870. Wagner in fact conceived this work as a Tribschen Idyll, for his family alone, specifically as ‘a symphonic birthday greeting to his Cosima from her Richard’. The day on which the piece was first performed, by 17 musicians conducted by Wagner, was not only Christmas but also Cosima's 33rd birthday. Cosima wrote: “As I awoke my ear caught a sound, which swelled fuller and fuller; no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming; music was sounding, and such music! When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but www.lmp.org
so was all the rest of the household. Richard had arranged his orchestra on the staircase, and thus was our Tribschen consecrated forever... After lunch the orchestra came into the house downstairs, and now the Idyll was heard once again, to the profound emotion of us all.” While motifs in Siegfried Idyll relate the work to the eponymous music drama, the dramatic changes in Wagner's personal life during the period in which he completed Die Meistersinger had more to do with the creation of this work in its family context. The music, warm-hearted and intimate throughout, could not have been better categorised than by the designation Idyll. It begins and ends as a caressing lullaby, with what might be described as a sequence of dream-pictures as its substance. In it are several motifs associated with Siegfried, from the music drama so titled which Wagner had completed at about the time of his son Siegfried's birth the previous year. The principal theme, stated at the outset, was created by Wagner as a gift for Cosima before he gave it to Brünnhilde in the opera’s final scene. In addition to the material borrowed from the opera, note must be made of the old lullaby Schlafe, Kindchen, schlafe, which is yet another element Wagner had planned to use in an earlier work that he never got round to writing: before his son was born he entered this tune in his diary for use in a piece for his second daughter, Eva. The work is so strong an expression of Wagner’s love for Cosima and their children, and their home itself, it is little wonder that, according to Cosima’s diary, she wept when Wagner found it necessary to sell this intimate family document. © Elizabeth Boulton
JEAN SIBELIUS (1865 – 1945)
Pelléas et Mélisande, Op.46 I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX
At the castle gate Mélisande At the sea shore A spring in the park The three blind sisters Pastorale Mélisande at the spinning wheel Entr'acte Mélisande's death
is the soloist in The three blind sisters, as well as in the Pastorale where its melancholic Sibelius sound is supported by the clarinets and occasionally the flute. In Mélisande at the spinning wheel the violas provide throughout the age-old musical formula associated with the spinning wheel. The following Entr'acte prepares the finale, and in The death of Melisande the music is dark and desolate. The Suite ends in D minor, the key also used by Fauré for the last movement of his Pelléas and Mélisande suite. © Stefan de Haan
Spiritually, Finland is closer to Flanders than France. The tendency to melancholy and desolation in Maeterlinck's Pelléas is also a characteristic feature in much of the music by Sibelius. When he was asked to compose incidental music for the play, he was so eager to attend to the new commission that he abandoned the violin concerto on which he was engaged at the time, and immediately began working on the music for Pelléas and Mélisande. He completed the required pieces in a matter of days, and on 17 March 1905 the play with the incidental music was first performed at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki. Sibelius himself conducted the orchestra on that occasion. The Orchestral Suite intended for concert performances follows the original sequence of the movements which formed the incidental music to the play. It is scored for a chamber orchestra of strings and percussion with a small wind section, including Piccolo and Cor Anglais. The sombre mood of much of the text, a mood close to Sibelius's heart, is established by the music before the first word is spoken. The second movement is a musical portrait of Mélisande, somewhat reminiscent of the composer's famous Valse Triste. The following short piece, At the sea shore, can be omitted but if it is played in the concert hall it must be linked to the next movement, A spring in the park. The Cor Anglais
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JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833 – 1897)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 I II III
Allegro non troppo Adagio Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace
Brahms first spent a summer at the lakeside resort of Pörtschach in 1877. “It is most beautiful here,” he wrote. “The lake and the forests, with the blue mountains shining white in clean snow; it is a place very much intended for my longer stay…” His second Symphony in D major was begun during this holiday, a work which caused his friend Theodor Billroth to exclaim: “How beautiful it must be on Lake Worth.” The following year Brahms returned to this quiet spot, which he found so “immensely refreshing”, and completed the first draft of another work in D major, the violin concerto. In dedicating this concerto to the great violinist Joachim, his beloved “Jussuf”, Brahms wrote: “It is a good thing that your name is on the copy; you are more or less responsible for the solo part.” In fact Brahms was far too strong-willed to accept his friend’s advice on every point. At one time this work was even termed a concerto against the violin; it is difficult to play, yet it lacks any element of display for its own sake. However, Brahms did entrust the cadenza to Joachim, the only occasion when he did not compose this section himself. Early in his career, Joachim had adopted a musical motto on the notes F.A.E, “frei aber ainsam” ("free but solitary"). Inspired by this, Brahms too chose a motto for himself, taking the notes F.A.F, “frei aber froh” ("free but joyful"). Arpeggio themes which recall this motto appear time and again in Brahms’s music; the opening of his violin concerto uses the motto’s exact melodic shape, although transposed www.lmp.org
into a different key. The lyrical slow movement, hardly the “feebly Adagio” which Brahms tells us replaced two rejected middle movements, is also based on an arpeggio theme; its serene melody foreshadows one of the loveliest of Brahms’s songs, the exquisite “Sapphische Ode”. Joachim had to wait many years before he could persuade Brahms to write him a concerto. Perhaps Joachim’s Hungarian blood receives a tribute in the finale, with its echoes of the Zigeuner style. Certainly, his influence on this work was profound, as was his influence on Brahms’s life and career. The shadow of their quarrel only three years later had not yet fallen when, on New Year’s Day, 1879, they gave the concerto its first performance. With Brahms conducting and Joachim as soloist, the occasion crowned a still perfect friendship. © Margaret Archibald
LMP MANAGEMENT Patron HRH The Earl of Wessex KG GCVO Music Director Gérard Korsten Associate Conductor Hilary Davan Wetton
Administration Managing Director Simon Funnell General Manager David Wilson
London Mozart Players Fairfield Halls Park Lane Croydon CR9 1DG
Development Manager Caroline Downing
T: 020 8686 1996 F: 020 8667 0938 E: info@lmp.org W: www.lmp.org
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FORTHCOMING CONCERTS AT ST JOHN'S SMITH SQUARE
Thursday 14 March 2013 Weber Mozart Brahms Piano/Director
7.30pm
Oberon Overture Piano Concerto No. 22 K482 Symphony No. 2 Howard Shelley
Wednesday 22 May 2013
7.30pm
Beethoven Violin Concerto Beethoven Symphony No. 5 Conductor GĂŠrard Korsten Violin Anthony Marwood
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