Principal Conductor Edward Gardner supported by Aud Jebsen
Principal Guest Conductor Karina Canellakis Conductor Emeritus Vladimir Jurowski
Patron HRH The Duke of Kent KG Artistic Director Elena Dubinets Chief Executive David Burke Leader Pieter Schoeman supported by Neil Westreich
TUESDAY 12 MARCH 2024, 6.30PM
ST JOHN’S CHURCH, WATERLOO
PART OF
Welcome to tonight’s London Philharmonic Orchestra performance here at St John’s Waterloo. Throughout March 2024 we’re celebrating the creativity in everyone during our festival ‘The Music in You’. Reflecting our adventurous spirit, the festival embraces all kinds of expression – from dance, to music theatre and even audience participation.
Scan to see all events in the festival.
lpo.org.uk/themusicinyou
Please note there will be no interval in tonight’s concert.
For this work the audience will be seated in two groups, each led by a conductor. You will be provided with paper and pencils. We encourage everyone to take part, but you’re welcome to just sit and enjoy the performance if you prefer.
There’s no right or wrong way to take part – please just enjoy being creative and interpreting the task in whatever way you like!
Audience Group 1 (coloured seats)
Firstly, you’ll be directed to inhale and exhale together by your conductor.
Secondly, during the piece you are invited to choose one of the five prompts from the paper slip on your seat, and – using this prompt and the music you hear as a starting point – to write a story (or draw a story with images, if you prefer). You’re welcome to take your story home, or leave it behind after the concert.
Audience Group 2 (grey seats)
During the piece, you’re invited to draw sketches or images that reflect the sounds around you. You will be given some pieces of paper: please draw your first image on one of the pieces. When the conductor signals, please hold your drawing up in the air and a member of staff will collect it and pass it on to the musicians. You can then move on to your next drawing.
Breathe and Draw was commissioned by the Nevis Ensemble and shortlisted for a Scottish New Music Award 2021. The composer writes:
‘Breathe and Draw is a piece for our individual and collective imaginations. It is an experience that is eased into existence and meaning not by the ‘composer’, but by the people in the performance space; by breathing, drawing, playing, and/or imagining. Each individual will have their own experience of and contribution to the piece, and the hope is to create a sense of community from our unique yet aligned creativities.
The 25-minute piece hinges on a basic cyclical idea: audiences respond to the music they hear by drawing images which the musicians then take to create more music and the cycle repeats. In this way, Breathe and Draw is created collaboratively by the musicians and audiences themselves and each performance is specific to the group of people, or community, present in that particular performance.
Breathe and Draw reminds us that communities are as much imagined as they are physical, that the community spirit is able to bridge distances, and that it is up to us, both individually and collectively, to foster and nurture these communities.’
Winner of the UK Critics’ Circle Young Artist Award 2021, British-Chinese composer Alex Ho is a former LPO Young Composer (2021/22). He is currently Artistin-Residence at Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier and Associate Composer at Oxford International Song Festival.
Alex’s music theatre piece Untold was premiered at the Concertgebouw Brugge and O. Festival Rotterdam in spring 2023, winning the FEDORA Opera Prize 2023 for a ‘bold and moving creation’.
His song cycle The Glass Eye received its broadcast premiere in January 2024, following the world premiere at Oxford International Song Festival in October 2023.
Alex has had pieces performed/commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, Manchester Camerata, BBC Radio 3, Royal Opera House, Het Concertgebouw, National Opera Studio, Music Theatre Wales, London Sinfonietta, Riot Ensemble, Roderick Williams, VOCES8, and National Youth Choirs of Great Britain.
Alex is also co-director of Tangram, a collective of composers and performers of Chinese and western instruments who are Associate Artists at LSO St Luke’s.
2022 (UK PREMIERE) (13’)
Free public WiFi at St John’s Waterloo:
Name SJWguest Password SJWvisitors
If you would like to take part, before the piece begins (or before the concert, if you’d like to be prepared!) scan the above QR code using your phone camera, which will take you to the start page. Alternatively navigate to ryancarter.us/lpo in your phone’s internet browser.
From there it’s easy – just follow the prompts on your phone screen!
Concerto Molto Grosso was commissioned by the Boise Philharmonic and premiered by them in May 2022.
American composer
Ryan Carter creates music for instruments, voices and computers. His work often explores new musical possibilities presented by emerging technologies, while remaining critical of the assumptions and unintended side effects embedded in them. Alternately playful, quirky, visceral and intense, his music has been described by The New York Times as ‘imaginative ... like, say, a Martian dance party’. Ryan’s music has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the MATA Festival, the National Flute Association, and many individuals and ensembles, with support from the the American Composers Forum, the Jerome Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His debut portrait album can be heard on KAIROS Records.
In addition to composing acoustic music, Ryan is an avid computer musician and programmer. His iMonkeypants app (available on the App Store) is an album of algorithmically generated, listener-interactive electronica for iOS.
Ryan holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (BMus), Stony Brook University (MA) and New York University (PhD). He is Associate Professor of Music at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY.
© LSO Soundhub © Dominica Eriksen WATCH A VIDEO OF RYAN CARTER INTRODUCING CONCERTO MOLTO GROSSO AHEAD OF ITS WORLD PREMIERE IN BOISE, IDAHO
György Ligeti was one of the most fascinating artists to emerge from Hungary in the 20th century. A Hungarian Jew born in Transylvania (now Romania) in 1923, he had a tragic early life, taken to a forced labour camp by the Nazis at the age of 20, whilst both his father and brother were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War. György was lucky to survive, escaping from the Nazis while he worked transporting heavy munitions to the front line. He deserted, and walked to the Russian-occupied Transylvania.
He subsequently studied music at the Budapest Academy, where he befriended György Kurtág, who was also to become a successful composer. They had both gone to Budapest to study composition with Béla Bartók, but unfortunately Bartók died around the same time. Ligeti’s early music is strongly influenced by folk music, Bartók, and Zoltán Kodály, but he had problems with the censorship of some of his more advanced music, (such as his String Quartet No. 1), and several of his works from the 1950s weren’t performed for many years due to the regressive Soviet regime in Hungary at the time.
Tonight’s conductors, Charlotte Politi and Luis CastilloBriceño, are our two LPO Fellow Conductors for 2023/24. Launched in 2023, the LPO Conducting Fellowship supports the development of outstanding early-career conductors from backgrounds currently underrepresented in the profession.
The LPO Conducting Fellowship is generously supported by Patricia Haitink with additional support from Gini and Richard Gabbertas.
In December 1956 Ligeti escaped Hungary with his wife Vera, avoiding the Soviet army by hiding under mail bags in a train. They continued on foot, at night, through the mud of no-man’s land to Austria. The move to the West had a radical effect on Ligeti’s subsequent music, and he reinvented himself as an avant-garde composer with a particular focus on textural composition. The sudden release of the Soviet artistic strictures he had been composing under caused an outpouring of new and imaginative music in the late 1950s and 1960s.
One of Ligeti’s recurring styles is his meccanico music, in which instruments imitate the ticking of clocks – all at different speeds. He talked about the influence on his music of a short story that he encountered as a five-year-old, in which a widow lived in a house full of clocks ticking away all the time. He also liked the idea of machines breaking down: ‘recalcitrant machinery, unmanageable automata have always fascinated me.’
The most extreme version of Ligeti’s meccanico music is Poème Symphonique, composed for 100 metronomes, which we hear tonight. The metronomes are all set going at the same time at different speeds and gradually stop once they have run down. The resulting sound at the beginning is cloud-like as the ticks merge together, but later individual metronomes become increasingly audible; thus clouds gradually emerge as clocks.
© Mike Searby/London SinfoniettaWe hope you enjoy tonight’s performance. Could you spare a few moments to complete a short survey about your experience? Your feedback is invaluable to us and will help to shape our future plans. Just scan the QR code to begin the survey. Thank you!
