LPO Season Brochure 2009-10 by London Philharmonic Orchestra

2009/10 Concert Season at Southbank Centreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Royal Festival Hall

Season Highlights Premières of new works by Rautavaara, Górecki, Glass, Turnage and Ravi Shankar BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: ALFRED SCHNITTKE

London Philharmonic Orchestra © Benjamin Ealovega

exploring thrilling orchestral and chamber works by the Soviet composer (November) Miraculous Logic: The Music of Sibelius

a celebration of works by this Finnish master including all his symphonies, with one of the finest interpreters of Sibelius’s music, Osmo Vänskä (January/February)

A celebration of Polish culture in the UK

including performances of music by Górecki and Szymanowski

London Philharmonic Orchestra: Making music and history together Welcome to our most ambitious, exciting and varied season at Royal Festival Hall yet. It’s been two years since Vladimir Jurowski took on the musical reins of this great orchestra, and it feels like the relationship is beginning to come of age.

Timothy Walker AM Chief Executive and Artistic Director London Philharmonic Orchestra

Vladimir’s imagination, technical ability and artistic knowledge have generated some wonderful evenings of music and provided a varied view of the art of orchestral music, and there’s more on the way. This season he presides over Between Two Worlds, a celebration of the unique world of Alfred Schnittke, as well as bringing us a host of established masterworks, including Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, which opens the season. Last year we inaugurated another relationship with Principal Guest Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Yannick joins us this season to explore the French repertoire that has proved central to his formidable reputation. We welcome Osmo Vänskä in January to curate a four-concert survey of symphonies and other works by his great Finnish compatriot Jean Sibelius, whilst we also take a look at music from Poland. In addition, Marin Alsop conducts the music of her teacher Leonard Bernstein, Vladimir Jurowski explores Prokofiev, and Kurt Masur marks Mendelssohn’s 200th anniversary year. But perhaps most exciting of all are the many ‘firsts’ we present this season: a new symphony by Ravi Shankar, a new Percussion Concerto by Sibelius’s Finnish successor Einojuhani Rautavaara, the Fourth Symphony from Henryk Górecki following the transcendent appeal of his Third over three decades ago, a new orchestral work from our Composer in Residence Mark-Anthony Turnage, and the first European performance of The Four Seasons from the pen of Philip Glass. Join us this season, as we’ll be making history as well as great music.

Vladimir Jurowski principal conductor

‘Vladimir Jurowski’s handling of this music, exquisitely played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, captured the spirit of the fairytale to poignant effect.’ Barry Millington, Evening Standard, October 2008

‘The musicians responded with high quality playing in solos, and the impressive, slimmer, more focused sound in ensembles that promises to be another mark of the Jurowski regime.’ Richard Fairman, Financial Times, March 2008

Friday 25 September 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Mahler Symphony 2 (Resurrection)

JTI Friday Series

Please note there will be no interval during this performance.

Saturday 26 September 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Kurtág Stele Mahler Symphony 2 (Resurrection) Please note there will be no interval during this performance.

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Friday 25 September 6.15pm – 6.45pm Free Royal Festival Hall An introduction to the Orchestra's 2009/10 season.

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Adriana Kucerova soprano Christianne Stotijn mezzo soprano London Philharmonic Choir Gustav Mahler’s almighty Resurrection Symphony was stirring inside the composer for over seven years, and when it finally arrived in 1892, it was the composer’s most weighty attempt yet ‘to express precisely what words cannot’. Encased in the work’s superlative scale is the most uplifting and reassuring testament of faith from any composer; a fervent expression in music of everlasting transcendence and renewal. ‘With wings which I have won for myself…I shall soar upwards’, proclaims Mahler’s huge assembly of instruments and voices in music which will triumphantly fill the Royal Festival Hall.

Central Bar, Level 2 at Royal Festival Hall An informal discussion with Vladimir Jurowski following the evening’s performance.

Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Christianne Stotijn

Vladimir Jurowski © Richard Cannon

Adriana Kucerova

The music of Mahler is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads.

Saturday 26 September Barlines – post concert event Free

Saturday 17 October 2009 | 7.00pm Royal Festival Hall

Mendelssohn Elijah This performance will last for approximately 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

Kurt Masur

Kurt Masur conductor MELANIE DIENER soprano ALICE COOTE mezzo soprano TOPI LEHTIPUU tenor JOHN RELYEA bass London Philharmonic Choir

Premièred in Birmingham, a German oratorio with a Christian soul composed by a practising Lutheran from a famously Jewish family; if any work can prove victorious over the entrenched boundaries that have long criss-crossed the European consciousness, it’s Mendelssohn’s towering dramatic oratorio Elijah. ‘I was able to sway at will the enormous mass of orchestra, choir and organ’, effused Mendelssohn in the letter that winged its way from the West Midlands back to Leipzig. He had created the large scale masterpiece that would crown his career, and a ground-shaking and inspiring monument to the nobility of faith. This concert is dedicated to the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Wednesday 21 October 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Liszt (orch. Adams) The Black Gondola Beethoven Piano Concerto 3 Mendelssohn Symphony 3 (Scottish)

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

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Trevor Pinnock conductor Maria João Pires piano Mendelssohn, wandering the streets of Edinburgh and rambling the hillsides of the Hebrides in 1829, was utterly overcome. Not even the composer’s self-professed love for the UK could have prepared him for the impact of the dramatic Caledonian coastline and imposing capital. In his splendid symphonic souvenir of Scotland, Mendelssohn creates music that moves from dark standing stones to gregarious and light Scottish folk tunes. This excursion in sound is one of the most vivid musical creations of the nineteenth century, and for all its perfection and poise, remains compelling today.

Maria João Pires © Felix Broede/DG

Mark-Anthony Turnage

Einojuhari Rautavaara

Philip Glass

New Music

More premières for your diary:

Time passes before a great new work is recognised as a masterpiece, but the Violin Concerto by Philip Glass and the Third Symphony by Henryk Górecki have safely and quickly assumed that status. This season sees both composers unveil the successors to those pieces: Glass’s The Four Seasons gets its first European airing on 17 April, and the same concert sees the first ever performance of Górecki’s Fourth Symphony and the first UK performance of a new orchestral work by our Composer in Residence Mark-Anthony Turnage. The extraordinary musical minds of all three composers guarantee an evening that will entertain, fascinate and challenge.

Wednesday 18 November 2009 Schnittke (see page 17)

The language of orchestral music is as free and all-encompassing as ever, thanks in no small part to composers like Glass who have harnessed the power of non-western modes, scales and instruments in their music. It was while studying with sitar player Ravi Shankar in India and working on a western-style notation method for Indian classical music that Glass discovered the eastern scales and modes that so often lend his own works such a broad, transcendental feel. Shankar is a towering musical figure no matter what your preferred genre, a collaborator with the great musicians of the twentieth century from Yehudi Menuhin to The Beatles and perhaps the finest exponent of Indian classical music in the world. His two concertos for sitar and orchestra and his previous collaborations with Philip Glass have yielded astonishing results, most poignantly revealing a powerful and inspiring belief in music’s age-old power, significance and potential, and at the same time investing it with a new, invigorated spirit. When the legendary Jean Sibelius was asked to award a scholarship to the most promising Finnish composer of the generation to follow him, he chose Einojuhani Rautavaara. In the fifty years since that endorsement, Rautavaara’s orchestral kaleidoscope has rotated full circle from luscious post-romanticism to electronic sampling – not to mention the broad range of his fascinating vocal and chamber works. Rautavaara’s dreamy, magical control of what seems like a distant musical world has made him one of the most performed European composers of today.

Saturday 17 April 2010 Turnage/Glass/Górecki (see page 43) Thursday 1 July 2010 Ravi Shankar (see page 53)

Saturday 24 October 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Rautavaara Incantations (world première) Bruckner Symphony 8

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

6.15pm–6.45pm Free

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Colin Currie percussion After evenings of indescribable electricity with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in recent seasons, here Colin Currie takes flight once more with a world first: the première performance of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Incantations, a piece that promises to marry aura and animation, finesse and fireworks. Over a hundred years before, Austrian Anton Bruckner had been hard at work on an Eighth Symphony. The resulting piece is one of magical solemnity – an incomparable portrait in sound glistening with the strings of Bruckner’s newly discovered harp. Rautavaara’s Incantations is jointly commissioned by the London Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Tampere Philharmonic and Baltimore Symphony Orchestras.

Royal Festival Hall Colin Currie demonstrates sections of Rautavaara’s Incantations.

Bruckner’s Symphonies 4, 7 & 8 are available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin

Wagner

Wagner’s Endless Orchestral Melody

More Wagner for your diary

Wagner: not just a composer, a way of life. For the composer’s fans, nobody else comes near. Even impartial observers acknowledge that Wagner’s supreme understanding of the orchestra and the voice is the culmination of the effort of almost every great composer who went before him.

Wednesday 4 November 2009 Overture, Tannhäuser/WesendonkLieder (see page 11)

But Wagner was more than that. Indeed, he was more than a musician. In today’s theatre – in the fire, smoke and techno-puppetry of the West End musical and the contemporary reassessment of many a spoken play – you can see so much of Wagner’s legacy at work. His concept of ‘total entertainment’ was far ahead of its time. It saw him pioneer the orchestra pit, write his own opera libretti and engage the best chemists, engineers and artists of the day in the conjuring of nightly magical effects that would resonate with the audience of the time. Then what? Naturally, he went and built his own perfectly sight-lined auditorium in which an audience could comfortably watch his visions unfold, with all the technical paraphernalia – orchestra included – hidden from view.

Wednesday 17 March 2010 Prelude to Act 1, Lohengrin (see page 40)

And yet one of the staggering truths to emerge from all this is that Wagner’s orchestral music – which he saw as just one component part of his theatrical world – can so often seem to stand all-conquering by itself. The overtures to Lohengrin and Tannhäuser are veritable mini-symphonies, the highlights of three hours’ worth of melodic and dramatic invention shoe-horned into short orchestral pieces that still seem so perfectly proportioned. In the rarely heard Faust Overture and the touching, lithe simplicity of the Wesendonk-Lieder – in addition to the orchestral magic, fire, flowing rivers, galloping horses and instantaneous love of Henk de Vlieger’s The Ring, an Orchestral Adventure – we present the most earbending side of the composer: Wagner as master of the orchestra.

Wednesday 25 November 2009 Prelude and Good Friday Spell from ‘Parsifal’ (see page 19)

Saturday 1 May 2010 Overture to Faust (page 47)

Wednesday 28 October 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Scriabin Rêverie Scriabin Piano Concerto Wagner (arr. de Vlieger) The Ring, an Orchestral Adventure

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

Neeme Järvi conductor Yevgeny Sudbin piano There can be no greater musical adventure than the Ring Cycle. The first staging of Wagner’s four operas required a new theatre; its orchestra new instruments. Upon a huge ocean of orchestral sound, the Ring’s gods, dragons, demons and heroes float like valiant galleons. In his hour-long symphonic summary of the epic, Henk de Vlieger achieves the seemingly impossible. He captures the emotional breadth of Wagner’s epic music drama – all the tension, anger, romance and ecstasy – in a voiceless orchestral tapestry of the Ring’s mesmerising themes and captivating transitional techniques. Wagner’s orchestral ocean remains awesomely thrilling.

6.15pm–6.45pm Free Royal Festival Hall Musicologist John Deathridge introduces the elements of Wagner’s Ring Cycle that appear in this evening’s performance.

The music of Wagner is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Yevgeny Sudbin © Clive Barda

Friday 30 October 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Prokofiev Classical Symphony Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto 2 Tchaikovsky Symphony 4

JTI Friday Series Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

Alexander Vedernikov conductor Piers Lane piano Fate. The idea has shaped and sharpened the art of music since Beethoven seized it by the throat. In 1877, Tchaikovsky felt its weighty hand on his shoulder. His artistic response was a symphony completely unlike anything he had created before: ‘This is fate’, he confided to his friend Nadezhda von Meck, explaining the opening notes of his hearton-sleeve Fourth Symphony. ‘It hangs above your head like the sword of Damocles.’ But by the symphony’s final chapter, Tchaikovsky’s darkness had turned to light. ‘Rejoice in others’ rejoicing’, he urged Nadezhda, and the symphony veered towards unstoppable, ebullient joy. Join us on Tchaikovsky’s journey.

The music of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Alexander Vedernikov © Russian National Orchestra

Wednesday 4 November 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Wagner Overture, Tannhäuser Wagner Wesendonk-Lieder Bruckner Symphony 6

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

CHRISTOPH ESCHENBACH conductor petra lang mezzo soprano Bruckner: sculptor of unmatchable, inimitable symphonies, the proverbial ‘cathedrals in sound.’ Wagner: creator of truly epic operas whose forces required their own instruments, buildings and machinery. Yet in this concert, both composers appear a little different. Bruckner’s lofty, gothic nave seems more one of Classical elegance as the Sixth Symphony echoes the upright designs of Mozart, whilst Wagner presents us with a beautifully true and unalloyed song cycle, touchingly revealing his forbidden love for the poet Mathilde Wesendonk.

The music of Wagner and Bruckner is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Christoph Eschenbach

London Philharmonic Orchestra ÂŠ Benjamin Ealovega

Friday 6 November 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Verdi Overture, La forza del destino Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto 1 ˇ ák Symphony 9 (From the New World) DvoR

JTI Friday Series Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

Yutaka Sado conductor Denis Matsuev piano In the true spirit of the American Dream, it was an immigrant – the godfather of Czech Romanticism Antonín Dvorák ˇ – who ignited the first ˇ pre-empted flickers of concert-hall nationalism in the New World. Dvorák America’s great black musical revolution as early as 1892: ‘the future music of this country must be founded upon African American melodies’, he prophesied on arrival in New York, ‘these beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil’. He didn’t stop there, either – injecting the spirit of the plantation song and the spiritual into an inspiring Slavic-American symphony that epitomises nobility, freedom, optimism and opportunity.

The music of Tchaikovsky is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Denis Matsuev

Sunday 8 November 2009 | 11.30am – 12.30pm Royal Festival Hall

FUNharmonics Family Concert The Sea WALTON Overture, Portsmouth Point RIMSKY-KORSAKOV The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship from ‘Scheherazade’ MARIANELLI New work ARR. WOOD Fantasia on British Sea Songs (excerpts) ZIMMER Pirates of the Caribbean (main theme)

Tickets Child £4 – £7 Adult £8 – £14 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

David Angus conductor Chris Jarvis presenter Welcome aboard the good ship HMS FUNharmonics as Cap’n Jarvis and his classical crew set sail from Portsmouth to Walton’s musical homage to Lord Nelson. After 1001 nights at sea, we reach land to the sound of Rimsky-Korsakov’s beautiful musical setting of The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship, one of the many stories told by Princess Scheherazade in her bid to outwit the wicked Sultan. Gallantly, we dash to her rescue offering a new story set to music by Oscar-winning composer Dario Marianelli. Sir Henry Wood’s British Sea Songs provide the perfect reminder of home and our nautical odyssey ends with a water-inspired classic film soundtrack from Pirates of the Caribbean. Shiver me timbres [sic]! Foyer Events throughout the morning You can try your hand at playing an orchestral instrument in one of our Have-a-Go sessions, get your face painted or join our human orchestra – in the foyers before and after the performance.

Musical Stories for Children Available on the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s own label as a CD or download. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order the CD on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Generously supported by The Jeniffer & Jonathan Harris Charitable Trust

ÂŠ Benjamin Ealovega

Saturday 30 January 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

TiTLE Title header Italic Alfred Schnittke

Tickets £9–£38two worlds: OSMO VÄNSKÄ conductor between HELENA JUNTUNEN soprano piano Premium seats £55 Alfred Schnittke Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk As Sibelius’s drew to a close, it grew even more Out of the ashes of Dmitri Shostakovich’s toweringsymphonic career andjourney effectively

remarkable. In the Sixth Russianhe looked backwards, to the ‘rapture’ of life as Discounted packages freed fromsubscription Soviet Russia’s party-line, the young German-born available (see pageAlfred ??). Schnittke set about a boy one in Hämeenlinna, south-west Finland. Here is the ‘pure, cold water’ based composer of the most imaginative of Sibelius’s own description of his musical language, flowing forth in creative journeys of the late 20th century. In him emerged a compositional sounds of luminous calmSchnittke and modal restfulness. Then came something credo inspired partly by Anton Webern’s principle of contrast. 6.15pm–6.45pm completely different: a single-movement epic of just twenty minutes, began to generate music from both icons and leftovers: fragments from Free masterworks and other composers’ a symphony compactness known tit- bitswhose consigned to the seemed to contain the whole world. Royal Festival Sibelius might not have known cutting roomHall floor found their way into a swathe of Schnittke’s many-it, but his Seventh’s stately ‘big tune’ – Pre-concert talk copy pieces. this time on a soaring trombone – was his farewell to the symphony. sided, many-voiced © Copyright

Aliquam sed elit non nunc luctu a nunc convallis. Cum sociis In this hoovering-up ofnatoque a millennium of music from plainchant to pop penatibus et magnis is parturient.in between), Schnittke brought much (and pretty much everything

together that on the surface didn’t belong together: the scholarly and the trivial, the tonal and the dissonant. Moments plucked out of musical history, from Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos to unused Mozart theatre scores, appear like apparitions in the dark. For bestselling American music The music of Beethoven is available writer and New Yorker critic Alex Ross, some of Schnittke’s music, albeit on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. saw him assume the status of ‘a phantom Romantic’. And contemporary, there’s hardly a greater gesture Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order of Romanticism than turning to Thomas Osmo Vänskäopera The Helena Juntunen Mann’s Faust, Schnittke didall for his unfinished History of CDs on 020 7840as 4242 or through good retailers. D. Johann Faustus, in which the composer’s music characteristically dances the tango at moments of high-octane drama. Every one of Schnittke’s works, though, is cut from different cloth; some don’t refer to music of bygone eras, some forge ahead in a recognisably post-Shostakovich vein. Schnittke was free to do what he liked; the only constant was his permanent break from the aesthetic monotony of the avant-garde, which in Schnittke’s eyes placed the personality of the composer above the content of the piece. In fact, Schnittke the man was as far from a personality as one can imagine; he left that to his music.

Saturday 30 18 Wednesday January November 2010 2009 | 7.30pm | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

between two worlds: Alfred Schnittke

Haydn TiTLE Title Symphony header Italic 22 (The Philosopher) Wagner Prelude and Good Friday Spell from ‘Parsifal’ Schnittke Excerpts from ‘The History of D. Johann Faustus’ (UK première) Sung in German with English surtitles.

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages ??). available (see page 58).

6.15pm–6.45pm Hear it first! Free www.lpo.org.uk/listen Visit

and imagination, scored for chorus, orchestra, electric guitars, crumhorn, zither and lute. As the doctor who sells his soul is dragged down to hell, Schnittke’s devil serenades him with a mocking, amplified tango in just one of the composer’s memorable coups de théâtre. © Copyright

Free

Royal Festival Hall

a boy in Hämeenlinna, south-west Finland. Here is the ‘pure, cold water’ of Sibelius’s own description of his musical language, flowing forth in sounds luminous and modal Then came ‘Faust isof the theme ofcalm my whole life, I restfulness. am already afraid of it’, something wrote Alfred completely a single-movement epic of just twentyopera, minutes, Schnittke asdifferent: he pressed on with his third, fiercely ambitious ‘in afact, symphony whose compactness seemed to contain the whole I don’t think I shall ever complete it.’ And he was right. But world. the Sibelius might notSchnittke have known but his Seventh’s stately ‘big tune’ – component parts did it, complete were enough to immortalise this time project. on a soaring was his farewell to momentum, the symphony. his Faust Heretrombone is music of–galloping dramatic terror © Copyright

Royal Festival Hallplaylist of the Access our online Pre-concert copy music for ourtalk concerts. Aliquam sed elit non nunc luctu a nunc convallis. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis is parturient. 6.00pm–6.45pm

Vladimir OSMO VÄNSKÄ Jurowski conductor conductor HELENA JUNTUNEN soprano piano Cast includes: SIR JOHN TOMLINSON bass (Dr Faustus) As Sibelius’s symphonic journey drew(Mephistophiles) to a close, it grew even more MARCO LAZZARA counter tenor remarkable.CONSERVATORY In the Sixth he looked backwards, to the ‘rapture’ of life as MOSCOW CHAMBER CHOIR

A performance of a Schnittke The music of Beethoven is available String Quartet. on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all The music of Wagner is available good retailers. on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads.

Osmo Vänskä

Helena Juntunen

Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Vladimir Jurowski © Roman Gontcharov

Sir John Tomlinson

Sunday 22 November 2009 Queen Elizabeth Hall/Purcell Room

between two worlds: Alfred Schnittke

In the Labyrinth of Alfred Schnittke An absorbing day of music and discussion celebrating the life and music of Alfred Schnittke. Leading exponents of Schnittke’s work talk, demonstrate and play through some of the composer’s eclectic and often extrovert catalogue of composition, including his work for film, an in-depth selection of his chamber music, scholarly input from Goldsmiths, University of London, and culminating in the opportunity for informal discussion with the day’s contributors.

Tickets Full day/evening ticket (entrance to all events) £30 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Allison Bell soprano Dmitry Sitkovetsky violin Alexander Zemtsov viola Alexander Ivashkin cello Boris Petrushansky piano London Philharmonic Orchestra Players Royal College of Music strings

10.00am –12.00pm Tickets £5

A discussion of Schnittke’s music and writings with contributions from one of the preeminent Schnittke research centres: the Alfred Schnittke Archive at the Centre for Russian Music, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Purcell Room

1.00pm –2.30pm Tickets £5 Purcell Room

3.00pm Tickets £15 Queen Elizabeth Hall

6.15pm Tickets £15 Queen Elizabeth Hall

9.15pm onwards Free but ticketed Front Room

An illustrated talk by an influential and revolutionary figure of Russian animation. Director Andrei Khrzhanovsky, in conversation with Clare Kitson, will discuss his collaboration with Schnittke on seven films, including the long-banned 'Glass Harmonica', in which Schnittke's music resonated especially closely with his own ideas.

Schnittke Five Aphorisms Three Madrigals Epilogue from ‘Peer Gynt’ Sonata 1 for violin and piano Three Scenes Music to an Imaginary Play Schnittke Concerto Grosso 1 Monologue Piano Concerto The Yellow Sound Schnittke Piano Quintet This performance will be followed by a Schnittke discussion forum with Vladimir Jurowski and today’s guests. Open to all. Further details of the day and all events taking place as part of Between Two Worlds: Alfred Schnittke will be available in Spring 2009. Promoted by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in association with Southbank Centre.

Wednesday 25 November 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

between two worlds: Alfred Schnittke

Webern Passacaglia LINDBERG Chorale Berg Violin Concerto Schnittke Symphony 3

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

6.00pm–6.45pm Free Royal Festival Hall A performance of works including the Bach/Webern Ricercar and Schnittke’s Polyphonic Tango.

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Leonidas Kavakos violin ‘In art, the impossible has a chance of success.’ So wrote Alfred Schnittke in 1981 as he struggled with his belief in the symphonic format, responding to a commission from this orchestra’s former Principal Conductor Kurt Masur for a Third Symphony. Eventually Schnittke’s creativity flowered into a work of extraordinary imagination and effect. He explored the near hypnotic qualities of harmonic ‘overtones’ – the inaudible sounds implied by the resonance of a single note. As it launches, the music selfperpetuates towards near ecstatic harmonic junctions punctuated by pounding drums; there’s a compelling sense of tension and release. Schnittke’s Third presents a live concert experience not to be missed. Leonidas Kavakos is world renowned for his virtuosity, superb musicianship and integrity of playing, and is Southbank Centre’s Artist in Focus in a week of concerts, recitals, talks and informal musicmaking between 25 November and 2 December 2009.

Barlines – post-concert event Free Central Bar, Level 2 at Royal Festival Hall An informal discussion with Vladimir Jurowski and the evening’s soloist Leonidas Kavakos.

Leonidas Kavakos © Yannis Bournias

Saturday 28 November 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

between two worlds: Alfred Schnittke

Schnittke Cello Concerto 2 Haydn The Seven Last Words

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

The music of Haydn is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads.

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Alexander Ivashkin cello LISA MILNE soprano RUXANDRA DONOSE mezzo soprano ANDREW KENNEDY tenor CHRISTOPHER MALTMAN baritone London Philharmonic Choir 1986 was the beginning of the end for Schnittke. As the cold war began to thaw, so his health fell into rapid decline. Just pages into his Second Cello Concerto, Schnittke suffered a stroke from which he’d never fully recover. He convalesced and pressed on with the concerto, but his language had been fascinatingly refracted by the experience: melodies were more contorted and dissonances more marked. But Schnittke ended his piece with a most ethereal, celestial musical prayer: a hymn of thanks, perhaps, resonant against his beloved Joseph Haydn’s moving set of seven choral adagios on the crucifixion.

Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Film screening: 2.30pm Tickets £7 Royal Festival Hall

Alexander Ivashkin © Nikos Rigopoulos

A screening of Elem Klimov’s 1974 film The Agony, with score by Alfred Schnittke. This account of Rasputin's influence on Russia's monarch and thedamning events that followed fuelled a controversy that would make cinema history.

Saturday 5 December 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall A Celebration of Christmas

Mendelssohn Vom Himmel Hoch Vaughan Williams The First Nowell J S Bach Christen, ätzet diesen Tag, BWV63 Honegger Une cantate de Noël

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

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6.00pm–6.45pm Free Royal Festival Hall A performance of Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols by the New London Children’s Choir conducted by Ronald Corp, with Rachel Masters (harp).

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Lisa milne soprano Ruxandra donose mezzo soprano andrew staples tenor christopher maltman baritone London Philharmonic Choir NEW LONDON Children’s choir Felix Mendelssohn was an artist of religious and cultural eclecticism, a man who crossed boundaries both physically, artistically and ethnically. For this, the 200th Christmas since Mendelssohn’s birth, Vladimir Jurowski marks the profound cultural and spiritual significance of the feast of Christmas with joyous, reflective, devotional and triumphant music that travels through Europe from east to west and from century to century, from the Leipzig of Mendelssohn and Bach to Honegger’s Paris and Vaughan Williams’ London. Despite their individualities, this is music that both ideologically and literally reaches across the continent in the celebration of hope and community.

Lisa Milne

Ruxandra Donose

Andrew Staples

Vladimir Jurowski

Christopher Maltman

Friday 11 December 2009 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven Piano Concerto 5 Brahms Symphony 1

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Jukka-Pekka Saraste conductor Radu Lupu piano Johannes Brahms had a habit of making promises that he found pretty hard to keep. Chief amongst them was his declaration in 1872 that he’d ‘never write a symphony.’ Sure enough, and despite the thuds of Beethoven’s epoch-making footsteps still ringing in his ears, Brahms eventually proved himself spectacularly wrong. When the composer’s First Symphony finally arrived, it certainly made an entrance – launching mid-sentence with a turbulent, energetic face-off between pounding drums, defiantly climbing strings and ominously plunging woodwinds. Like Beethoven before him, Brahms’s genius was shaking the very ground beneath him, and this was just the start. © Decca/Mary Roberts

The music of Beethoven is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Radu Lupu

London Philharmonic Orchestra ÂŠ Benjamin Ealovega

Henryk Górecki

Music from Poland

More Polish music for your diary

Poland’s most famous musical export, Frederic Chopin, was just that – an export: almost all his major works were written in other parts of Europe. But Chopin never forgot his Polish roots, nor did successive generations of Poles fail to recognise the great pianist’s significance, despite his exclusive attachment to the piano. The twentieth century saw an explosion of music in Poland; not only was there worldwide recognition of great native composers but also the emergence of a musical voice that was recognisably Polish.

Saturday 17 April 2010 Górecki Symphony 4 (see page 43)

Seventy-two years after Chopin’s birth, the arrival of Karol Szymanowski in 1882 ensured Poland was back at the centre of the European musical map. Inspired in part by Chopin, Szymanowski set about igniting a musical big-bang in the country, despite being technically deprived of a Polish birthright (His native province of Tymoszówka was under foreign occupation throughout his life). Nonetheless, Szymanowski infused his composer colleagues with the spirit of their homeland and inspired dozens to create new Polish music. Perhaps, in his musical imagination, Szymanowski did establish the free Poland he so passionately wished would be recognised. But as much as he loved his country, Szymanowski also absorbed the tastes, hues and images of the wider world around him; together with his exquisite sense of order and musical timing, they enriched his spontaneous, intense and passionate music, and took it far beyond the confines of central Europe. Just as an independent Poland has forged its way into the world’s economic consciousness in recent decades, so has its current music assumed a unique patch in our contemporary sonic tapestry. Henryk Górecki is the most well-known of a group of Polish composers who have sought to take art music away from the seemingly random endeavour of the avant-garde. Through simplistic, repetitive methods often returning to the ‘modality’ of ancient music, they created sounds of devastating beauty and power, helping to shape a recognisable and evocative ‘school’ of composition in the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe that still thrives today.

Saturday 16 January 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Szymanowski Violin Concerto 1 Shostakovich Symphony 4

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Vladimir Jurowski conductor Julia Fischer violin How ought one express one’s country in music, when that country is under the grip of a despotic regime, or when one’s homeland has been wiped out by occupying forces? Such questions were all too familiar to Shostakovich and Szymanowski. The former’s immense and gripping Fourth Symphony seems a screaming plea to the submissive subjects of the soviet state. The latter’s concerto, pitting a singing violin against a magical kaleidoscope of orchestral colour, echoes the Poland Szymanowski longed to see restored but whose sovereignty would never be recognised in his hometown of Tymoszówka.

Barlines – post-concert event Free Central Bar, Level 2 at Royal Festival Hall An informal discussion with Vladimir Jurowski following the evening’s performance.

The music of Shostakovich is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Julia Fischer © Kasskara

Henning Kraggerud

Miraculous Logic: The Music of Jean Sibelius Amongst the European musical menagerie at the dusk of the 19th century, there could be heard a lone wolf howling in a far away forest: it was the voice of Jean Sibelius. To mainland Europe, Sibelius’s music seemed a new sonic species. Not only was the composer’s orchestral language unique, it also evoked the physical and spiritual essence of its creator’s country like no other; indeed, in that respect, Sibelius arguably remains unsurpassed. Despite the composer’s Swedish genetic origins, Sibelius and Finland are inseparable. But by the 1930s Western Europe and America had fallen for the composer too – and the love affair still hasn’t ended. As the relentless rat-race of the avant-garde tore through the musical establishment, many found warmth, comfort and uplifting vigour in Sibelius’s own new structures – even though he was derided by some contemporaries, including one who famously referred to him as ‘the worst composer in the world.’ Time, the world, humanity and generations of subsequent musicians have proved that particular commentator wrong. In his own lifetime Sibelius became a central part of Finnish life and gave a musical voice to its movement for independence. Today his legacy is tangible. The Sibelius Academy in Helsinki routinely despatches musicians of superlative talent to play with and conduct the great orchestras of the world – and that from a population of just five million. Osmo Vänskä is one of them, a regular collaborator with this orchestra and a deep, penetrating interpreter of Sibelius’s orchestral music. He curates a fourconcert cycle of the composer’s symphonies, bringing with him one of Finland’s best-kept vocal secrets: the sublime, deliciously-voiced soprano Helena Juntunen whose deliveries exude a radiance and Nordic charm all of their own. Join us for seven of the greatest 20th century symphonies set amongst some gems from the rarely-opened compartment of the Sibelian jewel box.

Wednesday 27 January 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Miraculous Logic: The Music of Jean Sibelius

Sibelius Wood Nymph, Op. 15 Sibelius Six Humoresques for violin and orchestra Sibelius Symphony 1

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OSMO VÄNSKÄ conductor Henning Kraggerud violin As Sibelius’s First Symphony took shape, it seemed that Finland might face cultural suffocation at the hands of its Russian governors. The composer’s shimmering, voluptuous symphony did owe much to Tchaikovsky and Borodin, but it was unmistakeably Finnish, and unmistakeably Sibelius – launching with a spirited, breezy first movement peppered with an infectious, rocking theme on typically Sibelian adjacent notes. These were the enchanting beginnings of a musical voice that would come to represent a nation and delight the world; Finland had its cultural icon, and orchestral music had a whole new language.

6.15pm–6.45pm Free Royal Festival Hall Hilary Finch talks to Osmo Vänskä about Miraculous Logic: The Music of Jean Sibelius.

The music of Sibelius is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Osmo Vänskä © Ann Marsden

Saturday 30 January 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Miraculous Logic: The Music of Jean Sibelius

Sibelius Symphony 3 Sibelius Six Songs, Op. 36 Sibelius Five Songs, Op.37 Sibelius Höstkväll, from Five Songs, Op. 38 Sibelius Symphony 2 Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

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Osmo Vänskä conductor Helena Juntunen soprano In the wake of his rousing First Symphony, Sibelius crafted something altogether different: Höstkväll, ‘Autumn Nightfall’. Here, Helena Juntunen’s delicate, supple voice will float in from nowhere as Sibelius’s haunting, mysterious song settles into place like freshly fallen snow. This is one of the composer’s most beautiful creations; chilling yet embracing, and desperately delicate against the full-blooded warmth of the Second Symphony. In this latter work Sibelius discovered something new again, and it soon became a hallmark: the passionate, ear-bending, Sibelian ‘big tune’. When it arrives, it’s as though the world momentarily stops turning.

The music of Sibelius is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Helena Juntunen

Wednesday 3 February 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Miraculous Logic: The Music of Jean Sibelius

Sibelius Luonnotar Sibelius Symphony 4 Sibelius Symphony 5

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OSMO VÄNSKÄ conductor HELENA JUNTUNEN soprano Sketched rather than painted, Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony is compelling yet desolate – littered with brooding silences like a Finnish conversation, and opening with an ice-cold ‘tritone’, the sonic device that traditionally stood for ominous foreboding in western music. Then, from the darkness of the Fourth and Sibelius’s troubled financial and physical state, came the heroic, technicolour Fifth. Glimpsing a flock of sixteen swans taking flight over his Järvenpää villa, Sibelius discovered the joy of life once more. He thrust the swans’ soaring, graceful ascent into the final movement of the Fifth, which ascends optimistically upwards, free from its creator’s earthly concerns.

6.00pm–6.45pm Free Royal Festival Hall A performance by Lambeth and Southwark school children marking the culmination of their composition project, inspired by this evening's repertoire.

The music of Sibelius is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Osmo Vänskä © Greg Helgeson

Friday 5 February 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Miraculous Logic: The Music of Jean Sibelius

Sibelius Tapiola Sibelius Cantique and Devotion for cello and orchestra Sibelius Symphony 6 Sibelius Symphony 7 JTI Friday Series Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

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Osmo Vänskä conductor Kristina Blaumane cello As Sibelius’s symphonic journey drew to a close, it grew even more remarkable. In the Sixth he looked backwards, to the ‘rapture’ of life as a boy in Hämeenlinna, south-west Finland. Here is the ‘pure, cold water’ of Sibelius’s own description of his musical language, flowing forth in sounds of luminous calm and modal restfulness. Then came something completely different: a single-movement epic of just twenty minutes, a symphony whose compactness seemed to contain the whole world. Sibelius might not have known it, but his Seventh’s stately ‘big tune’ – this time on a soaring trombone – was his farewell to the symphony.

The music of Sibelius is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Osmo Vänskä

Kristina Blaumane Chair supported by Simon Yates and Kevin Roon. ÂŠ Benjamin Ealovega

Melvyn Tan

Yannick Nézet-Séguin

French musiC

More French music for your diary:

French music has always stood apart. From the angst-free elegance of Fauré and Franck to the quiet musical revolution of turn-of-the-lastcentury Paris in which Debussy re-wrote the rulebook of harmony, orchestral music from France has never sounded anything like its German, Russian or even Italian and British counterparts. It requires a whole new language of performance – an altogether different handling from conductors, and, for some, different halls and acoustics if it’s going to come off well.

Wednesday 17 February 2010 Ravel Piano Concerto in G (see page 35)

Many conductors have emerged as ‘specialists’ in giving voice to this very distinct musical language, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor, French Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin, is fast being recognised as one. ‘Others might decide you are a specialist in a given repertoire of style, but I’ve never thought of myself in that way. I refuse to’, said Yannick in 2006. But isn’t it only natural to draw such an association when viewing a conductor who obviously has certain strengths interpreting French music and who is a French speaker? More recently, Yannick has seemed to acknowledge that it is. He has also stated his intention to work on the ‘distinctive refinement’ of French music with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he’s Music Director. This season, after the cold of January and our four concerts of ‘ice and fire’ music from Nordic legend Jean Sibelius, February sees Yannick conduct glowing French masterworks by Fauré, Poulenc, Ravel and Debussy. Each composer is so different, and yet each is so very French: characterised by elegance, wit, seamless quality of construction and the most alluring, glistening orchestration possible. Later, in May, Chief Conductor of the Orchestre de Paris Christoph Eschenbach takes on a programme that looks at the long fascination French composers seem to have entertained with the music and culture of Spain.

Friday 12 March 2010 Ravel Mother Goose (see page 38) Saturday 22 May 2010 Ravel Boléro/Debussy Ibéria (see page 51)

Wednesday 10 February 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Ravel Daphnis et Chloé, Suite 2 Poulenc Concerto for Two Pianos Ravel Valses nobles et sentimentales Debussy Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune Debussy La Mer Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

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6.15pm–6.45pm Free

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Melvyn Tan piano Ronald Brautigam piano Fin-de-siècle Paris: a particle accelerator of creative ideas; an artistic universe in itself. In the 1890s the city was edging toward musical revolution. But when that revolution came, it wasn’t a Beethovenian firebrand nor a Stravinskian iconoclast who delivered it. It was Claude Debussy who, in his seminal portraits of a mythical faun and the changing textures of the sea, discovered a whole new orchestral language. Suddenly the orchestra was a medium of exotic, luxurious beauty and colour; one of otherworldly magic rather than Romantic angst; one of suggestion and free thought rather than command and explanation. Musical impressionism was born.

Royal Festival Hall Yannick Nézet-Séguin introduces the evening’s programme.

Ronald Brautigam © Marco Borggreve

Saturday 13 February 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Ravel Pavane pour une Infante défunte Ravel Le tombeau de Couperin Debussy Nocturnes Fauré Pavane Poulenc Stabat Mater Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

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Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Lisa Milne soprano London Philharmonic Choir Amongst the cacophonous musical exchanges of mid-twentieth century Paris could be heard a voice of palette-cleansing purity and melodic gift. With a combination of beautiful, uncluttered simplicity and sophisticated metropolitan wit, Francis Poulenc resided alone in a musical place entirely of his own creation. On Wednesday 10 February, experience the suave pleasure of his Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra; three days later, be moved and uplifted by his persuasive poetic portrayal of the mother of Christ weeping at the foot of the cross bearing her crucified son.

Yannick Nezet-Seguin © Marco Borggreve

Wednesday 17 February 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

tchaikovsky Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet ravel Piano Concerto in G Prokofiev Excerpts from Romeo and Juliet

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Vladimir Jurowski conductor alexander toradze piano

Tempers were frayed backstage at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad during the early days of 1940. Galina Ulanova was preparing to create the role of Juliet in Prokofiev’s new ballet, and found much of the composer’s music un-danceable. Not altogether surprising, perhaps. Because what Prokofiev created was unlike anything that had gone before it: a ballet score with symphonic principles and wholeness, music of unprecedented dramatic scope, clarity of emotion, clear-cut characterisation and technical invention. It’s little wonder Prokofiev’s score has achieved such iconic status – as much a vivid story in music as in dance. © Roman Gontcharov

The music of Tchaikovsky is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Vladimir Jurowski

Saturday 20 February 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

ˇ Taras Bulba JanáCek ˇ JanáCek Eternal Gospel Suk Symphony 2 (Asrael)

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Barlines – post-concert event Free

Vladimir Jurowski conductor SOFIA FOMINA soprano MICHAEL KÖNIG tenor London Philharmonic Choir Asrael. The Angel of Death. In May 1904 the celebrated Czech composer Antonin Dvorˇák died. His protégé Josef Suk was shaken to the core. Suk’s immediate response was creative: he wrote three movements of a symphony, producing long, Dvorˇákian, lyrical themes intensified by his own yearning chromatic harmonies. But a year later, the ‘Angel of Death’ visited Suk once more: it took his wife, Otylka. Suk was distraught. But he pushed on. He fashioned two final movements as a memorial to her; after a furious scherzo the yearning had turned to resolution as Suk found comfort in the transcendental and uplifting renewal of the natural world.

Central Bar, Level 2 at Royal Festival Hall An informal discussion with Vladimir Jurowski following the evening’s performance of Suk’s Symphony 2.

The music of Janácek is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Vladimir Jurowski © Roman Gontcharov

Wednesday 24 February 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Shostakovich The Gamblers Shostakovich Suite from ‘The Nose’ Shostakovich Symphony 1

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6.15pm–6.45pm Free Royal Festival Hall Musicologist Stephen Johnson takes a closer look at Shostakovich’s The Gamblers and The Nose.

VLADIMIR jurowski conductor MIKHAIL URUSOV Ikharev, a gambler VLADIMIR OGNEV Gavryushka, his servant SERGEI LEIFERKUS Uteshitelny, a gambler SERGEI ALEKSASHKIN Shvokhnev, a gambler VIACHESLAV VOYNAROVSKIY Krugel, a gambler MIKHAIL PETRENKO Alexey, his servant They might have lived a century apart, but writer Nikolai Gogol and composer Dmitri Shostakovich were the most natural of collaborators. Shostakovich’s imagination was never sharper than when fired up by that of Gogol’s own quick-fire satire: The Nose came first, with Gogol’s absurdist, unsettling visions of a bureaucrat outwitted by his own renegade nose coloured by Shostakovich’s wild parodies and unpredictable melodies. Then there was the darker, riskier world of The Gamblers: Shostakovich only wrote one act, which in itself provides a compelling, shocking glance at human treachery, deceit and desperation, brought to life by typically virile, moving music.

The music of Shostakovich is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Mikhail Urusov

Vladimir Ognev

Sergei Aleksashkin

Mikhail Petrenko

Sergei Leiferkus

Friday 12 March 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

ravel Mother Goose schumann Piano Concerto Brahms Symphony 2

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Gunther Herbig conductor hélène grimaud piano

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Hélène Grimaud

It was Schumann’s unflinching adoration for his pianist wife Clara that spawned the Piano Concerto, a love-letter in music that offers a touching insight into one of the most famously passionate romances of the nineteenth century. But Schumann also took the young Johannes Brahms very much to heart, who he said would ‘spring like Minerva from the head of Jove’ to take the compositional world by storm. He was only partly right; the First Symphony heard on 11 December took Brahms a painstaking fourteen years to write. But the Second did indeed spring forth like Minerva, flowing as seamlessly as a stream, abounding in pure, exhilarating joy.

Sunday 14 March 2010 | 11.30am – 12.30pm Royal Festival Hall

FUNharmonics Family Concert Dreams DAVENPORT In the Night Garden (theme) DEBUSSY Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (excerpt) SAINT-SAËNS Danse macabre MARIANELLI New work VARIOUS Classical lullabies SILVESTRI The Polar Express (theme)

Tickets Child £4–£7 Adult £8–£14 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

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Stuart stratford conductor Chris Jarvis presenter Everyone dreams – so whatever your age, as the theme from In the Night Garden begins, prepare your imagination for a fantastical musical journey and a surreal dreamtime experience. The sights and sounds along the way may enchant or terrify: Debussy’s Prélude depicts an unusual beast half-goat, half man – dozing and dreaming in the hot woodland. The clock strikes twelve and Death pays a visit to earth, his nightmarish violin bringing the skeletons to life to dance for just one night. Order is restored with music from Oscar-winning composer, Dario Marianelli, following which sleepy children may wish to rest as we listen to some beautiful classical lullabies. Finally, there’s just time to catch The Polar Express for adventures anew at the North Pole before…the dreaded wakeup call! Foyer Events throughout the morning You can try your hand at playing an orchestral instrument in one of our Have-a-Go sessions, get your face painted or join our human orchestra – in the foyers before and after the performance.

Generously supported by The Jeniffer & Jonathan Harris Charitable Trust

Wednesday 17 March 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Wagner Lohengrin, Prelude to Act 1 Brahms Violin Concerto Bartók Concerto for Orchestra

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

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Ludovic Morlot conductor Anne-Sophie Mutter violin What is life without the warmth and inspiration of human affection? When virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim bounded into Brahms’s life like an energetic puppy, he utterly overwhelmed the composer, drawing from him a violin concerto that’s at once poised and playful. Béla Bartók – alone, exiled, ill and poor – might well have thought his compositional life over in 1943. His friend the conductor Serge Koussevitsky thought otherwise. He re-energised Bartók with encouragement and a major commission. Eight weeks later Bartók delivered his Concerto for Orchestra – a percussive, irrepressible and playful firecracker of a piece.

6.00pm–6.45pm Free Royal Festival Hall A performance by Lambeth and Southwark school children marking the culmination of their composition project, inspired by this evening's repertoire.

The music of Wagner is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Anne-Sophie Mutter © Harald Hoffmann/DG

Saturday 10 April 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Handel Music for the Royal Fireworks prokofiev Violin Concerto 1 Stravinsky Fireworks Beethoven Symphony 7

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Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Lisa Batiashvili violin Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony has proved many things to many people: a celebratory vision of a rustic wedding for Robert Schumann; ‘the apotheosis of the dance’ for Richard Wagner; ‘a triumph of Bacchic fury’ for the legendary musicologist Donald Francis Tovey; and ‘a continuous, cumulative celebration of joy’ for modern Beethoven scholar David Wyn Jones. It might be preceded by colourful fireworks from the pens of Handel and Stravinsky, but when conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin lights the blue touch paper of Beethoven’s most blazingly triumphant orchestral work, the Royal Festival Hall will explode with colour and elation.

The music of Handel, Stravinsky and Beethoven is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Lisa Batiashvili

Wednesday 14 April 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

VERDI Dances (Ballabili) from Otello ˇ DVOrÁK Cello Concerto R STRAUSS Aus Italien

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Gianandrea Noseda conductor ENRICO DINDO cello Could this be the most electrifying score by Richard Strauss you’ve never heard? In 1886 the young composer planned a new work to suitably impress during his debut as conductor of the Munich Opera Orchestra. On a trip to Italy, the composer was overwhelmed by Venice and Florence, and by the sight of Mount Vesuvius which erupted even before his eyes. ‘The ideas came in flocks’, he enthused, the only trouble being, one of them wasn’t an Italian folk-tune as Strauss had thought, but a song by a native composer. Royalty legislation kicked in, and Aus Italien was shelved. Now freed from copyright constraints, hear the sumptuous symphonic fantasy that might have become Strauss’s orchestral calling card.

Gianandrea Noseda

Saturday 17 April 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Turnage New orchestral work (UK première) Glass Concerto 2 for Violin and Orchestra (The American Four Seasons) (European première) Górecki Symphony 4 (world première)

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

6.15pm–6.45pm Free Royal Festival Hall Marin Alsop introduces the evening’s programme.

Marin Alsop conductor Robert McDuffie violin As the resounding stillness of his Third Symphony echoed through Europe in 1977, Henryk Górecki’s unparalleled music began to uplift, move, and inspire many thousands – often listeners entirely new to classical music. Whilst the pattern-based, hypnotic minimalism of Philip Glass was emerging in America, in Poland Górecki was beginning to create music that concurrently displayed energy and placidity. It was inspired not by the compelling clacketty-clack of industrial America, but by the granite-like eternities of Polish soil, folksong and faith. Here, Górecki unveils the fourth step on his symphonic journey, and Europe greets The American Four Seasons from Philip Glass. Turnage’s new work is commissioned by the Festival de Música de Canarias and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

The music of Turnage is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers. A Part of the Polska Year in the UK 2009-2010!

Glass’s The American Four Seasons is commissioned by the Toronto Symphony and London Philharmonic Orchestras, Aspen Music Festival and School, Krannert Center at the University of Illinois and Carlsen Center at the Johnson County Community College. Górecki’s Symphony 4 is commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Southbank Centre London, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and Zaterdag Matinee Amsterdam.

Robert McDuffie

Philip Glass

Henryk Górecki

Mark-Anthony Turnage © Gerry Hurkmans

Marin Alsop

Visit www.PolandYear.com

Leonard Bernstein

Lenny Show-off, visionary, playboy, pedagogue, clown, genius. A century ago America spawned Leonard Bernstein, the most indefinable musician to ever hold a conductor’s baton. Adored, condemned, respected, worshipped – whatever he was, ‘Lenny’ proved the most important American classical musician of the 20th century, introducing hundreds of thousands to the symphonies of Beethoven and Mahler whilst using his own works to charge through the perceived boundaries that separated art music and popular music. Bernstein could have made it as a pianist, conductor or composer, and yet he chose all three – marrying these disciplines with his own sense of passion, fun and originality. By all accounts, every performance he conducted was an occasion, no matter how far-flung his sometimes eccentric interpretations. His stage manner prompted many a written description, one notably from his biographer Humphrey Burton, who tells of the maestro taking an umpteenth curtain call in front of the New York Philharmonic and offering a suave kiss to his young conducting assistant, Marin Alsop. Alsop has gone on to become a leading conductor in America and Europe. She joins us this season for a look at Bernstein’s concert works. Despite the raging popularity of his masterpiece West Side Story, he longed for recognition for the uplifting, surging profundity of his symphonies and delicate exuberance of his choral works. The perception was that Bernstein was simply too talented; he couldn’t be that good at conducting Mahler, creating musicals and writing symphonies, could he? Well yes, he could. And we have the compositional legacy to prove the case for Bernstein the composer. These apparent contradictions troubled Bernstein himself too – not only the conflicting responsibilities of the composer and the conductor, but also his apparent bisexuality and the social demands of his incomparable personality. But through the years Bernstein retained his energy, openness and creative genius as long as music was there to fuel and inspire him. As for Marin Alsop, ‘I didn’t mind telling Lenny he was the greatest in the world’, she recalled in a recent interview, ‘because he was.’

Wednesday 21 April 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall The Bernstein Project

Bernstein Symphony 2 (Age of Anxiety) Shostakovich Symphony 5

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

The music of Shostakovich is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads.

Marin Alsop conductor Nicolas Hodges piano You couldn’t have encountered two more different characters than Bernstein and Shostakovich, and yet their music shares so much: loneliness, exuberance, caustic wit, dazzling technique and the bluesy shadow of jazz. Bernstein’s symphony-concerto trips along like a lively conversation, embracing a magical array of textures from the serene stillness of its piano’s solitary first cadences to the striding honky-tonk of the same instrument’s Masque section. If Bernstein was the product of an Age of Anxiety, then Shostakovich lived through one: his everuplifting Fifth Symphony is a testament of survival against profound and overwhelming odds. This concert is part of The Bernstein Project at Southbank Centre, which over the season includes concerts, film, debate and participation events, led by the Festival Artistic Director, Marin Alsop.

Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Marin Alsop © Grant Leighton

Wednesday 28 April 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

prokofiev Sinfonia concertante MYASKOVSKY Symphony 6

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Danjulo Ishizaka cello london philharmonic choir

Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

As Russia lurched into turbulence in the early 1900s, the young composer Nikolai Myaskovsky had a ringside seat as a serving officer. He witnessed first-hand the most unparalleled series of events in European history, culminating in the First World War and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In Moscow, Myaskovsky heard revolutionary songs from an artisan Frenchman, and soon a work began to form in his head. It became a monumental choral symphony of heroism and revolution; life and death; the body and the soul. But for all its impressive scale, Myaskovsky’s Sixth Symphony was really a personal testament, as deeply felt and moving as any musical gesture of its day.

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

Barlines – post-concert event Free Central Bar, Level 2 at Royal Festival Hall An informal discussion with Vladimir Jurowski reflecting on the evening’s performance of Myaskovsky’s Symphony 6.

Vladimir Jurowski © Richard Cannon

Saturday 1 May 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Wagner Overture to Faust Brahms Alto Rhapsody Liszt Faust Symphony

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

Franz Liszt: virtuoso, mystic, visionary, celebrity, and architect of new musical forms. But above all, Liszt was an entertainer. In his new ‘symphonic poems’, Liszt wanted to convey, heart-on-sleeve, the full swathe of human emotions. He hoovered up inspiration from everywhere – especially literature and art. Appropriate then that, when the novelist George Eliot visited Liszt in 1854, a symphony was brewing inside the composer. It became the ‘Faust’ Symphony, a work that gives voice to heroism, lament, passion and love, and takes the audience one step closer to Liszt’s turbulent, passionate soul. © Thron Ullberg

6.15pm–6.45pm Free

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Anna Larsson contralto Robert Dean Smith tenor London Philharmonic Choir

Royal Festival Hall An exploration of Faust in music.

The music of Wagner is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Anna Larsson

Friday 7 May 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Tchaikovsky Francesca da Rimini Liszt Piano Concerto 2 Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis ˇ ák Symphonic Variations DvoR JTI Friday Series Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

THE INTERNATIONAL CONDUCTORS’ ACADEMY OF THE ALLIANZ CULTURAL FOUNDATION Arnaldo cohen piano Three young, talented conductors on the brink of major careers join us for four great masterworks of differing, probing depths. Dvorˇák’s set of variations on a Czech folk melody comes together piece by piece towards a final explosion as the theme is united with what feels like its rightful alignment of harmony and orchestration. To open, Tchaikovsky’s heartrending symphonic fantasy Francesca da Rimini is a moving slice of semi-conscious musical autobiography: Tchaikovsky was no stranger to unhappiness in love, and in his musical retelling of Dante’s tale of Francesca’s infidelity and casting into hell, he seems to pour all his own sorrow and pain.

The music of Tchaikovsky is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

Generously supported by The Allianz Cultural Foundation

Arnoldo Cohen

Saturday 8 May 2010 | 11.30am – 12.30pm Royal Festival Hall

FUNharmonics Family Concert Journeys ADAMS Short Ride in a Fast Machine ˇ DVOrÁK Scherzo from Symphony 9

(From the New World) MENDELSSOHN Second Movement, Symphony 3 (Scottish) Tickets Child £4–£7 Adult £8–£14 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

DARIO MARIANELLI New work DEBUSSY Ibéria – Le Matin d’un jour de fête ROZSA The Golden Voyage of Sinbad SCHIFRIN (arr. Townend) Mission Impossible

Ralf sochaczewsky conductor chris jarvis presenter Composers live life in the fast lane, creating music at a rate of knots, especially when they are influenced by the places they visit. So, fasten your seat belts as we join seven composers hit with the travel bug, starting with Short Ride in a Fast Machine by America’s most famous living composer. Dvorák made it to America in a steamboat, and his New World Symphony reflects both his Bohemian roots and the spiritual melodies of his new home, while Debussy’s music for Ibéria creates a perfect audio snapshot of Spain. We reach the climax of our three-part musical journey with Oscar-winning composer, Dario Marianelli, and two magnificent film themes inspired by dangerous journeys bring the concert to a roaring close – Rozsa’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Schifrin’s Mission Impossible. Foyer Events throughout the morning You can try your hand at playing an orchestral instrument in one of our Have-a-Go sessions, get your face painted or join our human orchestra – in the foyers before and after the performance.

Generously supported by The Jeniffer & Jonathan Harris Charitable Trust

Friday 14 May 2010 | 7.30pm Queen Elizabeth Hall

Foyle Future Firsts/Young Composers Scheme A concert including new works by talented young composers mentored by Composer in Residence Mark-Anthony Turnage as part of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Young Composers Scheme. The composers will have developed their pieces in a series of workshops with London Philharmonic Orchestra players and Foyle Future Firsts musicians, who combine to perform this evening’s concert.

Tickets £9 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

Programme also includes: Ravel Introduction and allegro Ravel Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé Stravinsky Concerto in E flat (Dumbarton Oaks) R Strauss Serenade for thirteen winds Clement Power conductor The Young Composers Scheme enlists four or five talented young composers at the end of their formal education to access the rich resources of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and develop new works for ensemble in a supportive and challenging environment. By working intensively with the players, composers are able to experiment with new techniques and sound-worlds, working in detail on technical aspects of composition with individual players. The Foyle Future Firsts are the Orchestra’s outstanding young apprentice musicians, handpicked from the most talented music college graduates. The musicians spend a year being mentored by London Philharmonic Orchestra players through performance experience and education work. The Foyle Future Firsts programme bridges the gap between advanced musical training and the professional world. The Foyle Future Firsts programme is generously funded by The Foyle Foundation with additional support from the Musicians Benevolent Fund and The Fenton Arts Trust.

Clement Power

Saturday 22 May 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Debussy Ibéria Lalo Symphonie espagnole R Strauss Don Juan Ravel Boléro

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

Christoph Eschenbach conductor Christian Tetzlaff violin Two works of blazing, passionate genius that seem to hail from opposite ends of the orchestral universe: Richard Strauss’s Don Juan is a multisectioned rollercoaster ride, lunging from key to key, instrument to instrument, loud to quiet and quick-fire to lethargic. Ravel’s Boléro is an exercise in patiently prepared climax; it uses only one melody, only one speed, draped over one incessant rhythm and one prolonged crescendo. Ravel joked that his great masterpiece ‘contained no music at all’, whilst some claimed Strauss’s score contained too much. But both are compelling, beguiling, and utterly gripping musical experiences.

Friday 28 May 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

RACHMANINOFF GALA CONCERT

Rachmaninoff Variations on a Theme of Corelli (arr. Dumbraveanu) Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto 4 (revised version) Rachmaninoff Symphony 1 JTI Friday Series Tickets –£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

Neeme Järvi conductor Alexei Lubimov piano On 15 March 1897, the young Serge Rachmaninoff introduced his First Symphony in St Petersburg. He listened from the staircase outside as his unique musical ideas were despatched by a poorly prepared orchestra, bracing himself for a critical onslaught. Exactly thirty years later, now a worldwide celebrity, Rachmaninoff strode into a Philadelphia concert hall to hear the first performance of his masterful final Piano Concerto. No other compositional career has so mirrored the 20th century’s cultural journey as Rachmaninoff’s, and no other man’s music has proved so popular, borderless and fervent a vision of twentieth century Romanticism.

Royal Festival Hall Geoffrey Norris introduces the music of Rachmaninoff.

The music of Rachmaninoff is available on the Orchestra’s own label as CDs or downloads. Visit www.lpo.org.uk/shop or order CDs on 020 7840 4242 or through all good retailers.

In co-operation with The Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation

Neeme Järvi

Thursday 1 July 2010 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Adams Shaker Loops Glass Violin Concerto 1 Ravi Shankar Symphony (world première)

Tickets £9–£38 Premium seats £55 Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Discounted subscription packages available (see page 58).

Hear it first! Visit www.lpo.org.uk/listen Access our online playlist of the music for our concerts.

6.15pm–6.45pm Free

David Murphy conductor Robert McDuffie violin Indian musicians The season ends with a new beginning. Ravi Shankar has been edging towards the creation of a symphony for decades: first came his virtuosic duets for sitar and violin written for performance with Yehudi Menuhin, then came the two thematically accomplished Concertos for Sitar and Orchestra. After years of collaboration with Philip Glass, the two composers are heard together here: the pulsating, lyrical groove of Glass’s Violin Concerto meets the world’s first performance of Shankar’s Symphony, which explores both the rich melodic heritage and the mathematical precision of Indian music and is an event of huge significance for world music.

Royal Festival Hall An introduction to the music of Ravi Shankar.

Diary 2009

October

Sat 26 Sept KURTÁG MAHLER Vladimir Jurowski conductor Adriana Kucerova soprano Christianne Stotijn mezzo soprano London Philharmonic Choir Sat 17 Oct 7.00pm MENDELSSOHN Kurt Masur conductor Melanie Diener soprano Alice Coote mezzo soprano Topi Lehtipuu tenor John Relyea bass London Philharmonic Choir Wed 21 Oct LISZT (orch. Adams) BEETHOVEN MENDELSSOHN Trevor Pinnock conductor Maria João Pires piano Sat 24 Oct RAUTAVAARA BRUCKNER Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Colin Currie percussion Wed 28 Oct SCRIABIN WAGNER (arr. de Vlieger) Neeme Järvi conductor Yevgeny Sudbin piano Fri 30 Oct PROKOFIEV RACHMANINOFF TCHAIKOVSKY Alexander Vedernikov conductor Piers Lane piano

Wed 4 Nov WAGNER BRUCKNER Christoph Eschenbach conductor Petra Lang mezzo soprano Fri 6 Nov VERDI TCHAIKOVSKY ˇ DVOrÁK Yutaka Sado conductor Denis Matsuev piano Sun 8 Nov 11.30am FUNharmonics Family Concert The Sea David Angus conductor Chris Jarvis presenter Wed 18 Nov HAYDN WAGNER SCHNITTKE Vladimir Jurowski conductor tba contralto Marco Lazzara counter tenor tba tenor Sir John Tomlinson bass Moscow Conservatory Chamber Choir Sun 22 Nov Queen Elizabeth Hall/ Purcell Room IN THE LABYRINTH OF ALFRED SCHNITTKE Vladimir Jurowski conductor Allison Bell soprano Dmitry Sitkovetsky violin Alexander Zemtsov viola Alexander Ivashkin cello Boris Petrushansky piano London Philharmonic Orchestra Players Royal College of Music Strings Wed 25 Nov WEBERN LINDBERG BERG SCHNITTKE Vladimir Jurowski conductor Leonidas Kavakos violin

Sat 28 Nov SCHNITTKE HAYDN Vladimir Jurowski conductor Alexander Ivashkin cello Lisa Milne soprano Ruxandra Donose mezzo soprano Andrew Kennedy tenor Christopher Maltman baritone London Philharmonic Choir

December

Fri 25 Sept MAHLER Vladimir Jurowski conductor Adriana Kucerova soprano Christianne Stotijn mezzo soprano London Philharmonic Choir

November

September

All concerts are at the Royal Festival Hall and start at 7.30pm unless otherwise stated.

Sat 5 Dec MENDELSSOHN VAUGHAN WILLIAMS J S BACH HONEGGER Vladimir Jurowski conductor Lisa Milne soprano Ruxandra Donose mezzo soprano Andrew Staples tenor Christopher Maltman baritone London Philharmonic Choir New London Children’s Choir Fri 11 Dec BEETHOVEN BRAHMS Jukka-Pekka Saraste conductor Radu Lupu piano

Wed 24 Feb SHOSTAKOVICH Vladimir Jurowski conductor Mikhail Urusov tenor Vladimir Ognev bass-baritone Sergei Leiferkus bass-baritone Sergei Aleksashkin bass-baritone Viacheslav Voynarovskiy tenor Mikhail Petrenko bass-baritone

Wed 3 Feb SIBELIUS Osmo Vänskä conductor Helena Juntunen soprano Fri 5 Feb SIBELIUS Osmo Vänskä conductor Kristina Blaumane cello Wed 10 Feb RAVEL POULENC DEBUSSY Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Melvyn Tan piano Ronald Brautigam piano Sat 13 Feb RAVEL DEBUSSY FAURÉ POULENC Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Lisa Milne soprano London Philharmonic Choir Wed 17 Feb TCHAIKOVSKY RAVEL PROKOFIEV Vladimir Jurowski conductor Alexander Toradze piano Sat 20 Feb ˇ JANÁCEK SUK Vladimir Jurowski conductor Sofia Fomina soprano Michael König tenor London Philharmonic Choir

Fri 12 Mar RAVEL SCHUMANN BRAHMS Gunther Herbig conductor Hélène Grimaud piano

Sat 1 May WAGNER BRAHMS LISZT Vladimir Jurowski conductor Anna Larsson contralto Robert Dean Smith tenor London Philharmonic Choir Fri 7 May TCHAIKOVSKY LISZT VAUGHAN WILLIAMS ˇ DVOrÁK Conductors from Allianz Cultural Foundation Arnaldo Cohen piano

Sun 14 Mar 11.30am FUNharmonics Family Concert Dreams Stuart Stratford conductor Chris Jarvis presenter Wed 17 Mar WAGNER BRAHMS BARTÓK Ludovic Morlot conductor Anne-Sophie Mutter violin

April

February

Sat 30 Jan SIBELIUS Osmo Vänskä conductor Helena Juntunen soprano

March

Wed 27 Jan SIBELIUS Osmo Vänskä conductor Henning Kraggerud violin

Wed 28 Apr PROKOFIEV MYASKOVSKY Vladimir Jurowski conductor Danjulo Ishizaka cello London Philharmonic Choir

May

Sat 16 Jan SZYMANOWSKI SHOSTAKOVICH Vladimir Jurowski conductor Julia Fischer violin

Sat 8 May 11.30am FUNharmonics Family Concert Journeys Ralph Sochaczewsky conductor Chris Jarvis presenter

Sat 10 Apr HANDEL PROKOFIEV STRAVINSKY BEETHOVEN Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Lisa Batiashvili violin

Fri 14 May Queen Elizabeth Hall RAVEL STRAVINSKY R STRAUSS Clement Power conductor

Wed 14 Apr VERDI ˇ DVOrÁK R STRAUSS Gianandrea Noseda conductor Enrico Dindo cello

Sat 22 May DEBUSSY LALO R STRAUSS RAVEL Christoph Eschenbach conductor Christian Tetzlaff violin

Sat 17 Apr TURNAGE GLASS GÓRECKI Marin Alsop conductor Robert McDuffie violin

Fri 28 May RACHMANINOFF Neeme Järvi conductor Alexei Lubimov piano

Wed 21 Apr BERNSTEIN SHOSTAKOVICH Marin Alsop conductor Nicolas Hodges piano

Thu 1 July ADAMS GLASS SHANKAR David Murphy conductor Robert McDuffie violin Indian Musicians

July

January

Diary 2010

Booking and Seating information

London Philharmonic Orchestra Ticket Office Book now 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk Monday to Friday 10am – 5pm No booking fee Fax 020 7840 4201

Evening Concerts

£9 £12 £16

£21 £27 £32

£38

Premium seats £55 We have selected the very best seats in the stalls to be sold at £55 ensuring you the finest acoustic and view.

Southbank Centre Ticket Office Book now 0871 663 2530 Daily 9am – 8pm (transaction fees apply)

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

FUNharmonics Family Concerts

(transaction fees apply) All ticketing staff at Southbank Centre can take typetalk calls In person at the Royal Festival Hall Ticket Office Daily 10am – 8pm (no transaction fee)

The Royal Festival Hall has wheelchair spaces in the boxes, choir seats, side and rear stalls of the auditorium.

Sunday 8 November 2009 Sunday 14 March 2010 Saturday 8 May 2010

Adult Adult Adult Adult Adult

£8 £9 £10 £12 £14

Child £4 Child £4.50 Child £5 Child £6 Child £7

Evening ConcertS

Balcony

Boxes

Boxes Rear stalls

Front stalls Side stalls

Side stalls

Performance area

Choir seats

FUNharmonics Family Concerts

Balcony

Boxes

Boxes Rear stalls

Front stalls Side stalls

Side stalls

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Booking information

London Philharmonic Orchestra Ticket Office Book now 020 7840 4242 Monday to Friday 10am – 5pm No booking fee Fax 020 7840 4201

www.lpo.org.uk

Southbank Centre Ticket Office Book now 0871 663 2530 Daily 9am – 8pm (£2 transaction fee)

www.southbankcentre.co.uk (£1.50 transaction fee)

London Philharmonic Orchestra Group Line: 020 7840 4205 Monday to Friday 10am – 5pm groups@lpo.org.uk www.lpo.org.uk/groups

Book more, pay less: series discounts – Book 3-4 concerts and receive a 10% discount – Book 5-7 concerts and receive a 15% discount – Book 8-10 concerts and receive a 20% discount – Book 11-14 concerts and receive a 25% discount – Book 15+ concerts and receive a 30% discount

GROUP BOOKINGS Make the most of our new group bookings scheme. With savings of up to 50% on ticket prices, and many other group benefits, everything has been done to help you and your group have an enjoyable and affordable evening out with one of the world’s finest orchestras. Benefits include – 20% discount for groups of ten or more – An additional pair of complimentary tickets for the group organiser for groups of 20 or more – Exclusive ticket offers and special promotions on selected concerts throughout the season – Flexible reservations until one month before the concert. No booking fee or postal charge. – Discounted meals at Pizza Express opposite Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall – Discounted coach hire – Customised free publicity material for your group

Students and under-26s If you are a full time student or under 26 you can get discounted tickets to selected London Philharmonic Orchestra concerts throughout the year. Several concerts are also followed by a bar in which students and those under 26 get a free post-concert beer! Sign up to one of the free e-bulletins at www.lpo.org.uk/noise to get details of these fantastic offers!

How do I get to Southbank Centre? Southbank Centre is situated on the Thames Riverside between the Golden Jubilee Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. Tube to Embankment (Bakerloo, Northern, District and Circle lines); to Waterloo (Northern, Jubilee, Bakerloo and Waterloo & City lines) Rail to Waterloo, Waterloo East or Charing Cross. Bus to Waterloo. Bus numbers 1, 4, 59, 68, 75, 139, 168, 171, 172, 176, 188, 243, 341, 521, RV1 X68 all stop on Waterloo Bridge and 77 and RV1 stop on Belvedere Road. Car parking: Access to Southbank Centre Car Parks is off Belvedere Road. Both car parks are open daily from 7am to 1am. Discounted flat fee payable for visitors attending daytime paid events, and for all visitors every evening after 5pm and on Bank Holidays. Please have your car park ticket validated at any of Southbank Centreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ticket Offices. Congestion charge payment machines (credit/debit cards only) are situated in both car parks.

Royal Festival Hall The Clore Ballroom Spirit Level The Saison Poetry Library Level 5 Function Room

Queen Elizabeth Hall Purcell Room The Front Room

Hayward Gallery The Hayward Project Space

Information

London Philharmonic Orchestra Resident at Southbank Centre and Glyndebourne Festival Opera 89 Albert Embankment, London, SE1 7TP Timothy Walker AM Chief Executive and Artistic Director Position supported by Macquarie Group HRH The Duke of Kent KG Patron Vladimir Jurowski Principal Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin Principal Guest Conductor Pieter Schoeman Leader Mark-Anthony Turnage Composer in Residence

T 020 7840 4200 F 020 7840 4201 Tickets 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk The London Philharmonic Orchestra gratefully acknowledges the financial support of Arts Council England and Southbank Centre.

When will I receive my tickets? Ticket bookings will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be advised if your booking cannot be fulfilled. We will endeavour to allocate tickets in your preferred seating area.

Can I exchange my tickets? You may exchange your tickets for another concert in the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2009/10 season or a credit voucher at no additional charge up to two working days before the concert. All tickets are non-refundable. – All discounts are subject to availability and cannot be combined. – The right is reserved to substitute artists and to vary programmes if necessary.

Limited concessions 50% off all ticket prices for full-time students, benefit recipients (Jobseekers Allowance; Income Support; and Pension Credit) and under-16s (maximum 4 per transaction. Not applicable to Family Concerts). Limited availability; appropriate cards will be checked on admission. Call 0871 663 2530 for further details.

Accessible parking Accessible parking is available in Southbank Centre Car Park – The Hayward on a first-come, first-served basis. To collect your free exit voucher, please present your parking ticket, along with your event ticket and Blue Badge, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall Artists’ Entrance or Royal Festival Hall Ticket Office.

General information and Access

Access list Visitors with a disability can join Southbank Centreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s free Access List. You may be eligible for tickets at concessionary prices and to bring a companion who can assist you during your visit; and to receive information in alternative formats. For a form or information, please email accesslist@southbankcentre.co.uk, call 0871 663 2587 or visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk/access. It is advisable to pre-book tickets as numbers for some events are limited. The auditoria are fitted with Sennheiser infrared systems. Receivers can be collected from the Cloakroom on Level 1 of the Royal Festival Hall.

Level access All levels of the Royal Festival Hall have level access via internal lifts and ramps. Some of the lifts have a limited weight capacity. For further details please call 0871 663 2587. The Royal Festival Hall has wheelchair spaces in the boxes, choir seats, side and rear stalls of the auditorium. Tickets for wheelchair spaces can be booked online or by phone on 0871 663 2500. Guide and companion dogs may be taken anywhere on site.

Bars All bars in the Royal Festival Hall are accessible.

Cloakroom Situated on Level 1 of the Royal Festival Hall and in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Accessible toilets Available on all floors of the Royal Festival Hall. In Queen Elizabeth Hall, unisex accessible toilets are on the ground floor by the Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Entrance. Other toilets are located off the foyer.

SUPPORTING THE ORCHESTRA JOIN US

For further information on Friends and Benefactors please contact:

Maria Fountoukaki Charitable Giving Officer 020 7840 4225 maria.fountoukaki@lpo.org.uk

Friends and Benefactors As well as sharing the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s passion for performance at the highest level, Friends and Benefactors generously support the Orchestra by contributing between £50 and £1,000 a year through their membership. In addition to playing a crucial role in the financial stability of the Orchestra, members enjoy a wide variety of exclusive benefits.

BENEFITS OFFERED TO FRIENDS AND BENEFACTORS include: – Priority booking to ensure access to favourite seats in the Royal Festival Hall – Access to exclusive Open Rehearsals – Access to the Friends’ Bar with private cloakroom – Access to the Corporate Bar with complimentary fine wines, canapés, chocolates and concert programmes – Priority access to purchase rehearsal and performance tickets at Glyndebourne Festival Opera – Invitation to an annual Christmas party with London Philharmonic Orchestra musicians and staff

For further information about becoming a member of the Thomas Beecham Group please contact:

Emma O’Connell Development Director 020 7840 4211 emma.oconnell@lpo.org.uk

THOMAS BEECHAM GROUP This group encompasses the Orchestra’s most generous donors. Members are closely involved with it's musicians and management team, and play a significant role in the life and financial well-being of the Orchestra. Thomas Beecham Group patrons enjoy access to a wide range of unique benefits including: – Access to exclusive private events, tours and recitals – Acknowledgement as the supporter of a London Philharmonic Orchestra musician’s chair

For more information on partnerships with the London Philharmonic Orchestra please contact:

Liz Muggeridge, Senior Corporate Relations Manager on 020 7840 4210 liz.muggeridge@lpo.org.uk

Corporate Partnerships

Sponsorship

The London Philharmonic Orchestra offers a rich portfolio of opportunities for corporate engagement. Building bespoke packages to support marketing, client entertaining, corporate responsibility and brand development is our forte.

Exclusive tour sponsorships, player sponsorships and bespoke performances create unforgettable experiences and provide both public and private opportunities to promote a partnership with the Orchestra. As well as creating distinctive brand synergies sponsorship provides unique access to London Philharmonic Orchestra musicians.

Entertaining with the Orchestra Treat your staff and guests to a unique concert experience with stunning hospitality and brand enforcing opportunities. Guests will listen to a world-class orchestra and mix with musicians in style at Southbank Centreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Royal Festival Hall and Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

Education & Community Complement entertaining and sponsorship activities by supporting the Orchestraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s diverse Education and Community programmes. Creating a partnership around our projects sends a strong corporate responsibility message to staff and clients alike.

ÂŠ Benjamin Ealovega

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For a full list of all our recordings so far, download the FREE London Philharmonic Orchestra catalogue at www.lpo.org.uk.

Buy now www.lpo.org.uk/shop (CDs and downloads)

London Philharmonic Orchestra Ticket Office 020 7840 4242 Monday to Friday, 10am – 5pm (CDs only) Available worldwide through all good retailers (CDs only).

Listen to great music on the move, in the car, or while you work ®

The London Philharmonic Orchestra experience doesn’t have to stop when you leave the concert hall. A fantastic range of recordings showcasing the Orchestra’s remarkable heritage as well as capturing recent concerts will make an exciting addition to your recording collection. The Orchestra’s own-label CDs are unique: amongst them are archive recordings, studio recordings, live concert recordings and recordings of world-première performances. Repertoire encompasses music from the baroque to the present day; music for the concert hall, music for the opera house, and music for children.

‘Haitink’s long-term vision of the music’s organic development comes across compellingly in this live recording. While there are distinct contrasts between the propulsive scherzo, the ghostly dance of the third movement and the inexorable force of the first movement and finale, the thread of the argument is sustained with probing power.’ Daily Telegraph on Bernard Haitink conducting Shostakovich Symphony 10 (LPO-0034)

‘After three years working with Turnage, their composer in residence, the LPO speak his language brilliantly: listen especially in The Torn Fields to the molten sound of the winds and brass. And Alsop’s commitment is total, whether she’s conjuring the composer’s urban whoops, battlefield desolation or percussive tinkling in Hidden Love Song, suggesting the sounds of a clock… These works so vividly performed are among the best in Turnage’s recent output. Listen with relish.’ The Times on Marin Alsop conducting works by Mark-Anthony Turnage (LPO-0031)

The Orchestra is delighted to be a partner of Passionato – the definitive download site for classical music repertoire. To purchase and download LPO recordings by individual track, movement or complete work direct to your computer in mp3 or high quality FLAC format visit: www.passionato.com/lpo

Latest releases on the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s own label

Distributed in the UK by Select Music and Video Distribution Ltd +44 (0)1737 645600

Texts Andrew Mellor London Philharmonic Orchestra photography Benjamin Ealovega www.benjaminealovega.com LPO-0026

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Cover image © Benjamin Ealovega Clare Duckworth, Co-Principal Second Violin Chair supported by Richard and Victoria Sharp Printer Tradewinds (this brochure is produced on paper from a sustainable source)

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ÂŠ Benjamin Ealovega