Schoenberg: Reshaping Tradition by London Sinfonietta

SCHOENBERG: RESHAPING TRADITION

6.15pm - 7pm

Discussion about Schoenberg and his works with Jonathan Berman, Jonathan Cross and Julie Brown

7.30pm

Evening Concert with readings between pieces

Arnold Schoenberg

Serenade Op. 24 (33’)

Elisabeth Lutyens

Six Tempi for 10 Instruments (12’)

Arnold Schoenberg

Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte Op. 41 (16’)

Interval

Arnold Schoenberg

Six Little Piano Pieces Op.19 (5’)

The London Sinfonietta acknowledges Arts Council England for its generous support of the ensemble, as well as many other individuals, trusts and individuals who enable us to realise our ambitions. This concert is produced by London Sinfonietta. This evening’s performance has financial support from the Southbank Centre from their Orchestral Development Fund. The broader work of the London Sinfonietta is significantly supported by the Garfield Weston Foundation, and the John Ellerman Foundation.

Anton Webern

Symphony Op. 21 (10’)

Arnold Schoenberg

Chamber Symphony Op. 9 (22’)

SOUTHBANK CENTRE’S QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL

Jonathan Berman conductor

Andrew Zolinsky piano

Richard Burkhard baritone/speaker

Theatre of Sound stage presentation concept

London Sinfonietta

Theatre of Sound are Daisy Evans, Stephen Higgins and Jake Wiltshire

Please note this performance contains haze

The readings between pieces include writings by Arnold Schoenberg, Lord Byron, a poem by Frank O’Hara and a sonnet by Petrach.

This concert is dedicated to Alexander Goehr, composer and teacher, who passed away on 25 August 2024

Also, in memory of Bojan Bujić, Schoenberg scholar, who passed away on 13 September 2024, coincidentally the anniversary of Schoenberg’s birth

WELCOME

Welcome to tonight’s concert, in which we continue a series of events at the start of our recent seasons celebrating the work of one of the great musical voices of the 20th century. If Schoenberg is often mentioned as one of the fathers of contemporary music in his extension of tonality and the invention of a new composing system which influenced many who followed, his Chamber Symphony is often mentioned as the prototype for a ‘Sinfonietta’ sized ensemble. Although the early orchestration for the classic London Sinfonietta ensemble quickly evolved into including piano, harp and a range of percussion, the relationship between the group, Schoenberg and his Chamber Symphony has never been forgotten. Over 100 years has passed since some of the works in this programme, and those years have seen a huge change in the styles and ideas in music. Yet we are still drawn back to listen to this music again which holds a deep and rewarding fascination.

It’s been a pleasure for me to work on this programme with Jonathan Berman, and we welcome him back to the podium. Also, thanks to Richard Burkhard and Andrew Zolinsky for their solos. We are pleased to work with Theatre of Sound again, after their stunning re-interpretation of Bartok’s Bluebeard Castle in 2021. In collaboration with the other art forms, we aim to re-present the great works of the 20th century.

We are hugely grateful to those who believe in the London Sinfonietta project and demonstrate that with their support. So, firstly and most importantly, thanks to you for coming tonight. And to the Southbank Centre for our important Residency here, and to our funders who see the importance of our commitment to championing the repertoire of the past 100 years and commissioning new music for the 21st century. Many of you know we use music and composition as the way to inspire young people and communities – at a time when financial support for the arts has shrunk and their place in the curriculum has been diminished. If you want to help us continue our work we would love to hear from you. Our season contains an exciting mix of repertoire, commissions, work with young people and communities – and we hope you will return again later this year to another of our performances and follow our projects.

Andrew Burke

Chief Executive & Artistic Director London Sinfonietta

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SCHOENBERG

Atonality is what we know him for;

Reluctant revolutionary is how he saw himself – ‘someone had to do it’, he declared.

New ideas shaped in the heart of

Old Vienna: the progressive future meets the conservative past.

Living with the awful hatred of his times (‘Jews not welcome’, he was told);

Died on the 13th of July just as he was born on the 13th of September: a triskaidekaphobic.

Sound (‘Klang’);

Colour (‘Farben’);

Harmony (‘Harmonielehre’):

Open your ears to a new world, he incited us (‘I feel air from another planet’).

Educator: of Berg and Webern, and of many who came later;

Neoclassicist: forward-looking works gazing back at gavottes and minuets.

Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), his artist friends, who proclaimed:

‘art knows no borders or nations: only humanity’.

Emancipate the dissonance! he cried; free music from the shackles of the past.

Rows were what he worked with, those famous 12-note rows. Yet,

George Gershwin knew him best … friend, admirer & tennis partner. Game, set & match.

A tribute to Arnold Schoenberg on the occasion of his 150th birthday

Jonathan Cross

SERENADE OP.24 (33’)

1. Marsch

2. Menuett

3. Variationen

4. Sonnet Nr 217 von Petraca

5. Tanzscene

6. Lied (ohne Worte)

7. Finale

The most immediately striking aspects of the Serenade are its exuberant mood, melodiousness, usages of Classical form-models, and the unprecedented repetition (for Schoenberg) of entire segments: most of the middle section of the first movement returns as the last movement, albeit with changes near the beginning and end; half of the Minuet is repeated as well, and about a third of the Dance Scene. Also, uniquely in Schoenberg, the March is without tempo modification from beginning to end.

“Viennese strumming”, Leoš Janáček wrote after hearing the Serenade in Venice in September 1925, referring to the mandolin-guitar foundation of the sonority, the pizzicati and bouncing of the wood of the violin, viola, and cello bows on the strings, as well as the flutter-tonguing of the clarinets, which extend and complement the articulation of the strummed and plucked instruments. At the beginning of the repeated section of the first movement, these efforts of bariolage occupy the stage centre.

The Minuet is a quiet, mellow piece, in which the strings are muted throughout the first section and again in the Coda. Whereas the main part of the movement is more song than dance, the Trio, which begins with an ostinato in the viola and guitar, is more dance than song.

The Variations movement, the most delectable of the seven, consists of a comparatively long theme in the clarinet, and six brief variations (the sixth is the Coda), each with the same number of bars as the theme itself. The expressive intensities of the music are reflected in the frequent changes of tempo, the many tempo controls (ritardando, più allegro, etc.), and the dynamic nuances. The Coda, with its dialogues between the clarinets, then between guitar and mandolin, and its gradual slackening of pace to the end, is the Serenade’s most intricately carved jewel.

The Petrarch Sonnet (No. 217 in Schoenberg’s score, but No. 256 in the standard Italian editions) is the Serenade’s centrepiece, at once the most highly organized movement of the seven, and the most chaotic-sounding. At the start the violin plays the first two notes of a twelve-tone series as a melodic fragment. Each note is followed by a mandolin / guitar chord containing the remaining ten pitches of the chromatic scale. The twelve pitches are then exposed in melodic order in the vocal part, and repeated in the same order twelve times (the twelfth is incomplete), but with differences in octave registers and in the position of the series vis-à-vis the musical phrases. The first of the twelve notes becomes, successively, the second, third, fourth, and fifth note in the next four phrases, for the reason that Petrarch’s elevensyllable line leaves a leftover note in each repetition of the series. Since the original first note becomes the last note before the final, longest, and most hectic of the three instrumental interludes that separate the poem’s four stanzas, and notes 2-12 follow after a considerable break, Schoenberg obviously did not intend the series to be heard integrally.

The instrumental accompaniment provides musical images for textural references, evoking a lion’s roar with loud glissandos and tremolos in the strings and clarinets, and, at the word “death” introducing a pulsation alien to the meter of the rest of the piece.

The melodies of the Dance Scene, the Serenade’s most popular movement, are also its most immediately memorable. The full Ländler melody (clarinet) and its counter-melody are repeated several times untransposed, rare instances of same-pitch repetition in Schoenberg’s “atonal period.” Worth mentioning, too, is the interruption of the four-metre ostinato in the mandolin and, later, violin, relieving the three-inone rhythm.

The violin sings the “Song Without Words” first, followed by cello, then bass clarinet. The guitar accompaniment, with major thirds doubled by viola and cello at the end of the first phrase, recalls ‘O alter Duft’, the nostalgic concluding piece of Pierrot Lunaire. The final March repeats the first movement, with alterations, including the return of the Ländler as a counter melody, and, shortly before the end, a brief, slow inset combining the principal melodies of the two preceding movements.

ELISABETH LUTYENS –SIX TEMPI FOR 10 INSTRUMENTS (12’)

Her Six Tempi op. 42 (1957) adheres to the soloistic style characteristic of Webern – the ensemble’s ten instruments never play all together – but Lutyens carefully fashions the brief contributions of individual instruments into longer melodic lines and chordal textures, to great poetic effect. Lutyens originally intended each short movement to be named after a Baudelaire poem – Morning Twilight; Mists and Rains; Landscape; Fountain; Nocturne; Dusk – but these titles were later suppressed in favour of the brisk objectivity of the movements’ different metronome markings.

ODE TO NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE OP.41

(16’)

TIS done -- but yesterday a King! And arm’d with Kings to strive -And now thou art a nameless thing: So abject -- yet alive!

Is this the man of thousand thrones, Who strew’d our earth with hostile bones, And can he thus survive?

Since he, miscall’d the Morning Star, Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far.

Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind Who bow’d so low the knee?

By gazing on thyself grown blind, Thou taught’st the rest to see. With might unquestion’d, -- power to save, -Thine only gift hath been the grave, To those that worshipp’d thee; Nor till thy fall could mortals guess Ambition’s less than littleness!

Thanks for that lesson -- It will teach

To after-warriors more, Than high Philosophy can preach, And vainly preach’d before. That spell upon the minds of men Breaks never to unite again, That led them to adore Those Pagod things of sabre sway With fronts of brass, and feet of clay. The triumph and the vanity, The rapture of the strife -The earthquake voice of Victory, To thee the breath of life; The sword, the sceptre, and that sway Which man seem’d made but to obey, Wherewith renown was rife --

All quell’d! -- Dark Spirit! what must be The madness of thy memory!

The Desolator desolate!

The Victor overthrown!

The Arbiter of others’ fate

A Suppliant for his own!

Is it some yet imperial hope

That with such change can calmly cope? Or dread of death alone?

To die a prince -- or live a slave -Thy choice is most ignobly brave!

He who of old would rend the oak, Dream’d not of the rebound: Chain’d by the trunk he vainly broke -Alone -- how look’d he round?

Thou, in the sternness of thy strength, An equal deed hast done at length, And darker fate hast found: He fell, the forest prowler’s prey; But thou must eat thy heart away!

The Roman, when his burning heart Was slaked with blood of Rome,

Threw down the dagger -- dared depart, In savage grandeur, home -He dared depart in utter scorn

Of men that such a yoke had borne, Yet left him such a doom!

His only glory was that hour Of self-upheld abandon’d power.

The Spaniard, when the lust of sway Had lost its quickening spell, Cast crowns for rosaries away, An empire for a cell;

A strict accountant of his beads, A subtle disputant on creeds, His dotage trifled well:

Yet better had he neither known A bigot’s shrine, nor despot’s throne.

But thou -- from thy reluctant hand The thunderbolt is wrung -Too late thou leav’st the high command To which thy weakness clung; All Evil Spirit as thou art, It is enough to grieve the heart To see thine own unstrung; To think that God’s fair world hath been The footstool of a thing so mean;

And Earth hath spilt her blood for him, Who thus can hoard his own!

And Monarchs bow’d the trembling limb, And thank’d him for a throne!

Fair Freedom! we may hold thee dear, When thus thy mightiest foes their fear In humblest guise have shown. Oh! ne’er may tyrant leave behind A brighter name to lure mankind!

Thine evil deeds are writ in gore, Nor written thus in vain -Thy triumphs tell of fame no more, Or deepen every stain: If thou hadst died as honour dies, Some new Napoleon might arise, To shame the world again -But who would soar the solar height, To set in such a starless night?

Weigh’d in the balance, hero dust Is vile as vulgar clay; Thy scales, Mortality! are just To all that pass away:

But yet methought the living great

Some higher sparks should animate, To dazzle and dismay:

Nor deem’d Contempt could thus make mirth

Of these, the Conquerors of the earth.

And she, proud Austria’s mournful flower, Thy still imperial bride; How bears her breast the torturing hour? Still clings she to thy side?

Must she too bend, must she too share Thy late repentance, long despair, Thou throneless Homicide? If still she loves thee, hoard that gem, -‘Tis worth thy vanish’d diadem!

Then haste thee to thy sullen Isle, And gaze upon the sea; That element may meet thy smile -It ne’er was ruled by thee! Or trace with thine all idle hand In loitering mood upon the sand That Earth is now as free! That Corinth’s pedagogue hath now Transferr’d his by-word to thy brow.

Thou Timour! in his captive’s cage What thought will there be thine, While brooding in thy prison’d rage?

But one -- “The word was mine!” Unless, like he of Babylon, All sense is with thy sceptre gone, Life will not long confine That spirit pour’d so widely forth-So long obey’d -- so little worth!

Or, like the thief of fire from heaven, Wilt thou withstand the shock?

And share with him, the unforgiven, His vulture and his rock!

Foredoom’d by God -- by man accurst, And that last act, though not thy worst, The very Fiend’s arch mock; He in his fall preserved his pride, And, if a mortal, had as proudly died!

There was a day -- there was an hour, While earth was Gaul’s -- Gaul thine -When that immeasurable power

Unsated to resign

Had been an act of purer fame Than gathers round Marengo’s name, And gilded thy decline, Through the long twilight of all time, Despite some passing clouds of crime.

But thou forsooth must be a king, And don the purple vest, As if that foolish robe could wring Remembrance from thy breast. Where is that faded garment? where The gewgaws thou wert fond to wear, The star, the string, the crest?

Vain froward child of empire! say, Are all thy playthings snatched away?

Where may the wearied eye repose When gazing on the Great;

Where neither guilty glory glows, Nor despicable state?

Yes --one--the first--the last--the best-The Cincinnatus of the West, Whom envy dared not hate, Bequeath’d the name of Washington, To make man blush there was but one!

The League of Composers had asked me (1942) to write a piece of chamber music for their concert season. It should employ only a limited number of instruments. I had at once the idea that this piece must not ignore the agitation aroused in mankind against the crimes that provoked this war. I remembered Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, supporting repeal of the jus prime noctis, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Goethe’s Egmont, Beethoven’s Eroica and Wellington’s Victory, and I knew it was the moral duty of intelligentsia to take a stand against tyranny.

But this was only my secondary motive. I had long speculated about the more profound meaning of the Nazi philosophy. There was one element that puzzled me extremely: the resemblance of the valueless individual being’s life in respect to the totality of the community or its representative: the Queen or the Führer. I could not see why a whole generation of bees or of Germans should live only in order to produce another generation of the same sort, which on their part should also fulfil the same task: to keep the race alive. I even surmised that bees (or ants) instinctively believe their destiny was to be successors of mankind, when this had destroyed itself in the same manner in which our predecessors, the Giants, Magicians, Lindworms [Dragons], Dinosaurs and others had destroyed themselves and their world, so that first men knew only a few isolated specimens. Their and the ants’ capacity of forming states and living according to laws -- senseless and primitive, as they might look to us -- this capacity, unique among animals, had an attractive similarity to our own life; and in our imagination we could muse a story, seeing them growing to dominating power, size and shape and creating a world of their own resembling very little the original beehive.

Without such a goal the life of the bees, with the killing of the drones and the thousands of offspring of the Queen seemed futile. Similarly, all the sacrifices of the German Herrenvolk [Master Race] would not make sense, without a goal of world domination -- in which the single individual could vest much interest.

Before I started to write this text, I consulted Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bees. I hoped to find there motives supporting my attitude. But the contrary happened: Maeterlinck’s poetic philosophy gilds everything which was not gold itself. And so wonderful are his explanations that one might decline refuting them, even if one knew they were mere poetry. I had to abandon this plan. I had to find another subject fitting my purpose.

SIX LITTLE PIANO PIECES OP.19 (5’)

On a cold winter’s day in 1911, Schoenberg as at the time occupied with reading the proofs of his major theoretical and pedagogical work, “Harmonielehre” (Theory of Harmony), he took a day off to compose a set of five piano miniatures. “I said to Webern: for my music you must have time. It is not for people who have other things to do. But it is in any case a great pleasure to hear one’s pieces played by somebody who has fully mastered them from a technical viewpoint.” Schoenberg made this note in his diary a year later, after the pianist Egon Petri had played the Six Piano Pieces, op. 19, for him in Berlin.

If one were to attempt to isolate the single genre that most accurately portrays Schoenberg’s compositional development throughout his life, his works for solo piano would be the obvious choice. Beginning with the late Romantic piano fragments in the musical language of Johannes Brahms through the free-tonal piano pieces op. 11 and 19, which mark his middle creative period, and extending to the twelve-tone piano pieces op. 23 No. 5, op. 25, and op. 33a and b, which enter a new epoch of tonal organization, one can observe what can be described a literally “unfathomable” diversity of musical composition and intellectual expression. The miniature form and extreme aphoristic brevity may appear as a strange and confusing deviation from Schönberg’s usual concise formulation of musical thought but is actually quite symptomatic of the free-tonal formal design of his works and those of his students – who innovatively followed his lead – during this period.

The natural melodic flow and the expansive breadth that would reappear in the later dodecaphonic works has given way here to an epigrammatic expression: the furthest extreme, as it were, to the symphonic writing of the contemporary Gustav Mahler and also to Schoenberg’s own “Gurre-Lieder,” a monumental work for orchestra, chorus, and solo voices that was completed around the same time. Creating from the moment and reducing the work to the moment seems to form, as it were, the aesthetic program for the Piano Pieces op. 19: “I attempted to create a specific logical and beautiful idea, and I tried to clothe it in a kind of music that flowed naturally and inevitably from me. I write what I feel in my heart – and in the end what appears on paper is what first went through every fiber of my body.” (Schönberg quoted by his student Josef Rufer, 1951). This first of the op. 19 pieces is exactly seventeen bars long and consists of melodic nuclei that are not combined into a phrase but are heard one after the other, like disjointed thoughts. In the next piece, the rhythmic ostinato of repeated major thirds assures a far greater degree of stability, as though the composer had now underpinned the piano writing with tonality. In the third piece, the right and left hands develop in independent dynamic frameworks, thus forming a contrast with each other, in a very fragmented way. The next two pieces can be perceived as a combination of recitative and aria. Gustav Mahler died in Vienna on 18 May 1911. For Schönberg he had been a mentor and a friend whom Schönberg was even to characterize as a saint. After the burial at Grinzing Cemetery, Schönberg painted a picture depicting the mourners (himself among them) at the composer’s open grave. The colors, however, only superficially reflected his profound emotion; a few weeks later, in endless grief, he composed the sixth and last piece of op. 19. The day after the funeral, the “Neues Wiener Journal” described the atmosphere at the cemetery in a report that could also be applied to mood of the piano piece, pervaded with the sounds of church bells: “On this last path, the floodgates of heaven opened, and a downpour descended on the funeral procession. […] It was touching how silent everything remained when the coffin was lowered into the depths. It was as if the whole world were holding its breath.” (May 23, 1911) Therese Muxeneder.

© Arnold Schönberg Center, Wien

ANTON WEBERN – SYMPHONY OP.21 (10’)

CHAMBER SYMPHONY OP.9 (22’)

1. Rhuig, schreitend

2. Variationen

The Symphony is the first major work (also in respect of its instrumentation) that Webern wrote using the technique of twelve-note composition. Admittedly it is scarcely any bigger than the “String Trio” which immediately preceded it, and the instrumentation is deceptive as far as volume is concerned, since the texture at no point exceeds the classical norm of four-part writing. Cum grano salis, one could describe the Symphony as a quartet for nine instruments. What distinguishes it from Webern’s earlier compositions, including the “String Trio”, is no less perceptible (all the more so, in fact) because it involves both qualitative and quantitative features. Besides, the differences are not limited to this or that component of the music, but lie rather in its substance. The specific form taken by the instrumentation is an example: it is not because the Symphony is scored the way it is that it differs from Webern’s earlier music; rather, it is because it is different (despite features in common) that it is scored in this way. The nature of this difference could be described as a higher degree of technical perfection or intellectual penetration which comes fully into play here for the first time, thus revealing Webern’s originality in what is, perhaps, a more precisely characterized manner.

When Schoenberg completed the Kammersymphonie (Chamber Symphony) No. 1 in 1906, he told his friends: “Now I have established my style. Now I know how I have to compose.” He quickly realized this was not true: as he put it, he was “not destined” to continue in this post-Romantic manner.

Looking back, he saw that the Chamber Symphony was only a way station—but an important one—on the road toward his goal, which was to master what he described as “a style of concision and brevity in which every technical or structural necessity was carried out without unnecessary extension, in which every single unit is supposed to be functional.” Within a few years, Schoenberg was composing an astoundingly dense, non-repetitive, richly detailed new music: the Stefan George song cycle Das Buch der hängende Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens); Three Pieces for Piano, Op. 11; Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16; and the one character opera Erwartung (Expectation), all completed in 1909, had gone far away from the luxuriant Romanticism of the earlier Verklärte Nacht and Gurrelieder. Something that did not change was Schoenberg’s artistic personality and his temperament. From Verklärte Nacht to the last scores, passion is a constant, and the most immediate and ultimately overwhelming impression the Chamber Symphony No. 1 makes is that of urgent, ardent, even wild utterance.

The Chamber Symphony is in one movement; it is also in five movements. Schoenberg uses a formal device that had served him well in Pelleas und Melisande and the String Quartet No. 1: he combines the traditional four-movement plan—sonata allegro, scherzo, slow movement, finale—with that of a single sonata movement. Sections I, III, and V are characterized sharply enough to encourage you to hear five distinct movements; at the same time, their mutual connectedness is so clear that the symphony’s master plan as a single sonata movement with extended interludes on either side of the development is also readily audible.

The Chamber Symphony opens with a great pile-up of notes that coalesce into a luscious five-note chord, which resolves ever so suavely into a chord of F major. As soon as the very fast main tempo begins, Schoenberg has the horn rush impetuously up the steep slope of fourths from D below middle C to the F at the top of the treble staff. After the horn call, the cello plays an energetic, upward-rushing theme easily recognized by its persistent triplets as well as by its Debussyan whole-tone steps. This moves forward to an intense climax, which is followed by a new melody for violin and horn in a broad, singing style. The first movement presents a series of fervent, spirited, and variegated themes in rapid succession. The return of the energetic cello theme becomes a transition to the scherzo. The scherzo itself is even faster than the first movement; the ghostly Trio takes about twenty seconds. In the symphony’s main development section, the themes of the first movement are reconsidered, recombined, and recostumed with captivating energy. Rising fourths introduce the slow movement, but now they take on the form of incorporeal doublebass harmonics, delicate six-note woodwind chords, weightless clarinet arpeggios, a dreamy melody for the first violin, all pianissimo. The music that ensues is a feast of lyric inspiration. The finale recapitulates and sometimes further transforms earlier themes with great freedom in their order of appearance. The rising fourths and the excited theme from the beginning of the first movement return in the coda. The close, with exultant horns and emphatic assertions of E major against the chromatic current, is joyously exuberant.

IMPRESSIONS OF SCHOENBERG

How should we view the composer whose music still divides audiences 150 years after his birth?

Peter Quantrill and key Schoenberg advocates set his work in the context of his own era, and of ours.

Queues have been snaking around Tate Modern in London to view its annual summer blockbuster.

‘Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider’ has transplanted from Munich a good chunk of the Lenbachhaus museum, dedicated to the members of the art collective formed in 1911 who named themselves after Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Der blaue Reiter (1903).

Observant visitors may even find some Schoenberg tucked away. The exhibition barely hints at his central place in the group, though the almanac Der blaue Reiter, published in 1912, printed the manuscript of his exquisite song Herzgewächse (‘Foliage of the Heart’), as well as an article in which the composer (then in his late thirties) discusses the relationship of text to sound and image.

Would the crowds of visitors to the Tate go and hear Herzgewächse for themselves? Would they enjoy it? Such questions remain purely theoretical when the score stays on the printed page, unheard. It was Stephen Walsh, biographer of Stravinsky and Debussy, who made the point, around 40 years ago, that Schoenberg was the first composer to be accorded a place in the canon of European art music even while his music goes largely unperformed.

In a year when we mark a century and a half since Schoenberg’s birth, it would be a shame to waste too many words speculating on this gulf between reputation and reception – why one of the most influential figures in the history of music is more often written about than listened to. ‘It’s no use arguing with the public about what it wants,’ remarked chairman of Decca Sir Edward Lewis.

All the same, the conductor John Mauceri succinctly distils the pervasive resistance to Schoenberg’s revolutionary ‘method of composition with 12 tones’, which he was developing at the same time that Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Pablo Picasso were overturning all the conventions of naturalism in art.

‘We can’t get rid of an octave,’ he tells me. ‘We can’t get rid of the fifth, we can’t get rid of a third. The language of music that develops in Europe out of the Greeks and Romans is something we have either learnt, or it’s actually how we perceive sound. It might have frustrated him. In that sense, he might have been wrong. There are people who love the most complex music. Most people do not. You can blame the people, or you don’t blame anyone. You say, “This is the music. Do you like it? Do you want to hear it again?”’

The pianist Pina Napolitano made a bold debut on record in 2011 with an album of Schoenberg’s piano music. ‘I think it has to do with musical culture in general,’ she says, ‘which is always behind other cultures – the most conservative, in terms of press, musicians and public. The ear is the most intimate sense, and the most ineffable, and the one that leaves us in least control. We are more in control when we read a book or look at art. Schoenberg is still perceived as avant-garde, whereas for me it’s a piece of history, a beautiful piece of history. And this is especially true of the musically educated; because our education system is still completely tonality centred, and music, more than other arts, is still conceived primarily in terms of entertainment.’

Both positions can be true. And both musicians believe that context is key to a fuller understanding of Schoenberg and his music. Mauceri has a vision of a concert series which would draw direct lines between Schoenberg’s expressionist and Californian music, and film scores by composers from Miklós Rózsa to John Williams. ‘Where is the concert in which the Schoenberg Suite for strings is paired with Stravinsky’s Apollo?’

Napolitano had been immersed in German and Russian literature when her conservatoire piano professor placed the Op 11 pieces in front of her. ‘And this immediately fitted in. We never talked about the 12note system or even about the culture of the period. He just helped me to read the score carefully, and bring out all the colours – to make the music dance. Just as we would with Brahms. And I started learning this music from that position. My ears don’t distinguish any more between tonal or atonal music. Schoenberg just sounds classical, and beautiful to me, like Beethoven or Brahms.’

In this context, I think of Gustav von Aschenbach stepping out for an afternoon stroll at the beginning of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In a Munich cemetery, a couple of miles away from the real-life Lenbachhaus, Aschenbach is assailed by the vision of ‘a tropical marshland beneath a reeking sky … Among the knotted joints of a bamboo thicket the eyes of a crouching tiger gleamed – and he felt his heart throb with terror, yet with a longing inexplicable.’ Mann was writing in 1912, and it took Max Ernst until after the war to imagine such visions for himself and project them on canvas. Meanwhile, back in 1909, Schoenberg had already composed his monodrama Erwartung (‘Expectation’), for which Aschenbach’s daymare could serve as a set design.

THE GENIE IN THE BOTTLE

What still disconcerts many listeners is the length and breadth of Schoenberg’s journey; their musical intelligence feels challenged. How can a composer capable of the lush and sensuous beauty in Gurrelieder go on to write the Fourth String Quartet? Perhaps they believe that he lost his way. Or they simply decline to travel where he went. But we hear music in the wake of Schoenberg much as we understand ourselves with recourse (consciously or unconsciously) to tropes inherited from Freud. When Schoenberg emancipated dissonance, he uncorked a bottle that could not be resealed, the contents of which were already fizzing with explosive force.

Still more disconcerting is the awareness, however vague or unformed, that Schoenberg’s harmonic experimentation takes place within a language of dialectic, and a small collection of forms inherited from his predecessors, paradoxically making him a traditionalist as well as a modernist. The Op 24 Serenade (1920-23) starts out with a march that cannot be ironised into alienation from its origins; its rhythm is too sturdy, its melodies are too upbeat, its sonata form too regular. There follows a minuet as relaxed and charming as any example by Haydn or Brahms, and a little set of variations on a chirpy theme led by the clarinet.

Schoenberg has gone to all possible lengths to defuse associations of serial composition with loss and angst, just as he had composed the impossibility of retaining a stable key signature through the progress of the Second String Quartet (1908). There, movement by movement, the ear is led to grasp that ‘the centre cannot hold’, until the finale gently takes off like a hotair balloon, with the soprano breathing ‘the air of other planets’ in a setting of Stefan George’s Entrückung (‘Rapture’): ‘I am dissolved in swirling sound.’ And when the quartet ends in a radiant major key, we are invited to glimpse a new harmony of the spheres, where consonance and dissonance may co-exist in a new relationship.

In Berlin – until the Nazis compelled his exile – and then in California, Schoenberg always continued to teach tonal harmony to his students. And once in America, even if compelled by circumstance, he fused tonal and serial methods in his own music; one never seeks to conquer the other. He cannot be reduced to a bundle of contradictions; his art thrives in a state of productive tension. ‘My music is solely the representation of myself,’ he said to Egon Wellesz in 1912, while confiding to Alma Mahler in 1910, in terms that her husband would have recognised, ‘I want to express myself, but I hope to be misunderstood. It would be terrible if someone could see through me.’

The Second Quartet is an almost embarrassingly direct response from Schoenberg to his wife’s affair with the painter Richard Gerstl, and his insistence that she break it off. At the other end of his career, the String Trio (1946) maps out in graphic detail his recovery from illness in hospital. We are surely past the stage of regarding such biographical detail as a threat to the integrity of the notes. Life and music belong together in Schoenberg as much as they do in Schumann and Liszt, and the more we know of one, the better we understand the other.

Mauceri’s ‘watershed moment’ with Schoenberg arrived in 1988, when he conducted the Second Chamber Symphony as part of an Edinburgh International Festival concert with Scottish Opera. ‘The audience had bought tickets to see Patricia Hodge and Richard Griffiths do the dream sequences in Weill’s Lady in the Dark. We put the Second Chamber Symphony in the middle of the concert, after Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, and the audience called me back for a second bow, because they got it.’

Along with Moses und Aron and Die Jakobsleiter, the Second Chamber Symphony is one of several works that make a nonsense of a straight-line chronology to Schoenberg’s career. As Mauceri points out, the first movement was completed around 1906, soon after the better-known First Chamber Symphony. Life and then war compelled Schoenberg to file it in the bottom drawer, from which he retrieved it 33 years later, as an exile living in Los Angeles. ‘When I turn the page from the end of the first movement to the beginning of the second, the silence in between is what most people think of as Schoenberg, the 12-tone composer,’ says Mauceri. ‘He picks up the melody that he wrote in 1906 and brings it back on the trumpet, and another war is looming. It’s the most embracing moment. Here is a man who looks in the mirror, and sees and accepts the reality of life. It is so beautiful and so haunting.’

Mauceri believes that Pierre Boulez had a good deal to answer for when he wrote his notorious polemic ‘Schoenberg est mort’ after the composer’s death in 1951. The post-war serialists took what they wanted (or needed) from Schoenberg’s method while cutting his music off from its roots: the influential theorist Theodor Adorno made the peculiar claim that Schoenberg was ‘like a man without origins, fallen from heaven’, when nothing could be further from the truth. But Schoenberg the emancipator of dissonance was the composer they were interested in, not Schoenberg the Jew, Schoenberg the teacher of harmony and counterpoint to film-music composers in Hollywood or, for that matter, Schoenberg the family man whose children called him ‘Daddy’.

BEETHOVEN’S FIFTH – THE SEQUEL

Something of this tension inflects performances of the First Chamber Symphony. As a conductor who had known Schoenberg since his student years in Vienna, Jascha Horenstein in 1957 draws out its Brahmsian, push-me-pull-you hemiola rhythms. He paints its teeming melodic life with the broadest of brushes over 26 minutes, whereas Boulez in 1964 cuts out all the sugar and fat with the Domaine Musical ensemble, nine minutes shorter, still none too well tuned.

It took a younger generation of performers to find the centre of the piece as a manifestation of the composer’s own identity, not bound to a Romantic past or a total-serialist future. In the UK, at any rate, as David Atherton recently recalled to me, his music ‘was always performed by groups that were just scraping things together, under-rehearsed and never really sorted out’. This state of affairs only improved in the late 1960s when Atherton and the late Nicholas Snowman formed the London Sinfonietta. The First Chamber Symphony was ‘our Beethoven Five’, says Atherton. ‘It was the genesis of the make-up of the Sinfonietta, with solo strings and solo winds: a phenomenally difficult piece, usually underprepared, but also a fully symphonic piece.’

By extension, the First Chamber Symphony made an impact on post-war music far beyond the notes, as other new-music ensembles modelled their makeup on the London Sinfonietta, and composers found that Schoenberg’s instrumentation permitted them a soloistic agility of both thought and execution. Younger musicians do not feel the burden of history pressing so heavily upon them: Napolitano, addressing the piano music, and Ilya Gringolts and his colleagues in the string quartets on BIS bring out relaxed and playful qualities foreign to (for example) Maurizio Pollini and the Juilliard Quartet, who were playing Schoenberg’s music in an era when the first priority was to get the notes right, and then to underline their bracing, perpetual modernity.

GALLERY TOUR

One of the few imaginative responses to the Schoenberg anniversary this year has taken place in Vienna. In the city that treated him alternately as hero and as madman during his lifetime, the MusikTheater an der Wien and Klangforum Wien staged a show covering his whole career across several rooms of the Reaktor (once a set of banqueting halls).

Appointed as curator of my own Schoenberg exhibition in sound (call it a playlist, if you must), I would leave out Gurrelieder, which long ago acquired a status and a momentum of its own. The first room would have to include Verklärte Nacht, saturated in the Wagnerian harmony that Schoenberg had embraced as a teenager, but I would encourage my visitors not to dwell too fondly there. They would move on briskly to the First Chamber Symphony: everything Schoenberg had inherited in large-scale form and harmony from the Austro-German tradition he seems to squeeze into a ball, like a whole bag of spinach steamed and reduced to an iron-rich pulp. At the other end of the room, Patricia Kopatchinskaja and friends would tease all the sexy, wide-eyed, moonstruck humour from Pierrot lunaire and the Brettl-Lieder (cabaret songs); Schoenberg was no Saint-Saëns, but he knew how to have fun.

The central room of my imaginary show would be dedicated to the Schoenberg of the 1920s, and the Opp 20s, placing the suites for piano and for ensemble opposite each other. Pride of place in this room would defiantly be given to the Wind Quintet of 1923-24. ‘If you’ve ever tried it and found its exhaustive “workings” overwhelming in the wrong sense, you have my sympathy,’ wrote Stephen Plaistow in 1977 (Gramophone Critics’ Choice); ‘but try it now in a performance by the Vienna Wind Soloists so warm and clear and scrupulous that what may once have passed as complexity becomes variety, and density richness.’ Interviewing the clarinettist Peter Schmidl, I was struck when he said that of all his recordings, he was most proud of making this one. There is an irreducible kernel of dialectic to the Wind Quintet, a fusion of serial harmony with old forms, which stands for Schoenberg’s output as a whole. Atherton recalls that the making of the London Sinfonietta recording of the piece on Decca (1973-74) took around 195 takes. Perhaps the satisfaction for the listener, as much as the performer, arises from finding your way through its ‘labyrinth of interconnecting parts’.

Schoenberg could have had the Wind Quintet in mind when he remarked that he did not expect listeners to love his music on first acquaintance; he only hoped they would not come to dislike it after 14 listenings. Is that naive, or even arrogant? I remember deciding to come to grips as a listener with Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony (completed in 1923, the year before the Wind Quintet) at a time before it occurred to me that reading a score would help; it took at least 14 attempts to feel for myself a logic as to what would happen next. At any rate, the Wind Quintet now unfolds for me with the rough and tumble of everyday life, full of birdsong and good company. I am as certain as I can be that the teenaged Shostakovich somehow heard or read this piece, and liked it enough to steal some comic moments from Schoenberg’s scherzo for his own First Symphony, completed in 1925.

Since we often fail to leave sufficient time and energy for the last rooms of an art show, I would omit Moses und Aron, the knotty and almost unstageable ‘opera of ideas’. In Mauceri’s festival of Schoenberg, his contemporaries and successors, however, I would love to hear the Dance around the Golden Calf from Moses alongside The Rite of Spring. A curtained annex would be dedicated to Die Jakobsleiter as his other tantalisingly incomplete ‘everything piece’, his would-be answer to Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis in its musical and dramatic journey up to heaven. At the door, a steward would hand out boxes of Michael Gielen conducting music from the Second Viennese School, an SWR Music set that gathers up lovingly dedicated performances of almost every piece discussed here.

Before that, though, the final room would pay tribute to Schoenberg’s extraordinary late harvest, including the pieces recorded by Mauceri on his ‘Schoenberg in Hollywood’ album for Decca (recently reissued by Eloquence within a set dedicated to the conductor’s Hollywood Bowl recordings). Another concert in Mauceri’s series would express Schoenberg’s newfound admiration for Gershwin and Ives. There would be space for his singular, variation-form excursions into the world of the wind band, and the organ, and for the freely rhapsodic Phantasy for violin and piano –another piece which has taken on a newly persuasive, less strident character with a younger generation of performers.

Still more striking as summations of his life’s work and thought are the settings of Jewish prayers for narrator, chorus and orchestra, Kol nidre (1938) and its better-known sequel, A Survivor from Warsaw (1947). Tonality, expressionism and 12-note method have become labels of limited use by this stage, to account for the strength of faith and personal feeling expressed in these works, even in the face of horror.

Schoenberg has never been short of eloquent advocates for his cause, but the most persuasive recent writing comes from the historian Jeremy Eichler. In his book Time’s Echo (2023), A Survivor from Warsaw takes its place alongside Britten’s War Requiem, Shostakovich’s Babi Yar, the writings of Stefan Zweig and Primo Levi and much else besides, as a necessary rebuke to the idea that it was an affront to create art about the Holocaust. The mix of English, German and Hebrew texts in A Survivor from Warsaw stands for Schoenberg’s own life story. It does not find an easy home in concert programmes. On his German and Jewish identities, Schoenberg once remarked: ‘I cannot feel by halves. With me it is one thing or the other!’

YouTube hosts a 1984 film of A Survivor, uploaded by Vienna’s Arnold Schönberg Center. It is given in a German church, by Bamberg forces under the baton of Horst Stein. He and the narrator Hermann Prey had lived through Nazi rule as boys; so, too, probably, had many of the musicians. The pain and the expiation of that memory is etched on their faces, and in Prey’s declamation. It is surely impossible to watch this and then think of the work’s creator as the cold inventor of abstract systems that had lost touch with the world around him. Those sharp thorns have lost none of their power to draw blood.

© Peter Quantrill / Gramophone

TONIGHT’S SOLOISTS

Jonathan Berman conductor

Jonathan Berman is an internationally renowned conductor working with orchestras such as The Cleveland Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and has conducted at the Tanglewood Festival and the BBC Proms.

His live performances receive the highest acclaim and his recordings have been praised for his deep understanding of the repertoire. Jonathan’s performances are regularly broadcast on national radio stations from the BBC to MDR Klassik and Radiotelevisione Svizzera.

Jonathan’s open-minded approach to music-making is reflected in his impressively broad repertoire, including over 40 operas. He is recognised for his thoughtfulness and insight, feeding into the unique and creative ways in which he connects to his audiences, such as, the 9 award winning films he made on Bach, Satie, Stravinsky, Ravel and a documentary series called Postcards From Vienna.

A fearless advocate for contemporary music (with over 75 World Premieres), Jonathan is equally well versed in the music of the classical and Romantic periods, specialising in music from Vienna. His recently released box set, Franz Schmidt: The Symphonies (BBC National Orchestra of Wales on the label Accentus Music celebrating he composer’s 150th anniversary) has won international universal acclaim.

British/Swiss baritone Richard Burkhard is a singeractor of chameleon-like versatility and creativity. He enjoys a reputation for bringing life and depth of character to his roles.

He is a previous recipient of the Decca Prize at the Kathleen Ferrier Vocal Awards, and winner of the Royal Overseas League singing competition.

Recent highlights include Don Bartolo Il barbiere di Siviglia and Bottom A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Garsington Opera, Ford and Forester Cunning Little Vixen for Opera North and Count Gil Il segreto di Susanna for Opera Holland Park. As well as in another role debut for Garsington Opera, the current season sees him involved in the world premiere of MarkAnthony Turnage’s Festen at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and in concert with the London Sinfonietta.

His repertoire encompassing roles as varied as Garibaldo (‘Rodelinda’) at the Bolshoi, Moscow, for which he was nominated for a Golden Mask Award, Harry Easter (‘Street Scene’) at Teatro Real, Madrid, and most recently Junius (‘The Rape of Lucretia’) for the KammerAkademie Potsdam.

In concert he has sung, amongst others, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the role of Joabel in Charpentier’s ‘Davide et Jonathas’ and the Witch in Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’. He has recently recorded the role of Jupiter in ‘Semele’ by John Eccles with the Academy of Ancient Music.

Richard Burkhard reciter/baritone

Andrew Zolinsky piano

Andrew Zolinsky’s unique style of programming and his individual interpretations have secured worldwide performances at many prestigious venues and festivals. His work with living composers brings a vivid freshness, energy and passion to his interpretations of music from previous eras.

Though a noted performer of contemporary and lesserknown repertoire, Andrew enjoys performing a wide range of music spanning several musical periods. He has performed with major orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia Orchestra, London Concert Orchestra and the Orchestre National de Lorraine

During the 2022/23 season, among other concerts, Andrew performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, New Music Dublin and Dark Music Days, Iceland; these three major festivals were all co-commissioners of two new major solo piano pieces written for him by the Irish composer Linda Buckley and the Icelandic composer Lilja María Ásmundsdóttir.

Future engagements include a tour of North America, and performances of concertos by Bernstein and the Irish premiere of Unsuk Chin’s Piano Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Olari Elts at the New Music Dublin festival 2025.

In addition to his performing career, Andrew is professor of piano at the Royal College of Music.

TONIGHT’S PLAYERS

Michael Cox* flute/piccolo

Gareth Hulse* oboe

Melinda Maxwell cor anglais

Mark van de Wiel* clarinet

Timothy Lines clarinet/Eb/bass clarinet

Katy Ayling bass clarinet

Emily Hultmark bassoon

Ruth Rosales contra bassoon

Diego Sánchez horn

Jonathan Maloney horn

Jason Evans trumpet

Jonathan Morton* violin

Elizabeth Wexler violin

Paul Silverthorne* viola

Joely Koos cello

Enno Senft* double bass

Andrew Zolinsky piano

Huw Davies guitar

Tom Ellis mandolin

Helen Tunstall* harp

*London Sinfonietta Principal Player

THEATRE OF SOUND

Theatre of Sound was created in 2021 as a vehicle to present new and informative ways of producing opera, theatre and music in an ever changing landscape. Our debut production, a reduced orchestration and radical re-telling of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s castle, for which the London Sinfonietta played an integral part, has been presented around the globe. Winner of the RPS award for best opera, the Dora award (Toronto) for best production and best director and nominated for a Sky Arts/Southbank award, this production continues its journey around the world with productions in Canada and Finland adding to already successful presentations in Atlanta, Toronto, Edinburgh, Beijing and New Zealand. We are always looking for ways to bring the music and theatre we love to a new audience and tonight’s Schoenberg concert staging has been designed to illuminate and contextualise this important musical material to create an inventive and accessible experience.

LONDON SINFONIETTA

The London Sinfonietta is one of the world’s leading contemporary music ensembles. Formed in 1968, our commitment to making new music has seen us commission over 470 works and premiere many hundreds more. Resident at the Southbank Centre and Artistic Associate at Kings Place, with a busy touring schedule across the UK and abroad, London Sinfonietta’s Principal Players are some of the finest musicians in the world.

Our ethos is to experiment constantly with the art form, working with the world’s best composers, performers, and artists to produce projects often involving film, theatre, dance and art. We challenge audience perceptions by commissioning work which addresses issues in today’s society, and we work closely with our audience as creators, performers and curators of the events we stage. We support and encourage musical creativity and the skills of composition in schools and

communities across the UK as well as working in partnership with Higher Education Institutions to give emerging musicians the opportunity to experience specialist training in understanding and playing contemporary classical music.

The London Sinfonietta has also broken new ground by launching its own digital channel, featuring video programmes and podcasts about new music. We created Steve Reich’s Clapping Music App, a participatory rhythm game that has been downloaded over 600,000 times worldwide, while our back catalogue of recordings has helped cement our world-wide reputation.

Image credit David Teng

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CURRENT SUPPORTERS

The London Sinfonietta would like to thank the following organisations and individuals for their support:

Trusts and Foundations

Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne

Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust

Big Give Foundation

Cockayne Grants for the Arts

Garfield Weston Foundation

Hodge Foundation

Jerwood Foundation

John Ellerman Foundation

Karlsson Játiva Charitable Foundation’s Signatur Programme

PRS Foundation

Steven R. Gerber Trust

Honorary Patrons

David Atherton OBE

Creative Pioneers

Ian Baker

Keith Brown

Frances Bryant

Andrew Burke

Jeremy & Yvonne Clarke

John Goodier

Sir Andrew Hall

Frank & Linda Jeffs

Andrew Nash

Julie Nicholls

Malcolm Reddihough

Iain Stewart

Plus those generous Artistic and Creative Pioneers who prefer to remain anonymous, as well as our loyal group of Pioneers.

Principal Players

London Sinfonietta Council

Fiona Thompson Chair

Sud Basu

Andrew Burke

Tim Gill (principal player)

Annabel Graham Paul

Kathryn Knight

Paul Silverthorne (principal player)

James Thomas

Ben Weston

Stephen Reid

Mark van de Wiel (principal player)

Fay Sweet

London Sinfonietta Staff

Andrew Burke

Chief Executive & Artistic Director

Frances Bryant General Manager

Elizabeth Davies Head of Finance

Susan Evans Finance Officer

Alfred Brendel KBE

Gillian Moore MBE

Entrepreneurs

Anthony Mackintosh (supporting Enno Senft)

Robert McFarland

Michael & Patricia McLaren-Turner (supporting Michael Cox)

Michael Cox flute (supported by Michael and Patricia McLaren-Turner)

Gareth Hulse oboe (supported by John Hodgson)

Mark van de Wiel clarinet

Simon Haram saxophone

Byron Fulcher trombone

Jonathan Morton violin (supported by Paul & Sybella Zisman)

Paul Silverthorne viola

Sinfonietta Circle

Susan Costello

Dennis Davis

Susan Grollet

John Hodgson (supporting Gareth Hulse)

Andy Spiceley (supporting David Hockings)

Paul & Sybella Zisman (supporting Jonathan Morton)

Artistic Pioneers

Anton Cox

Philip Meaden

Simon Osborne

Tim Gill cello

Enno Senft double bass

(supported by Anthony Mackintosh)

Helen Tunstall harp

David Hockings percussion (supported by Andy Spiceley)

Natalie Marchant

Head of Concerts & Touring

Nigel Harvey

Concerts & Productions Manager

Alice Kirker Concerts Producer

Evie Jones Development Officer

Lily Caunt

Head of Participation and Learning Jonah Baldwin Head of Marketing

Etta McEwan Marketing Officer

Freelance & Consultant Staff

Lesley Wynne

Orchestra Personnel Manager

Tony Simpson

Lighting Designer

WildKat PR

The London Sinfonietta is grateful to its auditors and accountants

MGR Weston Kay LL

COMING SOON

REFRACTED SOUND

A meditative and hypnotic evening exploring Morton Feldman’s expansive For Samuel Beckett, and Samuel Beckett’s experimental play Quad.

Fri 29 Nov 2024, 7.30pm

Queen Elizabeth Hall

LOVE LINES

An evening of music by Scottish composers exploring the idea of love and our deepest need for human connection. Hear rarely performed works by Peter Maxwell Davies and a world premiere of James MacMillan’s Love Bade Me Welcome.

Fri 6 Dec 2024, 8pm Hall Two Kings Place

BOULEZ/CAGE LETTERS

Discover more about the relationship between the two iconic composers of the post war period through the correspondence between Pierre Boulez and John Cage and through performances of their music.

Sun 9 Mar 2025, 7pm

Purcell Room at

Queen Elizabeth Hall

HIDDEN VOICES

Themed around the world premiere of a new Laurence Osborn composition comes works by Hannah Kendall and Luciano Berio exploring lost, hidden, obscured and suppressed voices from history.

Thurs 3 Apr 2025, 7.30pm

Queen Elizabeth Hall

IN C

London Sinfonietta and dance company Sasha Waltz & Guests join forces to present their vision of Terry Riley’s In C, trailblazing piece of musical minimalism.

Tues 29 & Wed 30 Apr 2025

Queen Elizabeth Hall

HUMANS

Two exclusive premieres from two rising stars of contemporary classical music. Future facing composers Sun Keting and Pablo Martinez debut their commissioned compositions as part of London Sinfonietta’s fifth edition of Writing the Future.

Thurs 12 Jun 2025, 7pm

Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall

For full details and to book visit londonsinfonietta.org.uk or southbankcentre. co.uk and join our e-list to receive further details of workshops and open rehearsals throughout the year.