LSO Futures Series programme

London Symphony Orchestra

LSO FUTURES 9–13 March 2016

Find out more lso.co.uk/futures

LSO FUTURES 2016 INTRODUCTION LSO Futures is a series of concerts, events and workshops exploring and celebrating the music of composers who push the boundaries of the classical genre to its limits.

The series features contemporary scores on every scale – from chamber to orchestral – and places performances of new works by emerging composers from the LSO’s Panufnik and Soundhub schemes alongside masterpieces of the 20th century by Schoenberg, Berio, Ligeti and Thomas Adès.

NEW WORKS BY Jack Sheen | Daniel Moreira | Patrick Giguère | Michael Taplin Deborah Pritchard | Ewan Campbell | Bethan Morgan-Williams Daniel-Lewis Fardon | Darren Bloom | Elizabeth Ogonek Sun 13 Mar 7pm broadcast live on BBC Radio 3

2 ABOUT

Generously supported by Lady Hamlyn and The Helen Hamlyn Trust The Britten-Pears Foundation PRS for Music Foundation Esmée Fairbairn Foundation

WHAT’S ON 9–13 MARCH 2016 Wednesday 9 March 10am–5.30pm, LSO St Luke’s GETTING IT RIGHT? NEW MUSIC AND DANCE CONFERENCE

page 6

Sunday 13 March 6pm, Guildhall School Lecture Recital Room BERIO: FOLK SONGS

page 36

Friday 11 March 10am–6pm, LSO St Luke’s PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOPS

page 8

Sunday 13 March 7pm, Barbican LSO FUTURES CONCERT II LIGETI, ELIZABETH OGONEK & BERIO

page 40

Sunday 13 March 4pm, LSO St Luke’s LSO FUTURES CONCERT I DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS

page 24

LSO Futures 3

WELCOME TO LSO FUTURES Welcome to LSO Futures, an exploration of the diversity of contemporary music and a celebration of composers who are pushing the boundaries of the classical genre today.

After the success of the first LSO Futures in 2013, we’re delighted to present this series of events for the second time.

LSO Futures launches on Wednesday with the third Getting it right? conference, an event produced in collaboration with our partners in the City of London, the Guildhall School.

This year’s conference, curated by composer Julian Anderson, discusses the dynamic relationship between the worlds of new music and contemporary dance.

Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director London Symphony Orchestra

4 WELCOME

On Friday, the full Orchestra workshops eight new works by the LSO’s Panufnik Composers – a scheme that has been generously supported

by Lady Hamlyn and The Helen Hamlyn Trust since its creation a decade ago. For these

workshops, we are joined by composer Colin Matthews and conductor François-Xavier Roth, who have led the LSO’s work with emerging composers over the last decade.

François-Xavier Roth joins us again on Sunday for the final day of events, conducting a chamber concert at LSO St Luke’s in the afternoon and an evening concert at the Barbican with the full Orchestra, which will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Against a backdrop of works by Schoenberg, Adès, Ligeti and Berio, these concerts feature world premieres by LSO composition scheme alumni Darren Bloom and Elizabeth Ogonek.

On Sunday afternoon we also welcome LSO Assistant Conductor Elim Chan for a performance of Berio’s Folk Songs with students from the Guildhall School.

I hope you enjoy the series and will join us at the Barbican or LSO St Luke’s again soon.

THE LSO AND COMPOSERS IN NUMBERS

58

w

1

,1

m

u si

c p e rf o r m

ed

Since 2005 the LSO has commissioned ...

169 composers

m in ute s o f

ne

44 LSO Discovery commissions performed by the LSO in Barbican concerts LSO Futures 5

WEDNESDAY 9 MARCH 10AM–5.30PM, LSO ST LUKE’S GETTING IT RIGHT? NEW MUSIC & DANCE CONFERENCE This one-day conference, the third in a series of Guildhall ResearchWorks/LSO Getting it right? conferences, brings together leading figures form the worlds of new music and dance to explore the dynamic relationship between the two disciplines.

A free sheet with full details and speaker names will be made available on the day

Convened by Julian Anderson, Professor of Composition & Composer in Residence, Guildhall School

10–11.15am Session 1 INTRODUCTION & KEYNOTE Welcome & Introduction Julian Anderson Keynote Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

Co-promoted by Guildhall School of Music & Drama ResearchWorks London Symphony Orchestra

11.45am–12.45pm Session 2 COLLABORATIONS ACROSS THE DIVIDE Poetry & Comedy Rambert’s Music Fellowship Performance of Stockhausen’s Harlekin

6 GETTING IT RIGHT? NEW MUSIC & DANCE CONFERENCE

1.45–2.45pm Session 3 COLLABORATIONS ACROSS THE DIVIDE London Contemporary Dance School & Guildhall School 2.45–4.15pm Session 4 TRADITION & INNOVATION Perspectives on a new work at the Royal Ballet 4.15–5.30pm Session 5 ROUND TABLE: THINKING AHEAD

Postgraduate training for composers The Guildhall School offers some of the most stimulating and creative training for composers in the UK, allowing you to explore and refine your individual artistic voice under the expert guidance of experienced practitioners.

MMus/MComp in Composition MA in Opera Making & Writing In association with the Royal Opera House Research degrees Including the Guildhall School and Royal Opera House Doctoral Composer-in-Residence Watch films and find out more at gsmd.ac.uk

FRIDAY 11 MARCH 10AM–6PM, LSO ST LUKE’S PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOP François-Xavier Roth conductor Colin Matthews composition director Christian Mason composition support David Alberman orchestra liaison In 2016 the LSO Discovery Panufnik Composers Scheme celebrates its tenth anniversary. Each year it gives six emerging composers the opportunity to explore the diverse possibilities of writing for a worldclass orchestra.

Supported by Lady Hamlyn and The Helen Hamlyn Trust

8 PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOP

Under the guidance of renowned composer Colin Matthews, the scheme enables composers to experiment over time and develop their orchestral writing skills, to establish a collaborative musical relationship with LSO players, and finally to have the rare chance to work with the Orchestra in a public rehearsal. The composers are drawn not only from the classical tradition, but also from other musical styles and backgrounds.

Each year the LSO selects one of the composers to write a ten-minute commission and another to write a five-minute commission for an LSO concert at the Barbican. The composers are given the opportunity to workshop their commissions with the Orchestra in advance of the premiere.

Today we will hear the first rehearsal of Jack Sheen’s ten-minute piece Lung and Michael Taplin’s five-minute piece Ebbing Tides, both commissioned after last year’s workshop. We are looking forward to hearing the pieces performed by the LSO at the Barbican in the 2016/17 season.

The scheme has been devised by the Orchestra in association with Lady Panufnik in memory of her late husband, the composer Sir Andrzej Panufnik. The Panufnik Scheme is generously supported by Lady Hamlyn and the Helen Hamlyn Trust.

PROGRAMME MORNING SESSION

AFTERNOON SESSION

10am Jack Sheen Lung

2.30pm Deborah Pritchard The Angel Standing in the Sun

10.50am Daniel Moreira Miniature Variations 3.20pm Ewan Campbell Three Glimpses 11.35am Break

2011 Matthew Kaner, Alastair Putt, Joanna Lee, Michael Langemann, Duncan Ward, Mihyun Woo 2010 Edward Nesbit, Nancie Eloise Gynn, Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian, Christopher Mayo, Dan Stern, Elizabeth Winters

4.05pm Break 11.55am Patrick Giguère l’heure de s’enivrer 4.25pm Bethan Morgan-Williams Scoot 12.45pm Michael Taplin Ebbing Tides

2009 Vlad Maistorovici, Francisco Coll García, Edmund Finnis, Fung Lam, Max de Wardener, Toby Young

5.15pm Daniel-Lewis Fardon Flux 1.30–2.30pm Lunch Timings are subject to change at the discretion of the conductor LSO St Luke’s politely requests: No eating or drinking in the Hall. All mobiles, watch alarms cameras and recording equipment are turned off in the Hall. Please avoid sitting or standing in gangways.

LSO St Luke’s is a no-smoking building.

PANUFNIK SCHEME GRADUATES

2008 Joshua Penduck, Sasha Siem, Raymond Yiu, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Matthew Sergeant, Andrew McCormack

2014 Michael Cryne, Michael Cutting, Alex Roth, Vitalija Glovackyte˙, Jack Sheen, Michael Taplin

2007 Charlie Piper, Elspeth Brooke, Tom Lane, Emily Howard, Evis Sammoutis, Anjula Semmens

2013 Elizabeth Ogonek, James Moriarty, Kim Ashton, Benjamin Graves, Jae-Moon Lee, Richard Whalley

2006 Jason Yarde, Larry Goves, Christian Mason, Emily Hall, Matthew Rogers, Martin Suckling

2012 Aaron Parker, Patrick Brennan, Ryan Latimer, Leo Chadburn, David Coonan, Bushra El-Turk

2005 (pilot) Daniel Basford, Philip Venables, John Douglas Templeton

LSO Futures 9

THE MUSIC MORNING SESSION JACK SHEEN (b 1993) LUNG Almost everything that happens in Jack Sheen’s piece is there in its first few bars.

Rather like an Alexander Calder mobile, in which there is no foreground or background, and in which every element is equal to every other, Lung has been written without narrative or dramatic incident, in the usual sense of the terms, but as an object to be slowly considered from every angle.

But this is not to say that everything that happens can be heard in those first few bars.

Sheen’s piece may be flat in one sense, but – again like Calder’s mobiles – it also has great depth of field, with layers of music rolling over each other to bring different elements in and out of view. Sheen divides his orchestra into independent groups that cross the traditional 10 PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOP

family barriers. So harp and alto flute pair up to play imaginary folktunes; piano, flute, clarinet and trumpets sound slowly changing arpeggios; and horns, violas and double basses sustain a harmonic bed. Most distinctive of all is a heavily muted trio made up of the leaders of the first violins, violas and cellos. Apart from four cues from the conductor, indicating points where they should start and stop, they act entirely independently of the rest of the orchestra, cycling through their own collection of melodic loops.

The title refers first of all to the slow expansion and contraction of breath, but it might also suggest the self-similar division of the airways into smaller and smaller paths, each division reflecting the structure of the whole. Or, again, a labyrinthine organism, alive through constant motion.

DANIEL MOREIRA (b 1983) MINIATURE VARIATIONS Miniature Variations begins mysteriously, with a chromatic melody played by the second violins, accompanied by string harmonics, rising flute arpeggios and dry percussion. It is a curious soundworld, but one ripe with possibilities.

Rather than a theme and variations in the usual sense, Daniel Moreira’s piece is more like a miniature concerto for orchestra that manages to squeeze in solos from all around the stage.

Instead of a single theme developing, lots of ideas are varied throughout the piece – not only melodies, but also rhythmic patterns, textures, and more. Several of these ‘variations’ might be heard at once.

First a solo violin takes a version of the melody into the stratosphere, high over interlocking semiquaver wind figures. Next it is the turn of the cor anglais, which plays in long,

arcing phrases, accompanied by descending chromatic runs in the strings and contrapuntal melodies from the other wind. For the third variation the wind and strings step back and the brass becomes more prominent, with chorale-like figures set against the cor anglais’ ongoing solo. The texture changes again, but remains stripped down as individual pizzicato notes spread amongst the strings, their scattered points counterpointed by flourishes from the flutes and clarinets.

In the final third of the piece, these different spin-offs are gradually brought together. The cor anglais solo returns, now heard in quasicanon with the two oboes. The wind figures and violin solo of the first variation return too, as do the descending chromatic runs of the second. At the work’s climax, an unusual trio of harp, bassoon and cello take up the melody over a shimmering celesta bed, leaving the final word to the piccolo.

PATRICK GIGUÈRE (b 1987) L’HEURE DE S’ENIVRER According to comments in the score, l’heure de s’enivrer describes a three-stage arc from one emotional state to another: ‘First with contained intensity … which is gradually released … and then, almost with exultation.’

The use of qualifiers is revealing – contained; gradually; almost. This is music that steps back from bold statements, preferring caution and deliberate imprecision. Giguère explores such states in other pieces too, composing with densities, degrees of focus and points in time.

The piece shares its title – ‘time to drink’ – with a book by the well-known Canadian cosmologist Hubert Reeves, a meditation on the meaning of the universe in the age of nuclear weaponry. Could consciousness, having taken 15 billion years to emerge, really eradicate itself in a matter of minutes?

It could be said that Giguère’s piece is as single-minded in its trajectory as the universe itself. At its start there is a division between strings, who play with practice mutes; and the rest, who play bundled melodies circling around a few notes, combining to create cluster chords, very quietly. It is a model of controlled chaos, yet when the strings remove their mutes the two halves start to come together, increasing in volume and coming closer to rhythmic unison. The music rises in register until the final pages, when it suddenly doubles in speed; from here to the end the orchestra moves joyfully as one.

‘Intelligence is not necessarily a poisoned chalice,’ Reeves concludes. ‘The absurd is still avoidable. The awakening of jubilation is, perhaps, the most effective antidote.’

LSO Futures 11

THE MUSIC continued AFTERNOON SESSION MICHAEL TAPLIN (b 1991) EBBING TIDES Michael Taplin clearly relishes the sound of many musical layers running independently over each other, like metronomes set at different speeds, or clouds passing in the sky. It is a technique that lends itself well to portraying natural phenomena, although he has also used it in his vocal piece A Banker’s Scandal? to create a babble of chattering voices. Ebbing Tides makes use of layers like these across the full breadth of the orchestra, each circling around the same pool of notes, but each describing a different rhythmic and melodic shape, to emulate the sea breaking on and receding from the shoreline.

The score is marked at the start ‘Gently Breathing,’ and this spirit pervades much of the music that follows. The first section of 12 PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOP

the piece unfolds harmonically rich chords (dissonant, but not overly so – Taplin refers to the harmony having a ‘transfixing’ quality), orchestrated with a soft in–out movement between strings and wind. As new layers are added, the different rhythms of the individual ebbs and flows overlap and combine in endlessly unpredictable yet somehow stable and reassuring ways, just like the sea itself.

The waves get stronger until they are suddenly cut off; at this point the music switches to a texture of fast repeated notes, yet still making similar overall patterns of stasis-within-movement. Again the music rises to a loud climax that is abruptly halted.

In the third and final section a sense of calm is restored as wind and brass sustain soft drones beneath high-spiralling strings, which finally float into the distance.

DEBORAH PRITCHARD (b 1977) THE ANGEL STANDING IN THE SUN JMW Turner’s late painting The Angel Standing in the Sun (1846) shows an apocalyptic scene rather different from the impressionistic sea and cloudscapes by which he is perhaps better known. In it appears the Archangel Michael, flaming sword in hand, on the Day of Judgement. Painted at the centre of a fiery orange maelstrom, he is surrounded by flocking vultures and, in front of him, almost obliterated by the light, scenes from the Old Testament of murder and betrayal.

It is unsurprising that Deborah Pritchard was drawn to this painting. A synaesthete who hears sounds as colours, her music is frequently connected to works of visual art, either independently of or in collaboration with artists themselves. Like that other famously synaesthetic composer, Olivier Messiaen

(whose work she is an expert in), she often also turns to religious themes.

EWAN CAMPBELL (b 1983) THREE GLIMPSES

Her short orchestral work is certainly as dramatic as Turner’s painting. It begins with a highly chromatic, searing string melody, whose penetrating quality is punctuated by brass and enhanced by piercing winds: the sound of Michael’s blaze of light. Tom-toms, timpani and a solo trombone add their own apocalyptic touches. At the centre of the work the winds come together in a strident melody of their own; at its height they are joined by the full orchestra in powerful chorus. The work reaches its climax with interlocking flurries of wind over a sustained and dissonant string chord. Both slowly fade to an ending (marked ‘ethereal’) of soft strings and descending chimes as Judgement is finally passed.

Faced with the challenge of compressing a piece for full orchestra into just three minutes, Ewan Campbell decided that the solution was, paradoxically, to increase that sense of compression still further and divide those three minutes into three separate movements. In fact, he says, this freed him up to think of each movement as just a snippet (or ‘glimpse’) of a much larger piece of music. These glimpses are caught only momentarily, as though suddenly and briefly illuminated in different kinds of light – hence the movements’ subtitles of ‘Radiant’, ‘Spark and Burn’, and ‘Strobe’.

the movement. ‘Spark and Burn’ begins with a Ligeti-like weave of densely chromatic wind counterpoint, which condenses in the space of just four bars to a single point. The movement’s second half, meanwhile, features prominent string glissandi based, apparently, on the sound of a pack of barking dogs Campbell heard while in India several years ago. As the music progresses, their barks are stretched into slow upward slides. The third movement contains even more invention, ‘Strobe’ suggesting the blips of chromatic melody in the bass and a hint of club music as they morph towards the end of the piece into a strange, 12-tone funk riff whose wide, syncopated leaps infect the entire orchestra.

Nevertheless, Campbell’s piece is packed with ideas that pass by as quickly as they are lit.

‘Radiant’ is based around a chord derived from aural analysis of the sound of a two-meter long tubular bell, which emerges slowly throughout LSO Futures 13

THE MUSIC continued BETHAN MORGAN-WILLIAMS (b 1992) SCOOT Somewhat unusually, the two short sections of Bethan Morgan-Williams’ Scoot are not intended to be heard straight after one another, at least not eventually. Instead, they are to be the first and third parts of a longer orchestral work whose middle is still to be written.

The clarinet music in Part I was the first element of the piece Morgan-Williams composed, and is inspired by the LSO’s versatile clarinet section who, she says, ‘have always brought a smile to my face’.

Their trio of interlocking parts inspires the music for the rest of this section, which centres on short rising motifs (often as glissandi for the clarinets), underpinned by mechanically clacking and chiming percussion and celesta to keep the music 14 PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOP

grounded. A sudden drum solo after a minute or so changes the mood completely, however, and the rising motifs – which until now had sounded light and innocent – take on a more yearning feel, as though searching for something to complete them.

The percussion section is also prominent at the start of the second part (what will be Part III of the final piece), which is titled ‘kissing dance’. Picking up from the violins’ opening stab, the tom toms and temple blocks start to lay down a syncopated groove, but this is quickly broken up by layers of imitation amongst the rest of the orchestra. Short but energetic, this half of the piece is packed with incident and humour, including a very brief comic turn for the bassoons and a pair of false endings. Beware!

DANIEL-LEWIS FARDON (b 1991) FLUX ‘Currently enjoying an open relationship between the serious and the light; the sober and the merry; the timeworn and the new’ is how Daniel-Lewis Fardon describes himself and his work. It’s a description that captures the particularly mercurial quality of his music, which at any given moment might contain hints of Renaissance song, European folk music, Viennese Classicism or 21st-century modernism – or two or more at once. Not surprisingly Flux is no exception, packing into its three minutes several musical sections, with instructions in the score that go from ‘rhapsodic’ to ‘deranged!’.

The music is similarly varied. After an opening of radiant, wedge-like harmonies that leaves us unsure where we’re about to go, the music moves through a series of fleeting moments,

each derived from that opening material but each time turning into something else – this continuous flowing out of ideas is the flux of the work’s title. One early section sets in motion processes among five different instrumental groups, each beginning with the alternation of two notes in stuttering, unpredictable rhythms and growing to include a wider and wider spread, each to a slightly different rhythm (the slowest in the strings), and each expanding at a different rate. Another section is dominated by punchy horn melody.

Throughout, a short, accented motif tries to interject and assert itself as the main theme.

The beginning and end echo each other, the latter shot through with what amounts to a brief solo for tubular bells.

PROGRAMME NOTES TIM RUTHERFORD-JOHNSON

LSO Futures 15

COLIN MATTHEWS COMPOSITION DIRECTOR, PANUFNIK SCHEME Colin Matthews was born in London in 1946.

He studied at the Universities of Nottingham and Sussex, and subsequently worked as assistant to Benjamin Britten and with Imogen Holst. He collaborated with Deryck Cooke for many years on the performing version of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. Since the early 1970s his music has ranged from solo piano music through five string quartets and many ensemble and orchestral works. From 1992–9 he was Associate Composer with the LSO, writing amongst other works a Cello Concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1997 his choral/ orchestral Renewal, commissioned for the 50th anniversary of BBC Radio 3, was given a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. More recent works include Reflected Images for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Berceuse for Dresden for the New York Philharmonic and Turning Point for the Concertgebouw Orchestra. He was Composer-in-Association with the Hallé from 2001–10, now Composer 16 PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOP

Emeritus, making for them his orchestrations of Debussy’s 24 Préludes. Traces Remain was premiered by the BBCSO in 2014, and Spiralling

by Spira Mirabilis at Aldeburgh in October 2014; The Pied Piper, a collaboration with Michael Morpurgo, was performed by the LPO in February 2015. Future commissions include works for the BCMG and London Sinfonietta.

He is Founder and Executive Producer of NMC Recordings, Executive Administrator of the Holst Foundation and Music Director of the Britten-Pears Foundation. He has been co-director with Oliver Knussen of the Aldeburgh Composition Course since 1992, and Composition Director of the LSO’s Panufnik Composers Scheme since 2005.

He holds honorary posts with several universities and is Prince Consort Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music.

CHRISTIAN MASON COMPOSITION SUPPORT, PANUFNIK SCHEME Christian Mason defines composition as ‘searching in sound for fleeting solidifications of intangible experiences’; his music, which combines an emotional aspiration to radiance with a sensitivity to natural resonance, has been commissioned, performed and broadcast internationally.

2015 saw the premieres of Open to Infinity: a Grain of Sand, co-commissioned for Pierre Boulez’s 90th birthday by Lucerne Festival and the BBC Proms, Layers of Love recorded by Klangforum Wien and premiered in Japan by Tokyo Sinfonietta, and Sympathetic Resonance, recorded by the Orchestre National de France for broadcast on Radio France’s ‘Alla Breve’ programme.

Current commissions include Lahara, a percussion sextet for the opening season of the Asian Arts Theatre in Gwangju, South Korea; Sonorous Islands for ensemble with audience participation co-produced by the

London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Asko/ Schönberg and Remix Ensemble as part of the ‘Connect Project’; a piece for the Munich Chamber Orchestra; and a programme written for the ‘Music of Today’ series with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

A Composer in Residence at Eton College in 2014/15, Christian previously worked as Composition Assistant to Sir Harrison Birtwistle, and continues to teach on the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme in which he was a participant in 2006. He read Music at the University of York before pursuing a PhD at King’s College London with George Benjamin, 2008–12, following which he was awarded the 2012 Mendelssohn Scholarship.

Christian is the founding Co-Artistic Director of the Octandre Ensemble. His works are now published by Breitkopf & Härtel.

LSO Futures 17

PANUFNIK COMPOSERS BIOGRAPHIES EWAN CAMPBELL‘s music has been awarded several international composition prizes including the New York-based Counterpoint Competition, the Forme uniche Competition in Adelaide and the Italian Mare Nostrum Competition. His works have been performed by ensembles including: the Britten Sinfonia, The Küss Quartet, the Fukio Ensemble, Lontano, Ensemble Matisse, Consortium 5, The Hermes Experiment, the Dr K Sextet, Anton Lukoszevieze, Thomas Gould and Clare Hammond.

Ewan studied musical composition at Cambridge University, with Jeremy Thurlow and Robin Holloway, and at King’s College London, where he completed a PhD under the tutelage of George Benjamin and Silvina Milstein. He now supervises in composition, orchestration, 20th-century history and analysis at Cambridge University and in 18 PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOP

2012 Ewan was appointed as Composer-inResidence with the Cambridge University Music Society.

As well as writing music for the concert hall he has collaborated with various dancers, filmmakers and theatre companies. Ewan is also active as a conductor and events curator, currently working with the Dr K Sextet on the Pierrot Project, in nurturing collaborations between the visual and aural arts. Ewan directs the Festival Orchestra and recently performed a show of his own orchestral arrangements of Radiohead at the Wilderness Festival.

DANIEL-LEWIS FARDON is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Michael Zev Gordon, where his research explores how musical eclecticism is understood and manifested across new music platforms. He is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and the Birmingham Conservatoire, where he studied under the tutelage of Richard Causton, Howard Skempton and Errollyn Wallen. He is currently the recipient of both The Sir Thomas White’s Music Scholarship, and a UoB CAL Doctoral Scholarship, which generously funds his study and research.

His career highlights include working with and writing for The HEMESensemble, BCMG, the Britten Sinfonia, Mark-Anthony Turnage, The Schubert Ensemble, Orkest de Ereprijs and CHROMA Ensemble, as well as various festival commissions including King’s Lynn, InTheSkyTour, The Little Missenden, Stratford on Avon, Flatpack, and CrossCurrents.

Daniel also works as a pianist specialising in the performance of contemporary music, performing both as a soloist and chamber musician, premiering the works of others as well as his own. In 2014, he was Head of Piano for the Royal Leamington Spa Competitive Music Festival, and in 2015, the president of the Darwin College Music Society at the University of Cambridge.

PATRICK GIGUÈRE Fascinated by music’s power to consecrate moments, by the unique qualities of shared listening and by the physicality of performance, Patrick tries to create intense musical experiences through his composing, conducting and curating.

In recent years, he has worked with performers such as Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, Ensemble Paramirabo, the Le Page Ensemble and Thin Edge New Music Collective, Aventa Ensemble, l’Orchestre de la Francophonie and l’American Academy of Conducting in Aspen Orchestra. His music has been performed all across North America and in the United Kingdom. He received various awards, notably the 3rd Serge-Garant Prize in 2015 for his work Le sel de la terre, which was toured extensively across Canada and recorded at the legendary Glenn Gould studios in Toronto.

Patrick conducts the Ensemble Lunatik, a new music ensemble that he founded in 2009. He also recently started to work with the Thallein Ensemble in Birmingham.

From 2013 to 2015, he was the artistic director of Erreur de type 27, an organisation producing new music concerts. An important part of Québec’s cultural life, Erreur de type 27’s concerts have been nominated for the Concert of the Year Opus Prize in 2014.

After studying in Québec City at l’Université Laval and working in Montreal as a composer and teacher, Patrick is now based in Birmingham where he is undertaking a PhD in composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire.

LSO Futures 19

PANUFNIK COMPOSERS continued BIOGRAPHIES BETHAN MORGAN-WILLIAMS is a recent graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music, where she studied composition with Gary Carpenter and violin with Lelend Chen.

Her current projects include commissions for trumpeter Joe Atkins, Ensemble 10/10, the 2017 Salford Sonic Fusion Festival, and horn-player Alex Wide.

Bethan is currently working alongside drummer and producer Tom Rydeard as part of an alternative electro-acoustic duo and with writer Beatrice Wallbank. Bethan and Beatrice are working on a staged version of The Legend of Gelert, using narration, live music and choreography to produce a multilayered re-presentation of the ancient Welsh tale for a new audience.

20 PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOP

Bethan is also an experienced violinist.

Having played since she was three years old, she made her concerto debut at the age of 14 with Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto.

She continues to play violin and viola professionally around the UK. Most recently, Bethan has been working with composer Paolo Gatti, on his piece Poltergeist for violin and electronics, which they performed at Leeds’ International Festival for Art Innovation – IFIMPaC 2016.

Recent works include Enraptured for viola and piano – which was premiered by Paul Silverthorne and Aglaia Tarantino at LSO St Luke’s on 30 January 2016 – and in the crypt for French horn and electronics, Bethan is the current holder of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s inaugural Christopher Brooks Composition Prize in association with the Rushworth Foundation.

DANIEL MOREIRA holds a BA in Economics (University of Porto) and an MA in Music Theory and Composition (Higher School of Music, Arts and Performance; Polytechnic Institute of Porto). At present he is a PhD candidate in Music Composition at King’s College, London, working under the supervision of George Benjamin and Silvina Milstein. He has also attended seminars and had occasional one-to-one classes with Klaas de Vries, Helmut Lachenmann, Magnus Lindberg, Jonathan Harvey and Kaija Saariaho, and he actively participated in workshops with Remix Ensemble, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Diotima Quartet and Lontano Ensemble.

His music has been commissioned, among others, by Casa da Música, Festival Musica Strasbourg, European Concert Hall Organisation, Movimento Patrimonial para a Música Portuguesa and Chester & Novello, and is performed in Portugal and

elsewhere in Europe by ensembles such as Porto Symphony Orchestra, Remix Ensemble and Gulbenkian Orchestra. Aside from several awards in international composition competitions, he has also been awarded a Young Composer-in-Residence at Casa da Música, and he represented Portugal at the UNESCO International Composer’s Tribune.

His music embraces multiple genres and formats, including orchestral, chamber, ensemble, vocal and film music. He is particularly interested in the relationship between music and poetry and, in fact, most of his recent music has been vocal – including his first opera, premiered in 2015.

Stylistically, his music shows a preference for complex textures, in which a variety of musical lines or strata – each with a particular musical character – unfold simultaneously.

DEBORAH PRITCHARD is a British composer broadcast by BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and released by NMC, Signum and Nimbus. In 2016 she will receive world premieres from the London Sinfonietta, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Manchester Camerata and will take up her position as composer-in-residence at the Lichfield Festival. Previous performances have been given by the Royal Northern Sinfonia, Philharmonia Orchestra, BBC Singers and English String Orchestra. She studied composition under Simon Bainbridge for her MMus Degree in Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, subsequently holding the Junior Manson Fellowship, and was awarded her DPhil from Worcester College, Oxford where she studied with Robert Saxton.

concerto Wall of Water is one of two recent works written after paintings by artist and sculptor Maggi Hambling. It was premiered by violin soloist Harriet Mackenzie and the English String Orchestra at LSO St Luke’s in October 2014 and subsequently performed at the National Gallery in January 2015.

The second piece after Hambling’s work is Wave Returning for chamber ensemble, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and premiered by Pierre-André Valade and the London Sinfonietta Academy at LSO Luke’s in July 2015. Deborah is currently tutor in composition at the University of Oxford.

Deborah is a synaesthetic composer Described as a work that ‘takes one’s breath away’ by Gramophone, her violin LSO Futures 21

PANUFNIK COMPOSERS continued BIOGRAPHIES JACK SHEEN is a composer and conductor from Manchester. Following an interest in experimental and electronic music, Jack began writing music whilst in Sixth Form and soon joined the National Youth Orchestra as a composer in 2011. Later that same year he was awarded BBC Young Composer of the Year and has gone on to write music for the BBC Philharmonic, Aurora Orchestra, Manchester Camerata, the Aldeburgh Festival, Psappha, Opera North, EXAUDI and the RNCM. Since 2012 Jack has been awarded an RNCM Gold Medal, the college’s most prestigious annual prize, the Grindon/Dearden Prize, the University of Manchester’s Hargreaves Prize and Highly Commended in the inter-collegiate Theodore Holland Prize.

Conducting and curating are central to Jack’s practice. In 2016 he conducted at the Lucerne 22 PANUFNIK COMPOSERS WORKSHOP

Festival and International Dartington Festival academies, and has previously worked with a variety of ensembles and orchestras such as Psappha, Halberstadt Orchestra, Ensemble Linea and ACM Ensemble, with whom he has performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Cafe OTO. He is the co-director of ddmmyy, a concert series dedicated to commissioning and contextualising experimental music.

Jack studied with Larry Goves and David Horne on the RNCM/University of Manchester Joint Course, graduating with first-class honours specialising in composing, conducting and aesthetics in 2015. He is currently completing a Masters degree at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama as a Leverhulme Scholar, where he studies composition with James Weeks and conducting with Tim Redmond.

MICHAEL TAPLIN Born in 1991 and raised in London, Michael Taplin has been actively involved in writing music from an early age and studied privately with Dai Fujikura with a grant from the Talbot House Trust. In 2009, Michael accepted a place at the Guildhall School with a scholarship where he studied with Paul Newland. Michael’s music has been performed/workshopped by groups such as the Gemini Ensemble, Exaudi, The Composers Ensemble, the Namascae and Lemanic Modern Ensemble.

Michael attended the St Magnus Composers‘ Course in Orkney, Scotland, with Sally Beamish and Alasdair Nicolson, and more recently the Britten-Pears Composition Course in Aldeburgh with Oliver Knussen, Colin Matthews and Michael Gandolfi, Dartington International Summer School’s Advanced Composition Course and the ‘New

NEW FROM LSO LIVE THE PANUFNIK LEGACIES II Voices’ Artists’ Programme at Royaumont Abbey with Brian Ferneyhough, Fabien Lévy and Oscar Bianchi.

Michael recently completed his Masters of Composition with Distinction at the Royal College of Music with Jonathan Cole and Simon Holt. Michael is the recipient of the 2015 Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Composer Prize. Current projects include a large ensemble work for the Philharmonia Orchestra.

François-Xavier Roth conductor London Symphony Orchestra PRE-ORDER NOW Release Date 1 April 2016 – £5.99 lsolive.lso.co.uk The Panufnik Legacies II showcases the works of selected composers from the first ten years of the LSO’s pioneering Panufnik Composers Scheme.

FEATURED COMPOSERS Evis Sammoutis, Alastair Putt, Toby Young, Christopher Mayo, Elizabeth Winters, Aaron Parker, Max de Wardener, Leo Chadburn, Larry Goves, Raymond Yiu, Anjula Semmens, Edmund Finnis, Kim B Ashton, Bushra El-Turk, Matthew Kaner, James Moriarty, Duncan Ward, Elizabeth Ogonek and Colin Matthews.

Generously supported by the Boltini Trust.

LSO Futures 23

SUNDAY 13 MARCH 4PM, LSO ST LUKE’S LSO FUTURES CONCERT I: DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS Darren Bloom Dr Glaser’s Experiment (world premiere, LSO commission)* Thomas Adès Chamber Symphony Schoenberg Chamber Symphony No 1 François-Xavier Roth conductor Ignatz Johnson Higham live visuals* LSO Chamber Orchestra

An image captured as part of a bubble chamber experiment detailing the movements of sub-atomic particles.

LSO commission Generously supported by PRS for Music Foundation and Britten-Pears Foundation

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER JO KIRKBRIDE

24 DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS

DARREN BLOOM (b 1982) DR GLASER’S EXPERIMENT (2015) When Bloom joined the LSO Soundhub scheme for emerging composers in 2013, he was given the opportunity to write a threeminute work for a handful of LSO soloists. But what started out as a short chamber piece for small ensemble has transformed into the wide orchestral canvas you hear today, a work that combines visual imagery with spatialised performance in what Bloom hopes will be an immersive, three-dimensional experience.

Dr Glaser’s Experiment is named after Donald A Glaser, a scientific pioneer who earned himself a Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the Bubble Chamber, one of the precursors to today’s particle accelerators. By using a device filled with super-heated liquid hydrogen and firing charged particles into its midst, Glaser discovered that it was possible

As a listener, you are invited to immerse yourself completely, to plunge into the heart of the bubble chamber and imagine yourself ‘on the scale of a subatomic particle, floating and nearly weightless.’ to ‘see’ the particles by capturing photos of the microscopic trails of bubbles they left behind. The images Glaser and his team captured are not just fascinating scientific excerpts but beautiful artistic images too, forming the basis of Ignatz Johnson Higham’s animations that accompany tonight’s performance. In that sense it is a truly multi-disciplinary work, one which is inspired by science, informed by art and expressed through music. As Bloom acknowledges, Johnson’s reactions to his music, and his

thoughts about how to express them visually, ‘would in turn circle back and re-influence the progress of the composition.’

Bloom’s music is both an illustration of Glaser’s striking and enigmatic images and, in his words, ‘a celebration of the curious scientific mind, the striving for enlightenment by these individuals that brings such extraordinary benefits to all our lives.’ As a listener, you are invited to immerse yourself completely, to plunge into the heart of the bubble chamber and imagine yourself ‘on the scale of a subatomic particle, floating and nearly weightless.’ But you are also encouraged to take a wider journey too, to admire the creation of the machine, the detail of the experiment itself and – at its zenith – the moment of Epiphany, the scientific discovery after years of hard work and perseverance.

For Bloom, the work is an expression of a lifelong fascination with science, and with physics in particular. ‘I think it’s because physicists parallel what I’m trying to do with my music,’ he says, ‘getting deep inside the materials of music, even the acoustic nature of sound itself.’ Placing the audience at the centre of a spatialised performance – in which the performers surround the listeners and encircle them in a web of sound – is in part an attempt to get ‘deep inside the materials’ of the bubble chamber and so too of Bloom’s music. But as the work passes its climax and enters the final Epiphany section, the harmony undergoes a radical transformation into a microtonal spectral language that, for Bloom, ‘represents physicists ‘seeing inside the invisible’ by hearing the inside of a sound through the magnification of its partials.’

LSO Futures 25

SUNDAY 13 MARCH 4PM, LSO ST LUKE’S continued LSO FUTURES CONCERT I: DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS THOMAS ADÈS (b 1971) CHAMBER SYMPHONY OP 2 (1990)

ADÈS & RHYTHM From his earliest works Adès has developed a unique and complex approach to rhythm – he frequently employs irrational time signatures, broken tuplets and multiple concurrent tempi, techniques that find their roots in the work of Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow, two major influences on Adès’ music.

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER PAUL GRIFFITHS

Having made a start as a composer in January 1990 with a set of TS Eliot songs, Adès had by the end of that same year completed this work for 15-piece ensemble: a chamber symphony that goes through four movements, fastish–slow–fast–slow, in an unbroken span. By his own account he began with the idea of a concerto for basset clarinet, the bass-extended instrument for which Mozart wrote a concerto, quintet and other music. As he started composing, however, ‘the accompanying chamber ensemble became infected with the personality of the solo instrument, until the whole group represented in my mind a superbasset-clarinet with strings and a constant rhythm section’.

26 DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS

The rhythm section gets the music going, in a ‘queasy but strict tango rhythm’, breeding a kind of sonata movement, whose first subject grows from the up-down half-step motif that comes in over the rhythm on viola and alto flute. Just as the piece seems to be developing into a concerto for jazz basset clarinet, it changes texture and tone for the second subject, with string harmonics, nervy chords on the piano (entering for the first time) and a ‘Three Blind Mice’ figure on the brass.

From here the music starts gaining in intensity, with both subjects overlaid, until the tango suddenly winds down to ‘a cavernous tread’, over which the trombone meditates before the basset clarinet is restored to its pre-eminence. The temperature rises steadily, and the up-down motif comes back high in the woodwind.

‘Adès performs one of the greatest sleights of hand a composer is capable of. His music makes you hear things you thought you were familiar with as if they were completely new.’

Tom Service on Thomas Adès Another new instrument at this late stage, the accordion, carries the music towards a dance-scherzo, which again rapidly shoots up in excitement, until it explodes. Then the accordion serves again to make a transition to the finale, ‘a serene overview of the preceding music, as if from a great height’.

London Symphony Orchestra

COMPOSER FOCUS

Thomas Adès Wed 16 Mar 2016 7.30pm Barbican Thomas Adès Asyla Sibelius Violin Concerto Franck Symphony in D minor Thomas Adès conductor Christian Tetzlaff violin

It was this piece that gained Adès his first professional performance, Mathias Bamert conducting the BBC Philharmonic in 1993, an event that sparked a number of commissions and invitations.

LSO Futures 27

SUNDAY 13 MARCH 4PM, LSO ST LUKE’S continued LSO FUTURES CONCERT I: DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951) CHAMBER SYMPHONY NO 1 OP 9 (1906)

The so-called Skandalkonzert conducted by Schoenberg in 1913, featured a performance of the First Chamber Symphony. The audience, shocked by the expressionist music they were hearing, started a full blown riot, and the concert had to be prematurely ended.

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER STEPHEN JOHNSON

In 1904, Arnold Schoenberg had a life-changing experience. At first he’d been hostile to Mahler and his music, but then he heard the first Viennese performance of the Third Symphony and was forced to change his mind. Immediately afterwards Schoenberg told Mahler ecstatically that the symphony had revealed to him ‘a human being, a drama, truth, the most ruthless truth!’

The two men soon became friends. It was clear they had a growing amount in common. Then, two years after they met, Schoenberg began writing a symphony of his own. (Up till then he seems to have shared the Wagnerian belief that the symphony as a form was no longer relevant.) Clearly the experience of hearing Mahler’s Third had left a lasting impression, but the symphony to

28 DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS

which Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No 1 seems most indebted is Mahler’s recently completed Seventh. This wasn’t performed until 1908, and Schoenberg didn’t actually hear it until the following year, but it is hard to believe that Mahler wouldn’t have shown him the score, and perhaps played through parts of it at the piano.

‘The effect on the vast majority of hearers is that of a lecture on the fourth dimension delivered in Chinese.’

An early review of Schoenberg’s music Of course in some important aspects the Chamber Symphony No 1 is very different from Mahler’s Seventh. Where Mahler employs a huge orchestra, Schoenberg uses an ensemble of just 15 instruments.

Mahler’s symphony lasts around 80 minutes

in most performances; Schoenberg’s takes well under half an hour. While Mahler’s five movements are separate imaginative worlds, with only occasional flashes back or forwards, Schoenberg creates a revolutionary structure in which elements of a four-movement symphony are fused into one continuous argument – a vindication of the older Schoenberg’s remark that ‘concentration is expansion’.

However both symphonies rely heavily on a disproportionally large, richly coloured woodwind ensemble – the shrill high clarinets and sneering low contrabassoon in Schoenberg’s scherzo-like second section suggest that Mahler’s central Scherzo made a particularly strong impact on him.

In both works the interval of the perfect fourth plays an important part: the horn’s upward rocketing theme near the start of the Schoenberg strongly resembles motifs

from the first movement of the Mahler – with which Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony also shares its basic tonality, E.

‘My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.’

Arnold Schoenberg

The structure is a carefully balanced A – B – A – C – A, in which A is a rushing allegro, B a still faster scherzo, and C an impassioned, restless slow movement, but instead of trying to identify formal landmarks, the listener can simply surrender to the compelling power of Schoenberg’s musical argument.

Everything builds inevitably to the thrilling ending, where radiantly dissonant horns slice through repeated E major chords. The atonal revolution is only a small step away.

But what Schoenberg creates is utterly personal. The intensity may resemble Mahler, as might the muscular, intricate counterpoint (though Schoenberg’s delight in textural complexity goes beyond even Mahler); but the sustained driving energy, the almost ruthless formal compression, the chromaticism that threatens to undermine any sense of basic tonality – all this creates a very different emotional impression.

LSO Futures 29

DARREN BLOOM COMPOSER PROFILE At 33 years old, Darren Bloom already has a huge number of accolades to his name.

One of the first composers to join the LSO Soundhub scheme in 2013, he impressed the LSO Discovery team so much that he was soon invited to write a full-length commission as part of the Orchestra’s main programme. He has also written for the London Sinfonietta, Royal Philharmonic Society and BBC Singers, and his music has been performed across the globe, at venues including the Eroica Hall (Vienna), Southbank Centre and Barbican, and at the Tête à Tête and Grimeborn Opera festivals.

COMPOSER PROFILE JO KIRKBRIDE

Originally from Los Angeles, Bloom credits his success to his unconventional schooling at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA), where he was able to dedicate half of every day to studying music. It was here that he heard his own music in performance for the first time.

30 DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS

‘The sensation of hearing my music come alive was amazing’, he remembers, ‘I had a smile beaming across my face, I was almost embarrassingly happy.’

From Los Angeles, Bloom moved to London to study composition at the Royal College of Music, before completing a Masters and DipRAM at the Royal Academy of Music, where he became the first composer in RAM history to hold the prestigious Manson Fellowship for two years. Recently awarded an ARAM for significant contributions to the field of composition, he is currently studying for an AHRC-funded PhD in Composition at the University of Cambridge.

Bloom combines his career as a composer with conducting, and is one of the founder members of the Ossian Ensemble, a group that specialises in theatrical productions and virtuoso performances of contemporary music.

‘Almost mystical … a genuine frisson’ The Times on Darren Bloom In his music, Bloom aims to be as true to life as possible, creating ‘a visceral experience for both listener and performer’. While his music draws upon the luminous sound worlds of the spectralists (he cites Grisey, Georg Friedrich Haas and Kaija Saariaho as influences), he is keen to ensure the darker, more brutal side of existence is represented too. ‘I love Xenakis’ music for that reason’, he says, ‘it feeds off the brutality of nature and humanity.’

His works have been praised for their unrelenting intensity and raw power, but Bloom also has a softer side, described by The Times as ‘almost mystical’, and a yearning for space and reflection that can be traced back to his fondness for Monteverdi. But it is Beethoven

who has exerted the greatest influence over Bloom’s creative life, a composer who combines softness and power in equal measure. ‘I keep his string quartets nearby at all times’, he says. ‘They are like my bible; I’ve never failed to find an answer to a question, be it technical or spiritual, in those works.

SOUNDHUB PHASE I SHOWCASE Sun 19 Jun 2016 7pm, LSO St Luke’s Four emerging composers in the first year of their LSO Soundhub residency at LSO St Luke’s present the new works they have developed as part of the scheme.

NEW WORKS BY Yasmeen Ahmed Ben Gaunt Oliver Leith Lee Westwood Find out more lso.co.uk/soundhub

LSO Futures 31

THOMAS ADÈS COMPOSER PROFILE

MORE ADÈS THIS SEASON Wed 16 Mar 2016 7.30pm, Barbican Thomas Adès Asyla Sibelius Violin Concerto Franck Symphony in D minor Thomas Adès conductor Christian Tetzlaff violin

Born in London in 1971, Adès studied piano and composition with Erika Fox and Robert Saxton at the Guildhall School from the age of twelve, and wrote his first acknowledged piece when he was 18. He went on to Cambridge, where he was a pupil of Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway, and in January 1993 made his London debut as both pianist and composer. The result was immediate acclaim. He gained a publisher, commissions for the London Sinfonietta, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and the Endellion Quartet, and an appointment as composer-in-residence with the Hallé. His first opera, Powder Her Face (1995), made his reputation global, with its portrait of a duchess socialite resilient in glamorouscheesy decay.

Two years later he wrote his first symphonic piece – Asyla, on a theme of havens, dark and benign – for Sir Simon Rattle and the

32 DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; it has since been played by major orchestras throughout the world. Then came the startling America: A Prophecy (1999), for the New York Philharmonic, and the beginning of a decade as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. By now travelling widely, he also formed an association with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and became a regular visitor to Australia, introducing his Piano Quintet (2000) with the Arditti Quartet at the Melbourne Festival.

His second opera, The Tempest, had its world premiere at Covent Garden in 2004, since when he has concentrated again on instrumental pieces, including the orchestral works Tevot (2007) and Polaris (2010). His third opera The Exterminating Angel receives its world premiere performance this July at the Salzburg Festival.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG COMPOSER PROFILE One of the most influential of all 20th-century composers, Schoenberg has justly been described as the ‘reluctant revolutionary’, pioneer of a method of composition that broke with long-standing traditions of harmony and melodic writing.

He studied cello and violin at school but left full-time education to become a bank clerk soon after his father’s premature death.

He supplemented his meagre income by working as an arranger of popular tunes and orchestrator; he also began to compose original works.

SCHOENBERG COMPOSER PROFILE ANDREW STEWART

THOMAS ADÈS COMPOSER PROFILE PAUL GRIFFITHS

In the early 1890s he took private lessons in counterpoint from Alexander Zemlinsky, building on his self-taught knowledge of composition. Later, Schoenberg attempted to support his family by teaching; meanwhile his increasingly atonal works gained notoriety in conservative-minded Vienna, especially those

that have since been associated with the Expressionist school of art.

In 1917, he began to compose an oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter, in which it is clear that the thoughts of the ‘chosen one’ are inevitably misunderstood by his peers, a situation reflected in Schoenberg’s real-life experience.

Certainly, his structured use of the 12 notes of the scale, beginning with such works as the Piano Pieces Op 23 and developed into a strict system of composition, was misunderstood and condemned by many. Those who regarded the 12-note method as emotionally sterile were forced to reconsider when Schoenberg completed his highly dramatic opera Moses und Aron in 1928. Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Schoenbergs emigrated from Germany and eventually settled in the United States. Here he taught many talented American pupils and composed a series of refined 12-note masterpieces.

LSO Futures 33

IGNATZ JOHNSON HIGHAM ARTIST PROFILE

ON STAGE FIRST VIOLINS Roman Simovic Leader Lennox Mackenzie SECOND VIOLINS David Alberman Thomas Norris VIOLAS Gillianne Haddow Malcolm Johnston

Ignatz Johnson Higham (b 1985) was previously a graphic designer and has recently turned his hand to animation. Since Graduating from the Royal College of Art in London in 2014, he has produced a number of short animations and has collaborated with classical musicians and composers to create dynamic projections for live performances.

CELLO Rebecca Gilliver DOUBLE BASS Colin Paris FLUTE Gareth Davies

34 DARREN BLOOM, SCHOENBERG & THOMAS ADÈS

PICCOLO/ALTO FLUTE Sharon Williams

OBOE Olivier Stankiewicz COR ANGLAIS Christine Pendrill CLARINET Chris Richards Chi-Yu Mo Eb CLARINET Chi-Yu Mo BASS CLARINET Laurent Ben Slimane BASSOON Rachel Gough CONTRA BASSOON Fraser Gordon

HORNS Jose Garcia Gutierrez Angela Barnes TRUMPET Huw Morgan TROMBONE Dudley Bright PERCUSSION Sam Walton David Jackson HARP Bryn Lewis, PIANO Catherine Edwards ACCORDION Bartek Glowacki

THE LSO AND COMPOSERS

Panufnik Composers Scheme Now in its tenth year, the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme – devised by the LSO and Lady Panufnik – is an exciting initiative offering six emerging composers each season the opportunity to write for a world-class symphony orchestra. Under the guidance of renowned composer Colin Matthews, the scheme enables composers to experiment over time and develop their orchestral writing skills. Composers form collaborative musical relationships with LSO players as well as having their compositions put under the microscope by the Orchestra and conductor François-Xavier Roth in a public workshop rehearsal – a major learning curve.

LSO Soundhub Based at LSO St Luke’s, Soundhub provides a flexible environment where composers can explore, collaborate and experiment, with access to vital resources and support from industry professionals and LSO members and staff. Soundhub is a composer-led resource, responding directly to the needs of those using it: a supportive framework for artists to try out new ideas, develop existing work and benefit from peer-to-peer networking and support. There are currently 78 composers participating in the scheme, either as full members or associates.

The LSO Soundhub scheme is generously supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Hinrichsen Foundation

The Panufnik Composers Scheme is generously supported by Lady Hamlyn and The Helen Hamlyn Trust

LSO Futures 35

SUNDAY 13 MARCH 6PM, GUILDHALL SCHOOL LECTURE RECITAL ROOM BERIO FOLK SONGS LUCIANO BERIO (1925–2003) FOLK SONGS (1964) Elim Chan conductor Orchestral Artistry Students from the Guildhall School

Luciano Berio and his first wife, mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, to whom he dedicated the song cycle Folk Songs.

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER MARK PARKER

1 Black is the Colour (USA) 2 I Wonder as I Wander (USA) 3 Loosin Yelav (Armenia) 4 Rossignol du Bois (France) 5 La Femminisca (Sicily) 6 La Donna Ideale (Italy) 7 Ballo (Italy) 8 Motettu de Tristura (Sardinia) 9 Malurous Qu’o Uno Fenno (Auvergne) 10 Lo Fiolaire (Auvergne) 11 Azerbaijan Love Song (Azerbaijan) Song texts will be available on a free sheet at the beginning of the concert.

36 BERIO FOLK SONGS

‘When I work with [folk] music I am always caught by the thrill of discovery.’

Luciano Berio Folk Songs was completed in 1964 while Berio was teaching at Mills College in California and while his 14-year marriage to the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian was coming to an end. He wrote the work to showcase her voice, dedicated it ‘to Cathy’, and included a song from Armenia because that was her heritage and one from Azerbaijan that she transcribed as a student in Milan, where they met.

She gave the world premiere but they divorced that year. You can hear the strains in the relationship through the choice of texts, like the warning against marriage in Song 9 or the appeal to a nightingale to reveal the

ON STAGE secret of love in Song 4, or the list in Song 6 of the qualities to seek in a wife.

Love wanders throughout these songs as a recurring theme but it does not hold them together as a cycle like ‘the thrill of discovery’ that Berio experienced when working with traditional music.

Each of the 11 Folk Songs opens itself up as a new world to explore, where the songs of the past have been rehoused, uprooted and salvaged by Berio as he searches for the elusive points of contact that bridge borders of culture and time: ‘I have a utopian dream, though I know it cannot be realised: I would like to create a unity between folk music and our music – a real, perceptible, understandable conduit between ancient, popular music-making, which is so close to everyday work, and music.’

The effect of these restored melodies is like old furniture in new rooms, and Berio’s challenge throughout the work was to find a balance between the two. Sometimes his own material dominates, like Song 8, where the integrity of the vocal line is obscured in the haze of the ensemble. At other times the melody itself becomes the centrepiece and in Song 11 we hear it paraded on top of a buoyant and lively march that brings this cycle to a close with the only text that the composer did not understand and which still has no translation, though we know it’s about love.

MEZZO-SOPRANOS Georgia Mae Bishop Clara Kanter Chloe Latchmore FLUTE Rosemary Bowker

HARP Elisabeth Eder VIOLA Henrietta Hill CELLO Anais Laugenie

CLARINET Dimitrios Spouras PERCUSSION Dorothy Raphael Beth Higham-Edwards

Song 1 is the most balanced of the set – it is also the most cruel. She recalls the beautiful features of her one true love and admits that without him she would die. Berio pairs her confession with the lament of ‘a wistful country fiddler’ who plays in an unrelated tempo so that the two remain separate throughout but stay close, never reconciled.

LSO Futures 37

ELIM CHAN CONDUCTOR Born in Hong Kong, 28-year-old Elim Chan became the first female winner of the Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition in December 2014. As a result she has been appointed Assistant Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra for 2015/16 and will conduct a number of their Discovery and education concerts this season.

Assistant Conductor London Symphony Orchestra

38 BERIO FOLK SONGS

Having recently taken part in a week of intensive masterclasses with Bernard Haitink in Lucerne, Elim will return there in summer 2016 to make her debut with the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra. Other forthcoming engagements include Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Orchestre National de Lille, Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano e Trento and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. Further ahead, she will also work with Norrlands Opera, Gavle Symphony, Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie and the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto.

Elim’s highlights to date include her debut with the National Arts Centre Orchestra Ottawa and the Orchestre de la Francophonie as part of the NAC Summer Music Institute in 2012 with Kenneth Kiesler and Pinchas Zukerman. In May 2015 she participated in the Musical Olympus Festival, St Petersburg. Elim has led workshops with the Cabrillo Festival and Baltimore Symphony orchestras, working alongside Marin Alsop, Gerard Schwarz and Gustav Meier, and has also worked with the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, Youth Orchestra of Curanilahue and the Orchestra of Universidad de Talca in Chile.

Elim Chan holds degrees from Smith College and the University of Michigan, where she has just concluded her studies with Kenneth Kiesler. Whilst there, she served as Music Director of the University of Michigan Campus Symphony Orchestra and the Michigan Pops Orchestra. She also received the Bruno Walter Conducting Scholarship in 2013.

London Symphony Orchestra

The Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition 2016 Thursday 17 November 2016, Barbican Patron HRH The Prince of Wales lso.co.uk/conductingcompetition

SUNDAY 13 MARCH 7PM, BARBICAN LSO FUTURES CONCERT II: LIGETI, ELIZABETH OGONEK & BERIO Ligeti Atmosphères Elizabeth Ogonek Sleep & Unremembrance (world premiere, Panufnik commission) Berio Sinfonia* François-Xavier Roth conductor London Symphony Orchestra Synergy Vocals* Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 Ligeti’s Atmosphères achieved its greatest public exposure through its inclusion in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER BENJAMIN PICARD

40 LIGETI, ELIZABETH OGONEK & BERIO

Panufnik commission Generously supported by Lady Hamlyn and the Helen Hamlyn Trust

GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923–2006) ATMOSPHÈRES (1961) In 1957 György Ligeti, fresh out of communist Hungary, travelled to Germany to study and work with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the WDR Electronic Studio in Cologne, a move that was to greatly influence his compositional language. Though Ligeti himself created very little electronic music – only two pieces Glissandi (1957) and Artikulation (1958) – the instrumental works he composed around this time bear a direct relation to the ideas that electronic music of the day had begun to confront. Chief amongst these is Atmosphères (1961) for large orchestra minus percussion.

On a purely sonic level Atmosphères eschews practically every traditional musical parameter – melody, harmony and rhythm – in favour of more tactile aspects of sound – timbre, texture and volume. The music consists of

vast clouds of orchestral noise that slowly and organically evolve, moving with a tectonic languor. The effect on the listener is very much akin to that of early electronic music, as if Ligeti himself were manipulating the filter on a mass of orchestral noise. The music is perceived as a continuum rather than the discreet instrumental parts from which it is formed.

‘My most basic aim … is the revivification of the sonorous aspect of musical form.’

György Ligeti on Atmosphères Beneath the relative stasis of the orchestral surface is a tightly controlled musical process Ligeti developed which he dubbed ‘micropolyphony’. In short, the technique consists of numerous intricately moving, independent instrumental lines the sum total of which create a homogenous, static sound-mass. Ligeti described the

micropolyphonic process as ‘governed by rules as strict as Palestrina’s – but the rules of this polyphony are worked out by me. The polyphonic structure does not actually come through, you cannot hear it; it remains hidden in a microscopic underwater world.’

It is incredibly difficult to pick out or even describe specific moments in Atmosphères since traditional structural sign-posts are essentially absent and the music is perceived more or less as a continuous stream.

A particularly striking and memorable gesture though is located around a third of the way into the work, memorable because it is the only fracture in Ligeti’s otherwise seamless soundworld. Here stratospheric flutes, piccolos and violins at the very height of the texture suddenly give way to a snarling cluster of double-basses at the very base, momentarily drawing our attention to the six-octave void in between the two textural extremes.

In Atmosphères Ligeti experimented with the idea of ‘sound-masses’. Huge blocks of dense sound in which the importance of pitch and rhythm are subordinate to ideas of texture, timbre and dynamic.

LSO Futures 41

SUNDAY 13 MARCH 7PM, BARBICAN continued LSO FUTURES CONCERT II: LIGETI, ELIZABETH OGONEK & BERIO ELIZABETH OGONEK (b 1989) SLEEP & UNREMEMBRANCE (2015)

‘Our young composers not only help to lift standards in the composition of classical music: they learn both about excellence and humanity, with the confidence to respond to the need for the thrill and stimulus for musicmaking in the lives of almost everyone in every sort of situation.’ Lady Panufnik

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER JO KIRKBRIDE

42 LIGETI, ELIZABETH OGONEK & BERIO

The threat of death, and the realisation of our impending fate, can spark surprising levels of creativity in all of us. When the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in her late 80s, it did nothing to diminish her seemingly limitless capacity for work. She continued composing right up until she died, her apparently simple and carefree verse giving little away about the severity of her illness. Her poem, While Sleeping, was one of the last to be completed before she succumbed to the disease, and is the inspiration for Ogonek’s work, Sleep & Unremembrance.

But what reads as little more than the recollection of a passing dream conceals veiled references to the very real prospect of her death. ‘In this poem,’ says Ogonek,

‘dreams become a metaphor for time; sleep, a metaphor for death; drawers, a metaphor for secrets; snow, a metaphor for frailty. To me, this lends Szymborska’s poetry a profound sense of humanity.’ Its subject is a sombre one, but Szymborska finds beauty and positivity even in the darkest of corners. As she looks back over her life, grappling with feeling that time is running out and her memories are slipping away, she finds only ‘stuff and nonsense’ – the things that once seemed so important but which time reveals to be trivial. ‘What remains’, says Ogonek, ‘is a frantic quest to remember all of the things that mark our lives as special, until we come to terms with the fact that forgetting is part of the cycle of life.’

In Sleep & Unremembrance, it is precisely this shifting perspective that forms the basis of Ogonek’s music. While Szymborska knew that death was just around the corner, and with it a sense of finality, Ogonek’s perspective

allows her to see something else: ‘I see it as a reminder that behind every corner lurks mystery, surprise and change. Thus, the music twists and turns in search of its own memories and its true identity.’ A four-note ascending chromatic figure (heard at the very opening of the piece) seems to seed itself as one of the work’s germinal motifs, flickering in and out of view in several different guises, but in time it too recedes into the background, forgotten and buried with the other memories, only to be replaced by a new, descending motive.

Amidst these thematic snapshots, the music is punctuated by snatches of insistent, repeated rhythms – a gentle, pulsing reminder that time keeps marching on regardless, only giving way at the work’s close when we are at last lulled to sleep.

WHILE SLEEPING

Sleep & Unremembrance is an LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme commission, generously supported by Lady Hamlyn and The Helen Hamlyn Trust

I floundered through tunnels of snow and unremembrance.

I dreamed I was looking for something, maybe hidden somewhere or lost under the bed, under the stairs, under an old address.

I dug through wardrobes, boxes and drawers pointlessly packed with stuff and nonsense.

I got stuck in thorny thickets and conjectures.

I swam through air and the grass of childhood.

I hustled to finish up before the outdated dusk fell, the curtain, silence.

I pulled from my suitcases the years and journeys I’d picked up.

I shook from my pockets withered letters, litter, leaves not addressed to me.

I ran panting through comforting, discomfiting displaces, places.

In the end I stopped knowing what I’d been looking for so long.

I woke up.

Looked at my watch.

The dream took not quite two and a half minutes.

Such are the tricks to which time resorts ever since it started stumbling on sleeping heads.

Wisława Szymborska | Translation Clare Cavanagh

LSO Futures 43

SUNDAY 13 MARCH 7PM, BARBICAN continued LSO FUTURES CONCERT II: LIGETI, ELIZABETH OGONEK & BERIO LUCIANO BERIO (1925–2003) SINFONIA (1968) 1 2 O King 3 In ruhig fliessender Bewegung 4 5

The O King Movement of Berio’s Sinfonia is dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King.

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER MALCOLM HAYES

44 LIGETI, ELIZABETH OGONEK & BERIO

When Sinfonia was premiered by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein in 1968, it created an instant sensation. Combining the resources of a large classical symphony orchestra with the multiple vocal styles pioneered by the Swingle Singers, Berio’s score also has the eight soloists declaiming a shifting kaleidoscope of verbal material from a host of literary or everyday sources – most prominently Le cru et le cuit (‘The Raw and the Cooked’, concerning the origin and symbolism of Brazilian water myths) by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and

‘The title Sinfonia bears no relationship to the classical form, rather it must be understood in its etymological sense of ‘sounding together’ of eight voices and instruments or, in a larger sense, of ‘sounding together’ of different things, situations and meanings.’

Luciano Berio Samuel Beckett’s dramatic monologue The Unnamable. Much of the musical material, too, is not by Berio himself, but consists of a huge range of quotations from Mahler (his Second Symphony) and Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Beethoven among others.

All this is assembled, with astonishing artistic confidence and technical skill, into what Time Magazine’s reviewer of the New

York premiere described as a ‘sonorama’ – requiring amplification for accurate balance, and operating on a level of teeming virtuosity that reflects Berio’s earlier involvement with electronic music. The result is something much more purposeful and powerfully charged than a mere collage-like celebration of ‘diversity’. Five decades after the turbulent 1960s, Sinfonia’s genuinely eruptive radicalism continues to astonish.

The first movement deploys fragments of Levi-Strauss’ text alongside a fluctuating tapestry of orchestral sound, reflecting the origin of the sinfonia genre itself (in 18thcentury Italy, as a musical ‘sounding together’ of instruments, sometimes with voices) – and also, in Berio’s words, ‘a more general sense [of] the interplay of a variety of things, situations and meanings’. Next comes O King, composed in tribute to Martin Luther King after his assassination in 1968, and exploring

the individual phonemes of his name, which is then stated more clearly in the closing bars.

The longer third movement deploys the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony as a kind of on-off template for a panoply of musical quotations, along with spoken phrases from Beckett’s text and much else.

Berio thought that the result resembled ‘a river running through a constantly changing landscape, disappearing from time to time underground, only to emerge later totally transformed’. After the fourth movement’s intermezzo-like calm, the fifth grows from its opening arabesques for voice, flute and piano into a swarm of intertwined musical lines that builds to a climax, and then dissolves into silence.

MUSICAL QUOTATIONS IN SINFONIA Aside from the Scherzo taken from Mahler’s Symphony No 2, here is a full list of musical quotations used in the third movement of Sinfonia in the order that they appear: Schoenberg Five Pieces for Orchestra Debussy La mer Mahler Symphony No 4 Berg Violin Concerto Brahms Violin Concerto Ravel Daphnis et Chloé Berlioz Symphonie fantastique Ravel La Valse Stravinsky The Rite of Spring Stravinsky Agon Strauss Der Rosenkavalier JS Bach Brandenburg Concerto No 1 Berg Wozzeck Beethoven Symphony No 6 Boulez Pli selon pli Webern Cantata No 2 Stockhausen Gruppen

LSO Futures 45

GYÖRGY LIGETI COMPOSER PROFILE György Ligeti was born in Diciosânmartin, Transylvania. During the war his native region was seized by the crypto-fascist Hungarian regime and, as a Jew, Ligeti was sent to a labour camp. Most of the rest of his immediate family perished at Auschwitz. After the war he studied at the Budapest Academy of Music, where he later taught from 1950.

LIGETI LE GRAND MACABRE Sat 14 & Sun 15 Jan 2017 7pm, Barbican Sir Simon Rattle conductor Peter Sellars director London Symphony Orchestra Produced by LSO and Barbican. Part of LSO 2016/17 season and Barbican Presents.

46 LIGETI & BERIO

His earliest works trod the officially approved path of folk-music stylisation à la Kodály and Bartók. However, he felt constrained by life under the Hungarian communist regime and its requirement of extreme stylistic conservatism. In late 1956, after the Soviet army had put down the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet rule, he fled to Vienna.

Ligeti subsequently worked at the electronic studio in Cologne, then from 1961 he taught at the Academy of Music in Stockholm. In a series of frankly experimental works starting

with Apparitions, Aventures and Atmosphères, exploring composition with ‘blocks of sound’, micro-intervals and a host of complex interwoven individual parts, he established himself as one of the leaders of Europe’s avant-garde. This phase culminated in his grotesque opera Le Grand Macabre.

Following the opera there was a five-year hiatus in composition, after which, in the last phase of Ligeti’s career, he returned to a somewhat more traditional view of musical form and content. Ligeti eventually assumed Austrian citizenship in 1967, and the following year his music reached a very wide audience through its use in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The recipient of many international music awards and prestigious commissions, and generally recognised as one of the most important Hungarian composers since Bartók, he died in Vienna in 2006.

LUCIANO BERIO COMPOSER PROFILE Luciano Berio’s father was a composer, as was his grandfather, so the fate of young Luciano was all but sealed when he was born in the small port of Oneglia in 1925. Piano lessons at home led to chamber music performances through the town and the young boy held hopes of one day becoming a pianist. But on his first day conscripted into Mussolini’s fascist army he mishandled his weapon and injured his hand. When he enrolled at the Milan Conservatory aged 20 he had shifted his focus to composition.

BERIO COMPOSER PROFILE MARK PARKER

LIGETI COMPOSER PROFILE GAVIN PLUMLEY

He graduated in 1951 and spent the next summer at Tanglewood in Massachusetts to study serialism. He was lucky that his stay overlapped with the first concert to include electronic music in the United States, which ignited in Berio a lifelong fascination for the field that he took up in earnest on his return to Italy with his first job as director of the electronic music studio at the public

broadcaster RAI. He stayed there for ten years and built his reputation as a composer with works like Thema (Omaggio a James Joyce) (1958) and Circles (1960) and the first in his series of Sequenza that occupied him for the rest of his life, as he searched for the limits of performers’ capabilities in these 14 virtuosic solo works.

He spent the next nine years teaching in America, a time that included the composition of his most famous work Sinfonia (1968). He returned to Europe for good in 1972.

He was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1989, Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion in 1995, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in 1996, and when he died in 2003 he was the most significant Italian composer of his generation.

LSO Futures 47

ELIZABETH OGONEK COMPOSER PROFILE Vivid, colourful and intensely dramatic, Elizabeth Ogonek’s music brings words to life.

Often inspired by text – be it poetry, prose, or drama – her works centre around the transference of linguistic ideas to a musical setting, creating works that are as much about the semantics of language as they are about the notes themselves.

COMPOSER PROFILE WRITER JO KIRKBRIDE

At just 26 years of age, she is one of the youngest composers in its history to have been appointed Composer-in-Residence to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and she has a host of other impressive accolades to her name. She was the winner of the RPS Composition Prize in 2014, the recipient of a 2013 Charles Ives Scholarship, and has seen her music performed by, among others, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Aldeburgh Festival and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

48 ELIZABETH OGONEK & FRANÇOIS-XAVIER ROTH

Despite this success, Ogonek began her musical career with hopes of becoming a concert pianist. It was only when she began tuition at an arts school near Boston that she realised her vocation lay elsewhere. ‘I stopped practising! I truly hated it! My theory teacher was the one person who hadn’t lost hope!’

Encouraged to try her hand at composition, she soon discovered a hitherto untapped creative side. ‘As soon as I wrote my first piece’, she says, ‘I knew instantly that I would spend the rest of my life composing.’

Her music has been shaped by a life lived across different cultures and continents. ‘The fact that I’ve lived in a lot of different places has influenced my music … That movement, those transitions, this idea of transience, have influenced the way I think about my music now.’

It is here that she finds her restless energy, an infectious desire to change and transform that makes her music utterly compelling.

FRANÇOIS-XAVIER ROTH CONDUCTOR François-Xavier Roth, born in Paris in November 1971, is one of the most charismatic and enterprising conductors of his generation. He is General Music Director of the City of Cologne, leading both the Gürzenich Orchestra and the Opera, and Principal Conductor of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg.

In 2000 he became Assistant Conductor of the LSO for a year, after winning the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition.

General Music Director City of Cologne Principal Conductor SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg

His repertoire ranges from music of the 17th century to contemporary work and encompasses all genres: symphonic, operatic and chamber. In 2003 he founded the innovative orchestra Les Siècles, which performs contrasting and colourful programmes on modern and period instruments, often within the same concert.

With a reputation for enterprising programming, his incisive approach and communication skills are valued around the world. He works with leading orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw and Boston Symphony. Next season he continues his conducted series, After Romanticism with the LSO, exploring the musical legacy of the post-Romantic period.

Outreach projects are an important aspect of François-Xavier Roth’s work. He is conductor of the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme and, with the Festival Berlioz and Les Siècles, founded the Jeune Orchestre Européen Hector Berlioz. Roth and Les Siècles devised Presto!, their own television series for France 2, attracting weekly audiences of over three million. In Cologne, he has announced initiatives to take music to new, unconventional venues and initiate collaborations with the City’s cultural institutions.

LSO Futures 49

SYNERGY VOCALS ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

SYNERGY VOCALS & THE LSO IN 2016 Sun 6 Nov 2016 7pm, Barbican Steve Reich You Are (Variations); Daniel Variations; The Desert Music Kristjan Järvi conductor Synergy Vocals

50 SYNERGY VOCALS

Working primarily on microphone, Synergy Vocals are closely associated with the music of Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, Steven Mackey and the late Luciano Berio, collaborating regularly with Steve Reich & Musicians, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Asko|Schönberg, Ictus, and the Colin Currie Group.

The group has undertaken educational and outreach projects in the UK, the US and The Netherlands. Micaela Haslam also coaches instrumental ensembles for Steve Reich in the preparation of his unconducted Music for 18 Musicians, most recently in Buenos Aires for the work’s South American premiere at the Teatro Colon.

Live performances have taken them all over the world, working with many outstanding ensembles including the Boston, Chicago, New World, St Louis, and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, all five of the UK’s BBC orchestras, Shanghai Symphony, Sydney Symphony, Ensemble InterContemporain, Percussion Claviers de Lyon, the Hebrides Ensemble, Nexus, and with dance companies including Rosas (Brussels), the Royal Ballet (London) and L’Opéra de Paris.

World premieres for Synergy Vocals include Steve Reich’s Three Tales and Daniel Variations, Steven Mackey’s Dreamhouse, Louis Andriessen’s La Commedia, David Lang’s Writing on Water and Sir James MacMillan’s Since it was the Day of Preparation … as well as the UK première of Nono’s monumental Prometeo.

Synergy Vocals is featured on a wide variety of CD recordings from John Adams to Steven Wilson, as well as film and TV soundtracks including the recent Home Fires for ITV.

London Symphony Orchestra

Contemporary Highlights 2016/17 season

Sun 6 Nov 2016 7pm, Barbican

STEVE REICH AT 80 Sun 4 & 8 Dec 2016, Barbican

ADAMS CONDUCTS ADAMS Thu 19 Jan 2017 7.30pm, Barbican

TURNAGE WORLD PREMIERE Wed 15 Feb 2017 7.30pm, Barbican

TURNAGE UK PREMIERE Sun 9 Jul 2017 7pm, Barbican

ANDREW NORMAN WORLD PREMIERE

Find out more lso.co.uk/201617season

LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ON STAGE

52 ON STAGE

FIRST VIOLINS Roman Simovic Leader Carmine Lauri Lennox Mackenzie Clare Duckworth Nigel Broadbent Ginette Decuyper Gerald Gregory Jörg Hammann Maxine Kwok-Adams

SECOND VIOLINS David Alberman Thomas Norris Sarah Quinn Miya Väisänen Richard Blayden Matthew Gardner Julian Gil Rodriguez Naoko Keatley Belinda McFarlane

VIOLAS Andriy Viytovych Gillianne Haddow Malcolm Johnston Lander Echevarria Anna Bastow Julia O’Riordan Robert Turner Jonathan Welch Fiona Dalgliesh

CELLOS Tim Hugh Alastair Blayden Jennifer Brown Noel Bradshaw Eve-Marie Caravassilis Daniel Gardner Hilary Jones Amanda Truelove Deborah Tolksdorf

Claire Parfitt Elizabeth Pigram Laurent Quenelle Ian Rhodes David Worswick

Philip Nolte Andrew Pollock Hazel Mulligan Eleanor Fagg Gordon MacKay

Caroline O’Neill

Peteris Sokolovskis DOUBLE BASSES Colin Paris Patrick Laurence Matthew Gibson Thomas Goodman Joe Melvin Jani Pensola Simo Väisänen Jeremy Watt

SYNERGY VOCALS ON STAGE FLUTES Gareth Davies Alex Jakeman Patricia Moynihan PICCOLO Sharon Williams OBOES Olivier Stankiewicz Ruth Contractor Lauren Sansom COR ANGLAIS Christine Pendrill CLARINETS Andrew Marriner Chris Richards Chi-Yu Mo

BASS CLARINET Laurent Ben Slimane E-FLAT CLARINET Chi-Yu Mo SAXOPHONES Simon Haram Shaun Thompson BASSOONS Rachel Gough Joost Bosdijk Christopher Gunia CONTRA BASSOON Dominic Morgan

HORNS Jose Garcia Gutierrez Phillip Eastop Angela Barnes Antonio Iezzi Jonathan Lipton Jocelyn Lightfoot

TUBA Patrick Harrild TIMPANI Nigel Thomas

TRUMPETS Huw Morgan

PERCUSSION Neil Percy David Jackson Sam Walton

Gerald Ruddock Daniel Newell Robin Totterdell

HARP Bryn Lewis

TROMBONES Dudley Bright James Maynard Matthew Knight BASS TROMBONE Paul Milner

SOPRANOS Micaela Haslam Wendy Nieper

TENORS Gerard O’Beirne Tom Bullard

ALTOS Rachel Weston Heather Cairncross

BASSES Michael Dore Simon Grant

PIANO Catherine Edwards HARPSICHORD Caroline Jaya-Ratnam ELECTRIC ORGAN Cliodna Shanahan

LSO Futures 53

LONDON’S SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

The London Symphony Orchestra performs over 120 concerts a year and was named by Gramophone as one of the top five orchestras in the world.

In London and across the globe The LSO is proud to be Resident Orchestra at the Barbican, where we perform 70 concerts a year. The residency has enabled us to establish a truly loyal audience and to fulfil many artistic aspirations. Joint projects between the Orchestra and the Barbican place us at the heart of the Centre’s programme. The LSO also enjoys successful residencies in New York, Paris and Tokyo. Our tour destinations also include China, Canada, South Korea and the United States, plus many major European cities.

The LSO is widely acclaimed by audiences and critics alike.

The LSO has an enviable family of artists; our conductors include Sir Simon Rattle as Music Director designate, Daniel Harding and Michael Tilson Thomas as Principal Guest Conductors and André Previn as Conductor Laureate. We also have long-standing relationships with some of the leading musicians in the world – Bernard Haitink, AnneSophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida and Maria João Pires amongst others. The Orchestra is self-governing and made up of nearly a hundred talented players who also perform regularly as soloists, or in chamber groups in concerts at LSO St Luke’s.

54 LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

In the studio

Experience the LSO at home Capturing live performances at the Barbican, LSO Live is the most successful label of its kind in the world. LSO Live has over 100 releases, all of which are available globally.

Recent releases include the label’s first LSO String Ensemble disc and Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony with Sir John Eliot Gardiner. The LSO also captures performances on video which can be seen on a variety of digital platforms, including LSO Play.

The LSO is a world-leader in recording music for film, television and events, and was the Official Orchestra of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games ceremonies.

The LSO appeared on stage in the Opening Ceremony with Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, performing Chariots of Fire. The LSO has also recorded music for hundreds of films including Philomena, The Monuments Men, four of the Harry Potter films, Superman and six Star Wars movies.

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: THE LSO ON TOUR WITH BERNARD HAITINK, MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS IN REHEARSAL AT THE BARBICAN, LSO PRINCIPAL TRUMPET PHILIP COBB RECORDING FILM SCORES AT THE ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS

LSO Futures 55

Inspiring music-making …

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: LSO ON TRACK HORN PLAYER, LSO SINGING DAY, FAMILY MORNING AT LSO ST LUKE’S, LSO ST LUKE’S

56 LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

The LSO is set apart from other international orchestras by the depth of its commitment to music education, reaching over 60,000 people each year. The many projects that make up LSO Discovery offer people of all ages opportunities to get involved in music-making. Recent projects include LSO On Track, a long-term investment inspired by the London 2012 Olympics, which saw teenagers performing Elgar’s Nimrod in the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, and LSO Sing – a programme of singing activities designed to draw in singers of all ages and abilities.

… at LSO St Luke’s LSO St Luke’s, the UBS and LSO Music Education Centre, is the home of LSO Discovery. As well as offering chamber and solo recitals, it provides inspiring experiences for all kinds of music lover. LSO St Luke’s artistic partners include BBC Radio 3, Barbican, City of London Festival, Guildhall School and jazz, world and contemporary music promoters, soundUK and Serious.

When the corridors aren’t filled with music, the building is an ideal location for corporate and private events – this unique heritage space provides a canvas that can be easily adapted to suit any occasion. Income from hire fees helps support the education work of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Find out more at lso.co.uk LSO Futures 57

LSO DISCOVERY

58 LSO DISCOVERY

Support our work Thanks to our funders – and through your valued support – we are able to offer many LSO Discovery activities at little or no cost to participants from all walks of life. For us to continue to thrive and offer inspiring opportunities to over 60,000 participants every year, the London Symphony Orchestra seeks additional support from companies, individuals, charitable trusts and foundations. Your contribution means that our investment in music education can grow and ensures that LSO St Luke’s, the UBS and LSO Music Education Centre, remains at the heart of the local community.

To find out more about how you can help email felicity.hindle@lso.co.uk, visit lso.co.uk/supportus or call 020 7588 1116.

The London Symphony Orchestra is a registered charity in England No 232391.

LSO Futures 59

London Symphony Orchestra Barbican Centre Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS Tickets 020 7638 8891 Administration 020 7588 1116 lso.co.uk

LSO Registered Charity No 232391

Print Cantate 020 3651 1690