22 February 2013 LPO programme notes

Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor VLADIMIR JUROWSKI* Principal Guest Conductor YANNICK NÉZET-SÉGUIN Leader pieter schoeman Composer in Residence JULIAN ANDERSON Patron HRH THE DUKE OF KENT KG Chief Executive and Artistic Director TIMOTHY WALKER AM

JTI FRIDAY SERIES SOUTHBANK CENTRE’S ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL Friday 22 February 2013 | 7.30pm

marin alsop conductor GARRICK OHLSSON piano

ives Three Places in New England (18’) gershwin Rhapsody in Blue (15’) Interval copland Piano Concerto (16’) joplin (arr. Schuller) Suite from Treemonisha (20’)

Free pre-concert events at Royal Festival Hall 5.00–5.30pm The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s ensemble for 15–19 year olds, The Band, presents a new work inspired by Ives’s Three Places in New England.

6.15–6.45pm Pianist Garrick Ohlsson shares his views on performing works by Gershwin and Copland.

* supported by the Tsukanov Family Foundation and one anonymous donor CONCERT PRESENTED BY THE LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

PROGRAMME £3 CONTENTS 2 Welcome 3 Tonight’s works in context 4 About the Orchestra 5 On stage tonight 6 Marin Alsop 7 Garrick Ohlsson 8 Programme notes 13 Next concerts 15 Supporters 16 LPO administration

The timings shown are not precise and are given only as a guide.

Welcome

WELCOME TO SOUTHBANK CENTRE We hope you enjoy your visit. We have a Duty Manager available at all times. If you have any queries please ask any member of staff for assistance.

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If you wish to get in touch with us following your visit please contact the Visitor Experience Team at Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, phone 020 7960 4250, or email customer@southbankcentre.co.uk We look forward to seeing you again soon.

A few points to note for your comfort and enjoyment: PHOTOGRAPHY is not allowed in the auditorium.

LATECOMERS will only be admitted to the auditorium if there is a suitable break in the performance.

RECORDING is not permitted in the auditorium without the prior consent of Southbank Centre.

Southbank Centre reserves the right to confiscate video or sound equipment and hold it in safekeeping until the performance has ended.

MOBILES, PAGERS AND WATCHES should be switched off before the performance begins.

Southbank Centre’s The Rest Is Noise, inspired by Alex Ross’s book The Rest Is Noise Presented by Southbank Centre in partnership with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. southbankcentre.co.uk/therestisnoise The Rest Is Noise is a year-long festival that digs deep into 20th-century history to reveal the influences on art in general and classical music in particular. Inspired by Alex Ross’s book The Rest Is Noise, we use film, debate, talks and a vast range of concerts to reveal the fascinating stories behind the century’s wonderful and often controversial music.

We have brought together the world’s finest orchestras and soloists to perform many of the most significant works of the 20th century. We reveal why these pieces were written and how they transformed the musical language of the modern world.

Over the year, The Rest Is Noise focuses on 12 different parts. The music is set in context with talks from a fascinating team of historians, scientists, philosophers, political theorists and musical experts as well as films, online content and other special programmes.

If you’re new to 20th-century music, then this is your time to start exploring with us as your tour guide. There has never been a festival like this.

Jude Kelly Artistic Director, Southbank Centre

2 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Tonight’s works in context

1867/68 (exact date unknown) Scott Joplin born in Texarkana, Texas

1870 1874 Charles Ives born in Danbury, Connecticut

1880

1876 Prototype telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell 1880 Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov published 1886 First sales of Coca-Cola in the USA, originally marketed as a patent medicinal remedy

1890

1891 Carnegie Hall opened in New York City

1900

1896 Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity. First modern Olympic games held in Athens 1898 George Gershwin born in Brooklyn, New York 1900 Aaron Copland born in Brooklyn, New York 1906 Kellogg’s began selling Corn Flakes

1910

1910 Joplin completed his opera Treemonisha; however, it was not fully staged until 1972 1914 Ives completed Three Places in New England

1920 1930 1940

1917 Death of Scott Joplin 1922 Creation of the Soviet Union (USSR) 1924 Premiere of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in New York 1927 Premiere of Copland’s Piano Concerto in Boston 1930 Premiere of Ives’s Three Places in New England in New York 1932 London Philharmonic Orchestra founded by Sir Thomas Beecham 1937 Death of George Gershwin 1939 Outbreak of World War II in Europe 1945 End of World War II

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990

1949 Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four published 1954 Death of Charles Ives 1955 Vietnam War began 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first man on the Moon. Stonewall riots in New York 1972 First professional performance of Joplin’s complete opera Treemonisha in Atlanta 1977 First Star Wars film released 1980 John Lennon assassinated 1982 Falkland Islands invaded by Argentina 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall 1990 Death of Aaron Copland

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 3

London Philharmonic Orchestra

The London Philharmonic Orchestra is one of the world’s finest orchestras, balancing a long and distinguished history with a reputation as one of the UK’s most adventurous and forward-looking orchestras. As well as giving classical concerts, the Orchestra also records film and video game soundtracks, has its own record label, and reaches thousands of Londoners every year through activities for schools and local communities.

The Orchestra was founded by Sir Thomas Beecham in 1932, and since then its Principal Conductors have included Sir Adrian Boult, Sir John Pritchard, Bernard Haitink, Sir Georg Solti, Klaus Tennstedt and Kurt Masur.

The current Principal Conductor is Vladimir Jurowski, appointed in 2007, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin is Principal Guest Conductor.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra has recorded many blockbuster scores, from The Lord of the Rings trilogy to Lawrence of Arabia, The Mission, East is East, Hugo, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It also broadcasts regularly on television and radio, and in 2005 established its own record label. There are now nearly 70 releases available on CD and to download. Recent additions include Tchaikovsky’s Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5 with Vladimir Jurowski; Brahms’s Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 with Klaus Tennstedt; a disc of orchestral works by Mark-Anthony Turnage; and the world premiere of the late Ravi Shankar’s First Symphony conducted by David Murphy.

In summer 2012 the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed as part of The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant on the River Thames, and was also chosen to record all the world’s national anthems for the London 2012 Olympics.

The Orchestra is Resident Orchestra at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London, where it has performed since it opened in 1951, giving around 40 The London Philharmonic concerts there each Orchestra maintains an season. 2012/13 The LPO were on exceptional form, energetic programme of highlights include activities for young people three concerts and the performance had a real and local communities. with Vladimir edge-of-your-seat excitement. The Guardian Highlights include the Jurowski based (29 September 2012, Royal Festival Hall: Rachmaninoff, Shchedrin, Denisov & Miaskovsky) Deutsche Bank BrightSparks around the theme Series; the Leverhulme of War and Peace Young Composers project; and the Foyle Future Firsts in collaboration with the Russian National Orchestra; orchestral training programme for outstanding young Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, also conducted by players. Over recent years, developments in technology Jurowski; 20th-century American works with Marin and social networks have enabled the Orchestra to Alsop; Haydn and Strauss with Yannick Nézet-Séguin; reach even more people worldwide: all its recordings and the UK premiere of Carl Vine’s Second Piano are available to download from iTunes and, as well Concerto with pianist Piers Lane under Vassily Sinaisky. as a YouTube channel, news blog, iPhone app and Throughout 2013 the Orchestra is collaborating with regular podcasts, the Orchestra has a lively presence on Southbank Centre on The Rest Is Noise festival, based Facebook and Twitter. on Alex Ross’s book of the same name and charting the 20th century’s key musical works and historical events.

Find out more and get involved!

The Orchestra has flourishing residencies in Brighton and Eastbourne, and performs regularly around lpo.org.uk the UK. Every summer, the Orchestra leaves London for four months and takes up its annual residency facebook.com/londonphilharmonicorchestra accompanying the famous Glyndebourne Festival Opera, where it has been Resident Symphony Orchestra twitter.com/LPOrchestra since 1964. The Orchestra also tours internationally, performing concerts to sell-out audiences worldwide.

Tours in the 2012/13 season include visits to Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland, the USA and Austria.

4 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

On stage tonight

First Violins Abigail Young Guest Leader Ilyoung Chae Chair supported by Moya Greene

Catherine Craig Tom Eisner Robert Pool Sarah Streatfeild Yang Zhang Grace Lee Rebecca Shorrock Galina Tanney Madeleine Easton Robert Yeomans Katie Littlemore Francesca Smith Alina Petrenko Jamie Hutchinson Second Violins Alison Kelly Guest Principal Joseph Maher Fiona Higham Marie-Anne Mairesse Nancy Elan Emma Wragg Chloé Boireau Gavin Davies Dean Williamson Stephen Stewart Mila Mustakova Elizabeth Baldey Kate Birchall Chair supported by David & Victoria Graham Fuller

Sheila Law Violas Helen Kamminga Guest Principal Robert Duncan Gregory Aronovich

Benedetto Pollani Laura Vallejo Michelle Bruil Daniel Cornford Isabel Pereira Martin Fenn Miriam Eisele Susanne Martens Alistair Scahill Cellos Timothy Gill Guest Principal Francis Bucknall Laura Donoghue Jonathan Ayling Chair supported by Caroline, Jamie & Zander Sharp

Gregory Walmsley Santiago Carvalho† Sue Sutherley Susanna Riddell Tom Roff Sibylle Hentschel Double Basses Tim Gibbs Principal Laurence Lovelle George Peniston Kenneth Knussen Helen Rowlands Tom Walley Catherine Ricketts Margarida Castro Flutes Wissam Boustany Guest Principal Sue Thomas Chair supported by the Sharp Family

Piccolo Stewart McIlwham* Principal

Oboes Ian Hardwick Principal Angela Tennick

Trombones Mark Templeton* Principal David Whitehouse

Cor Anglais Gill Callow

Bass Trombone Lyndon Meredith Principal

Clarinets Robert Hill* Principal Emily Meredith

Contrabass Trombone Lyndon Meredith

Bass Clarinet Paul Richards Principal E-flat Clarinet Tom Watmough Saxophones Martin Robertson Christian Forshaw Nick Moss Paul Nathaniel Bassoons Gareth Newman* Principal Emma Harding Contrabassoon Simon Estell Principal Horns John Ryan* Principal David Pyatt Principal Martin Hobbs Mark Vines Co-Principal Gareth Mollison Trumpets Paul Beniston* Principal Anne McAneney* Chair supported by Geoff & Meg Mann

Tuba Lee Tsarmaklis* Principal Timpani Christopher Thomas Guest Principal Percussion Andrew Barclay* Principal Chair supported by Andrew Davenport

Keith Millar Olly Yates Sacha Johnson Eddy Hackett Harp Rachel Masters* Principal Celeste Catherine Edwards Banjo James Ellis

* Holds a professorial appointment in London † Chevalier of the Brazilian Order of Rio Branco

Nicholas Betts Co-Principal Daniel Newell

The London Philharmonic Orchestra also acknowledges the following chair supporters whose players are not present at this concert: Sonja Drexler • John & Angela Kessler • Julian & Gill Simmonds

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 5

Marin Alsop

© Grant Leighton

conductor

Marin Alsop is an inspiring and powerful voice on the international music scene, a Music Director of vision and distinction who passionately believes that music has the power to change lives. She is recognised across the world for her innovative approach to programming and for her deep commitment to education and the development of audiences of all ages.

Her success as Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was recognised when, in 2009, her tenure was extended to 2015. Alsop took up the post of Principal Conductor of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra at the start of the 2012 season, steering the orchestra in its artistic and creative programming, recording ventures and its education and outreach activities. In August 2012 she led the orchestra on a European tour, with acclaimed performances at the BBC Proms in London and at the Concertgebouw’s Robeco Summer Concerts in Amsterdam.

Since 1992, Marin Alsop has been Music Director of California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, where she has built a devoted audience for new music.

Building an orchestra is one of Alsop’s great gifts, and she retains strong links with her previous orchestras – the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (Principal Conductor 2002–08; now Conductor Emeritus) and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra (Music Director 1993–2005; now Music Director Laureate). Marin Alsop has guest conducted the great orchestras of the world including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, La Scala Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. In Europe, she regularly returns to the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and the Czech Philharmonic orchestras. Alsop has a close relationship with both the London Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras, appearing with both orchestras most seasons, as well as with the Orchestra of the Age of Englightenment. She is also Artist in Residence at the Southbank Centre in London.

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Highlights of 2012/13 include Marin Alsop’s Viennese debut with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra at the Musikverein; a performance of the Brahms Requiem with the MDR Symphony Orchestra at the Leipzig Gewandhaus; and her debut with Orchestre National de France in Paris.

Since taking up her position in Baltimore in 2007, Marin Alsop has spearheaded educational initiatives that reach more than 60,000 school and pre-school students. In 2008 she launched ‘OrchKids’, which provides music education, instruments and mentorship to the city’s neediest young people, and in 2010 the BSO Academy, where local non-professional musicians work for a week with members of the orchestra.

In 2008 Marin Alsop became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and, in the following year, was chosen as Musical America’s Conductor of the Year.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and is the only conductor to receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, given to US residents in recognition of exceptional creative work. She was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 2010 and was the only classical musician to be included in The Guardian’s ‘Top 100 Women’, celebrating the centenary of International Women’s Day in 2011. In October 2012 Alsop was presented with Honorary Membership (HonRAM) of the Royal Academy of Music, London.

Alsop’s extensive discography on Naxos includes a notable set of Brahms symphonies with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and a highly praised Dvořák series with the Baltimore Symphony. The first disc of her Prokofiev symphonic cycle with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra was Orchestral Choice in BBC Music Magazine.

Other award-winning recordings include Bernstein’s Mass (Editor’s Choice, Gramophone Awards 2010) and Jennifer Higdon’s Percussion Concerto with Colin Currie on the LPO Label (LPO-0035, Grammy Award 2010).

Born in New York City, Marin Alsop attended Yale University and The Juilliard School. Her conducting career was launched when, in 1989, she was a prize-winner at the Leopold Stokowski International Conducting Competition and in the same year was the first woman to be awarded the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize from the Tanglewood Music Center, where she was a pupil of Leonard Bernstein.

Garrick Ohlsson

© Paul Body

piano

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 International Chopin Piano Competition, pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess.

Although he has long been regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Chopin, Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire, ranging across the entire piano literature.

A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. His concerto repertoire alone is unusually wide and eclectic – ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century – and to date he has at his command more than 80 concertos.

The 2012/13 season began with performances of Busoni’s Piano Concerto with the European Union Youth Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda, including at the Edinburgh International Festival. Ohlsson appeared with the London Philharmonic Orchestra earlier this season, followed by a month-long tour of Australia where he recorded, in performance, both Brahms Piano Concertos.

At the beginning of 2013 Ohlsson gave a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Sir Mark Elder.

Tonight’s concert will be followed by a Kennedy Center appearance with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra as part of the venue’s Nordic Festival, and a US tour with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. Garrick Ohlsson returns to New York later in the spring as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, conducted

by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. Other US appearances include return visits to the orchestras of Minnesota, Dallas, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Baltimore.

In acknowledgement of the bicentenary of Liszt’s birth, the 2011/12 season included recitals of the composer’s works in cities including Chicago, Hong Kong, London and New York, where he also visited Carnegie Hall with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Lincoln Center with

the New York Philharmonic. Tours in Europe and Asia included concerts in the UK, France, Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan.

During the 2010/11 season Garrick Ohlsson presented a series of all-Chopin recitals in Seattle, Berkeley and La Jolla, culminating at Lincoln Center. In conjunction with that project, a documentary, The Art of Chopin, featuring Garrick Ohlsson and co-produced by Polish, French, British and Chinese television stations, was released in autumn 2010.

Garrick Ohlsson is an avid chamber musician, and has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Takács and Tokyo string quartets. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based FOG Trio.

A prolific recording artist, Garrick Ohlsson can be heard on labels including Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Virgin Classics and Bridge Records, where his ten-disc set of the complete Beethoven sonatas has garnered considerable critical praise, including a GRAMMY® for Volume 3. His recording of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Robert Spano was released in 2011. In 2008, Hyperion re-released his 16-disc set of the complete works of Chopin, and recently released a disc of all the Brahms Piano Variations and Granados’s Goyescas.

Born in New York State, Garrick Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of eight. He attended the Westchester Conservatory of Music and at 13 entered The Juilliard School. His musical development has been influenced by a succession of distinguished teachers, most notably Claudio Arrau, Olga Barabini, Tom Lishman, Sascha Gorodnitzki, Rosina Lhévinne and Irma Wolpe. Although he won First Prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and the 1968 Montreal Piano Competition, it was his 1970 triumph at the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, where he won the Gold Medal, that brought him worldwide recognition as one of the finest pianists of his generation. Since then he has made nearly a dozen tours of Poland, where he retains immense personal popularity.

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 7

Programme notes

American pioneers Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England of 1914 employs a characteristically rich mixture of quotation and allusion to evoke three scenes set in the composer’s beloved native region: a Boston memorial to a regiment of black soldiers that fought for the North in the Civil War; a Revolutionary campsite where a boy at a Fourth of July picnic dreams of soldiers on the march; and a riverside in the Berkshires where Mr and Mrs Ives took a Sundaymorning walk during their honeymoon.

The programme includes two works for piano and orchestra from the heady period in the 1920s when the classics met jazz: George Gershwin’s famous Rhapsody in Blue, in which an aspiring songwriter displayed his ability to work on a broader canvas;

Charles Ives 1874–1954

Charles Ives was the first great American classical composer: not simply, as he seemed for so long, an ingenious experimenter who anticipated many of the technical innovations of 20th-century music; but a composer who shared with Mahler the ability to fuse many different kinds of music, including popular music, into a coherent and powerful statement. One of his most perfectly achieved works is Three Places in New England, depicting three locations in his beloved native region, all with significant historical or personal associations. Ives drafted the three movements in 1911 and 1912, drawing on earlier sketches. By 1914 he had completed them in versions for large orchestra, and brought them together under the title ‘First Orchestral Set’. But this Set, or suite, was never performed, and the manuscript has survived only in fragmentary form.

8 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

and Aaron Copland’s two-movement Concerto, written by its idealistic young composer to show how jazz rhythms and colours could help create a distinctive American musical language.

Scott Joplin, the son of a former slave, became the ‘King of Ragtime Writers’ through the success of Maple Leaf Rag and other piano compositions, but had loftier ambitions. He completed and published his opera Treemonisha towards the end of his life, but he never saw it reach the stage. A prime mover in the work’s revival in the 1970s, as orchestrator and conductor, was Gunther Schuller; and he has now arranged an orchestral Suite from Joplin’s ragtimetinged score.

Three Places in New England 1

2 3

The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment) Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut The Housatonic at Stockbridge

In 1929, for the conductor Nicolas Slonimsky, Ives made a new version of the piece for a chamber orchestra of two dozen players. It was performed in the USA and in France, and the score was published in 1935 – the first commercial publication of any of Ives’s music. Tonight’s performance is of an edition by the American scholar James B. Sinclair, which retains the compositional improvements of the 1929 revision, while restoring the original scoring for full orchestra.

The first movement was inspired by a bas-relief by the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens on Boston Common: a memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his regiment of black soldiers, the first of its kind, which he raised to fight for the North in the American Civil War. Ives’s score of this movement is prefaced by a poem,

presumably his own, which begins and ends with the line ‘Moving – Marching – Faces of Souls!’ The music is mostly sombre and reflective, sometimes evoking a march step but never actually breaking into a march, sometimes seeming on the point of dropping into a familiar melody (such as Marching through Georgia) but never quite doing so, once reaching a brief climax but at the end fading away to nothing.

The second movement is named after the site, preserved as a Revolutionary Memorial, on which General Israel Putnam’s soldiers camped in the winter of 1778/79 during the American War of Independence.

Ives combined two earlier works, a humorous Country Band March and an overture and march called 1776, uniting them by means of a narrative in which a boy wanders away from a Fourth of July picnic on the site, and dreams that he sees Putnam’s soldiers marching out of the camp. The music includes both parodies of the amateur bandsmen of Ives’s own time and quotations of tunes from the Revolutionary period, juxtaposed and superimposed in one of Ives’s richest and most complex collages – and one of his most riotous.

The final movement is a souvenir of a walk that Ives and his wife Harmony took by the Housatonic river near Stockbridge, Massachusetts on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1908, during their honeymoon in the Berkshires. ‘We walked in the meadows along the river,’ he recalled, ‘and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colours, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember.’ The mists over the water are evoked in ‘shadow’ parts for muted violins, playing in a different key from the rest of the orchestra. At the heart of the piece is a hymn melody, Zeuner’s Missionary Chant, which is eventually expanded into a massive climax – though it is a climax with a characteristically Ivesian aftermath.

‘[‘The “St. Gaudens” in Boston Common’] seems to look ahead to black music of the near or distant future: the jagged country blues of Skip James, the dreaming chords of Ellington’s symphonic jazz, John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound”. Such resemblances may be nothing more than accidents, but Ives’s whole method was to plan accidents. He was incapable of asserting a monolithic point of view; instead, he created a kind of open-ended listening room, a space of limitless echoes.’

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (Fourth Estate)

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 9

Programme notes

George Gershwin

Rhapsody in Blue, for piano and orchestra Garrick Ohlsson piano

1898–1937

George Gershwin began his career in Tin Pan Alley, as a composer of popular songs and musicals, before making his mark in the realms of concert music and opera. The beginning of this shift is marked by his Rhapsody in Blue. This was one of a number of pieces of ‘symphonic jazz’ requested from various composers by the white band-leader Paul Whiteman, for a New York concert in February 1924 called ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’.

Gershwin wrote the Rhapsody in about three weeks, enlisting the help of Whiteman’s arranger Ferde Grofé to score it for the band. The first performance, with the composer playing the solo part (including a cadenza he had not yet written down), was a triumphant success with the star-studded audience. The piece was soon repeated in various cities by Gershwin and the Whiteman band. Later, to give it greater circulation, Grofé also made versions accompanied by theatre orchestra and by full symphony orchestra – though he retained the saxophone section and the banjo of the original.

The Rhapsody in Blue is a single-movement work in the tradition of pieces such as Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy, with a brilliant solo part including several extended cadenzas. Right from the famous trill and glissando of the opening clarinet solo, it is permeated by the instrumental colouring of jazz, together with its melodic and harmonic inflections, and above all its syncopated rhythms. There is also what might well be a full-blown Broadway show tune in the slower interlude towards the end. But it is the way in which Gershwin treats his material, not in a suite-like succession of episodes but in a continuous process of organic development, transition and transformation, that gives the Rhapsody the depth and complexity of a serious concert work.

Interval – 20 minutes An announcement will be made five minutes before the end of the interval.

‘It’s been tremendously exciting to look on as the works I discuss in The Rest Is Noise have come together in Southbank Centre’s festival. Twentieth-century classical music is an extraordinary creative achievement that has shaped so many aspects of what we hear now, classical or not. There will always be something smouldering at the heart of this repertoire, something dangerous and untamed, but placing the music in a broad cultural and historical context should help people to become more comfortable with it and to understand how it came to be.’

Alex Ross, author, The Rest Is Noise southbankcentre.co.uk/therestisnoise

10 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Aaron Copland 1900–90

Aaron Copland composed his only Piano Concerto in 1926, and took the solo part in the first performance in Boston in January 1927, with his long-time champion Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The work reflects Copland’s ambition, forged while he had been studying in Europe a few years earlier, to create a national style through the use of elements of jazz. As he later recalled, the period of the 1920s was ‘definitely coloured by the notion that Americans needed a kind of music that they could recognise as their own. The jazz came by way of wanting to write this more immediately recognisable American music.’ Unlike Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (which had had its famous premiere while Copland was still away), the Concerto is not simply in jazz idioms, but uses jazz styles, clichés and colours to enliven the composer’s rapidly evolving personal style. So, for example, syncopated rhythms are combined with Copland’s Stravinskyan changing metres to produce rhythmic textures of some complexity.

Piano Concerto Garrick Ohlsson piano 1 Andante sostenuo – 2 Molto moderato (molto rubato) – Allegro assai

a development section beginning calmly and incorporating a central piano cadenza. But where the recapitulation ought to be there is instead an expansive return to themes from the introduction to the first movement; after which the two main ideas of the second movement are brought back, in reverse order, in a brilliant coda.

Copland identified ‘two dominant jazz moods: the “blues” and the snappy number’: and it is this dualism that moulds the Concerto’s highly original twomovement form. After a challenging introduction, foreshadowing some of the work’s main thematic ideas, the first movement is a predominantly gentle slow blues; its principal melody is given increasingly full canonic treatment, culminating in a complex and sonorous passage for almost the full forces. After a brief transition, the second movement begins with a piano solo requiring some molto rubato playing (for which Copland’s own recording sets the grotesque tone). The pace then quickens towards the main part of the movement, an exuberant ‘snappy number’. This begins as if in sonata form, with the piano’s syncopated scalewise figure as the first subject, a parodistic tune initiated by the saxophone as the second, and London Philharmonic Orchestra | 11

Programme notes

Scott Joplin

Suite from Treemonisha Arranged by Gunther Schuller (born 1925)

1867/8–1917

Overture We’re Goin’ Around – Treemonisha’s Bringing Up – Good Advice Confusion The Bears We will Rest Awhile – Aunt Dinah has Blowed de Horn Prelude to Act 3 – Wrong is never Right – A Real Slow Drag Scott Joplin, born the son of a former slave in Texarkana, Texas, was an itinerant pianist and singer whose published piano pieces established him as the ‘King of Ragtime Writers’ – master of the fashionable style that combined the regular tread of marches and dances with the syncopations of African-American musical tradition.

Keen to succeed in more ambitious genres, he wrote two operas: A Guest of Honour, which was given a brief tour in 1903 but has now been lost, and Treemonisha. Joplin completed this three-act opera in 1910 and published its vocal score (with piano accompaniment) the following year; but he died before he could secure a production.

Treemonisha is sung throughout, with some numbers in the style of parlour songs of the time, but with ragtime rhythms prominent in most of the writing for orchestra and chorus. The libretto, by Joplin himself, is set on a single day in 1884 on an Arkansas plantation occupied by slaves freed following the Civil War. Treemonisha is the adopted daughter of a kindly couple who have given her a good education. Having held out against the influence of a group of elderly ‘conjurers’ who foster superstition, she is kidnapped by them. On being rescued, she forgives them, and the people of the plantation hail her as their moral teacher and leader.

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When Treemonisha finally reached the stage during the ‘ragtime boom’ of the 1970s, a major part was played by Gunther Schuller, who is not only an eminent composer, conductor and educator, but also a former jazz musician and a respected historian of jazz. Schuller conducted the first fully professional performances of Treemonisha by Houston Grand Opera in 1975 (followed by a recording).

For these he made a new scoring of the work for full orchestra, as Joplin’s own orchestration has not survived (though there is tantalising evidence that the orchestral parts were destroyed as late as the early 1960s). Schuller has now compiled an orchestral Suite from the score, made especially for the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (of which Marin Alsop is Principal Conductor).

The Suite combines orchestral movements and vocal and choral numbers, freely adapted with voices replaced by instruments. The extended Overture begins with a theme that Joplin said ‘is the principal strain in the opera and represents the happiness of the people when they feel free from the conjurors and their spells of superstition’. It is followed by orchestral transcriptions of a choral dance or ‘ring play’, a description by Treemonisha’s adoptive mother of her upbringing, and a sermon by Parson Alltalk. ‘Confusion’ is an ensemble of horrified reaction to Treemonisha’s abduction, and ‘The Bears’ is a dance scene in which eight bears frolic in waltz time. The next two numbers are sung by a male quartet during work in the cotton fields, and by all the cotton pickers at the end of the day’s labour. The Prelude to Act 3, introducing a scene in which Treemonisha’s friends are waiting anxiously for news of her, is followed by a ‘lecture’ by the idealistic young Remus, and then by the finale, in which Treemonisha leads the company in a joyful dance.

Programme notes by Anthony Burton © 2013

Next LPO concerts at Royal Festival Hall

Saturday 2 March 2013 | 7.30pm

Saturday 27 April 2013 | 7.30pm

Weill The Threepenny Opera (sung in German with English surtitles)

Webern Variations Op. 30 Berg Lulu Suite Martinů Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano and Timpani Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Mark Padmore Macheath Sir John Tomlinson J J Peachum Dame Felicity Palmer Mrs Peachum Allison Bell Polly Peachum Nicholas Folwell Tiger Brown Gabriela Iştoc Lucy Brown Meow Meow Jenny Max Hopp narrator Ted Huffman director London Philharmonic Choir There will be no interval in this performance.

Free pre- and post-concert performances 6.00–6.45pm and 9.45–10.15pm The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall Foyle Future Firsts and conductor Gerry Cornelius present Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel – two chances to hear Weill and Brecht’s first collaboration.

Saturday 6 April 2013 | 7.30pm

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Barbara Hannigan soprano

Wednesday 1 May 2013 | 7.30pm Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 4 Tippett A Child of our Time Ryan Wigglesworth conductor Rebecca Evans soprano Pamela Helen Stephen mezzo soprano Ben Johnson tenor Matthew Rose bass London Philharmonic Choir Free pre-concert discussion 6.15–6.45pm | Royal Festival Hall Writer and broadcaster Daniel Snowman takes a look at Tippett’s A Child of our Time.

Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms Orff Carmina Burana Hans Graf conductor Sally Matthews soprano Andrew Kennedy tenor Rodion Pogossov baritone London Philharmonic Choir Trinity Boys Choir Free pre-concert discussion 6.15–6.45pm | Royal Festival Hall Hans Graf looks at Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and the lasting appeal of Carmina Burana.

Friday 17 May 2013 | 7.30pm JTI Friday Series Stravinsky Jeu de Cartes Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 Vladimir Jurowski conductor Patricia Kopatchinskaja violin

Booking details Tickets £9–£39 London Philharmonic Orchestra Ticket Office: 020 7840 4242 Monday to Friday 10.00am–5.00pm | lpo.org.uk Southbank Centre Ticket Office: 0844 847 9920 Daily 9.00am–8.00pm | southbankcentre.co.uk

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 13

LPO Label sale on iTunes 12 February–11 March 2013 | www.iTunes.com/LPO From 12 February–11 March, we’re offering special discounts on all our LPO Label albums on iTunes.

With over 70 releases in the LPO catalogue – from Handel to Holst, and Shostakovich to Ravi Shankar – there’s something for every taste, so grab a bargain this month!

Some of our recent releases – browse the full LPO catalogue at www.iTunes.com/LPO

Vladimir Jurowski conducts Tchaikovsky Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5

Klaus Tennstedt conducts Brahms Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3

INTERNATIONAL PIANO SERIES 2012/13

New orchestral works by Mark-Anthony Turnage

CHRISTIAN BLACKSHAW

Tuesday 26 February

KARIM SAID

Sunday 3 March and Sunday 9 June

MITSUKO UCHIDA

DENIS KOZHUKHIN Sunday 12 May Part of The Rest Is Noise

PIOTR ANDERSZEWSKI

STEPHEN KOVACEVICH

STEVEN OSBORNE

KIRILL GERSTEIN

ELISABETH LEONSKAJA

YUNDI

Thursday 18 April

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Tuesday 7 May

Thursday 23 May

Thursday 4 April

TICKETS 0844 847 9929 SOUTHBANKCENTRE.CO.UK

ANGELA HEWITT

Wednesday 6 March

Tuesday 19 March

Mitsuko Uchida © Roger Mastroianni

Paavo Berglund conducts Sibelius Symphonies Nos. 5 & 6

Wednesday 29 May Part of The Rest Is Noise

Wednesday 5 June

We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the following Thomas Beecham Group Patrons, Principal Benefactors and Benefactors: Thomas Beecham Group The Tsukanov Family Foundation Anonymous The Sharp Family Julian & Gill Simmonds Garf & Gill Collins Andrew Davenport Mrs Sonja Drexler David & Victoria Graham Fuller Moya Greene John & Angela Kessler Mr & Mrs Makharinsky Geoff & Meg Mann Caroline, Jamie & Zander Sharp Eric Tomsett Guy & Utti Whittaker Manon Williams Principal Benefactors Mark & Elizabeth Adams Jane Attias Lady Jane Berrill Desmond & Ruth Cecil Mr John H Cook Mr Charles Dumas

David Ellen Commander Vincent Evans Mr Daniel Goldstein Mr & Mrs Jeffrey Herrmann Peter MacDonald Eggers Mr & Mrs David Malpas Mr Maxwell Morrison Mr Michael Posen Mr & Mrs Thierry Sciard Mr John Soderquist & Mr Costas Michaelides Mr & Mrs G Stein Mr & Mrs John C Tucker Mr & Mrs John & Susi Underwood Lady Marina Vaizey Howard & Sheelagh Watson Mr Anthony Yolland Benefactors Mrs A Beare Dr & Mrs Alan Carrington CBE FRS Mr & Mrs Stewart Cohen Mr Alistair Corbett Mr David Dennis Mr David Edgecombe Mr Richard Fernyhough Ken Follett Michael & Christine Henry

Ivan Hurry Mr Glenn Hurstfield Mr R K Jeha Mr Gerald Levin Sheila Ashley Lewis Wg. Cdr. & Mrs M T Liddiard OBE JP RAF Mr Frank Lim Paul & Brigitta Lock Mr Brian Marsh Andrew T Mills John Montgomery Mr & Mrs Andrew Neill Edmund Pirouet Professor John Studd Mr Peter Tausig Mrs Kazue Turner Mr Laurie Watt Des & Maggie Whitelock Christopher Williams Bill Yoe Hon. Benefactor Elliott Bernerd Hon. Life Members Kenneth Goode Pehr G Gyllenhammar Edmund Pirouet Mrs Jackie Rosenfeld OBE

The generosity of our Sponsors, Corporate Members, supporters and donors is gratefully acknowledged: Corporate Members Silver: AREVA UK British American Business Destination Québec – UK Hermes Fund Managers Pritchard Englefield Bronze: Lisa Bolgar Smith and Felix Appelbe of Ambrose Appelbe Appleyard & Trew LLP Berkeley Law Charles Russell Lazard Leventis Overseas Corporate Donor Lombard Street Research Preferred Partners Corinthia Hotel London Heineken Lindt & Sprüngli Ltd Villa Maria

In-kind Sponsors Google Inc Sela / Tilley’s Sweets Trusts and Foundations BBC Performing Arts Fund The Boltini Trust Sir William Boreman’s Foundation The Boshier-Hinton Foundation Britten-Pears Foundation The Candide Trust The Coutts Charitable Trust Diaphonique, Franco-British fund for contemporary music Dunard Fund Embassy of Spain, Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs The Equitable Charitable Trust Fidelio Charitable Trust The Foyle Foundation J Paul Getty Junior Charitable Trust The Jeniffer and Jonathan Harris Charitable Trust Capital Radio’s Help a London Child The Hobson Charity The Kirby Laing Foundation

The Idlewild Trust The Leverhulme Trust Marsh Christian Trust Adam Mickiewicz Institute The Peter Minet Trust Paul Morgan Charitable Trust The Diana and Allan Morgenthau Charitable Trust Maxwell Morrison Charitable Trust Musicians Benevolent Fund Newcomen Collett Foundation The Austin & Hope Pilkington Trust Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation The Rothschild Foundation The Samuel Sebba Charitable Trust The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation John Thaw Foundation The Tillett Trust The Underwood Trust Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement Kurt Weill Foundation for Music Garfield Weston Foundation and others who wish to remain anonymous

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 15

Administration

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Victoria Sharp Chairman Stewart McIlwham* President Gareth Newman* Vice-President Desmond Cecil CMG Vesselin Gellev* Jonathan Harris CBE FRICS Dr Catherine C. Høgel Martin Höhmann* Angela Kessler George Peniston* Sir Bernard Rix Kevin Rundell* Julian Simmonds Mark Templeton* Sir Philip Thomas Natasha Tsukanova Timothy Walker AM Laurence Watt Dr Manon Williams

Timothy Walker AM Chief Executive and Artistic Director

Andrew Chenery Orchestra Personnel Manager

Philip Stuart Discographer

Sarah Thomas Librarian (maternity leave)

Gillian Pole Recordings Archive

Sarah Holmes Librarian (maternity cover)

Professional Services

* Player-Director

Advisory Council Victoria Sharp Chairman Richard Brass Sir Alan Collins Jonathan Dawson Christopher Fraser OBE Clive Marks OBE FCA Stewart McIlwham Lord Sharman of Redlynch OBE Timothy Walker AM American Friends of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Inc. Margot Astrachan Chairman David E. R. Dangoor Vice Chair/Treasurer Kyung-Wha Chung Peter M. Felix CBE Alexandra Jupin Dr. Felisa B. Kaplan William A. Kerr Jill Fine Mainelli Kristina McPhee Dr. Joseph Mulvehill Harvey M. Spear, Esq. Danny Lopez Honorary Chairman Noel Kilkenny Honorary Director Victoria Sharp Honorary Director Richard Gee, Esq Of Counsel Robert Kuchner, CPA

Alison Atkinson Digital Projects Manager Finance David Burke General Manager and Finance Director

Michael Pattison Stage Manager

Jo Orr PA to the Chief Executive / Concerts Assistant

Marketing

Matthew Freeman Recordings Consultant

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Charles Russell Solicitors

Crowe Clark Whitehill LLP Julia Boon Auditors Assistant Orchestra Personnel David Greenslade Manager FSC_57678 14 January 2011 15/09/2011 12:30 Page Dr 1 Louise Miller Finance and ITLPO Manager Honorary Doctor Ken Graham Trucking Concert Management Instrument Transportation London Philharmonic Roanna Gibson Development Orchestra Concerts Director 89 Albert Embankment (maternity leave) Nick Jackman London SE1 7TP Development Director Ruth Sansom Tel: 020 7840 4200 Artistic Administrator / Acting Fax: 020 7840 4201 Helen Searl Head of Concerts Department Box Office: 020 7840 4242 Corporate Relations Manager lpo.org.uk Graham Wood Katherine Hattersley Concerts and Recordings Charitable Giving Manager The London Philharmonic Manager Orchestra Limited is a Melissa Van Emden registered charity No. 238045.

Barbara Palczynski Events Manager Glyndebourne and Projects Photograph of Copland © Laura Luckhurst Administrator Roman Freulich. Photograph Corporate Relations and Jenny Chadwick of Gershwin © ClassicStock/ Events Officer Tours and Engagements Alamy.

Sarah Fletcher Manager Development and Finance Front cover photograph Alison Jones Officer © Patrick Harrison.

Concerts Co-ordinator

Patrick Bailey Education and Community Director Alexandra Clarke Education Manager Caz Vale Community and Young Talent Manager Richard Mallett Education and Community Producer

16 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Kath Trout Marketing Director

Samantha Kendall Box Office Manager (Tel: 020 7840 4242) Libby Northcote-Green Marketing Co-ordinator Isobel King Intern Albion Media Public Relations (Tel: 020 3077 4930)

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