LPO/RAM pre-concert performance programme: 26 Nov 2022 - Foyle Future Firsts: Refugee

Pre-concert performance Foyle Future Firsts: Refugee Saturday 26 November 2022 | 6.00pm Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall

Edward Gardner conductor Amar Muchhala tenor Members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra LPO Foyle Future Firsts Students from the Royal Academy of Music Arson Fahim Journey to the Sea (9’) Mark-Anthony Turnage Refugee, for tenor & chamber orchestra (22’)

A place to call home

Welcome Welcome to this evening’s performance, which forms part of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s ‘A place to call home’ season theme. In this special performance, LPO Principal Conductor Edward Gardner brings together an ensemble of LPO members, Foyle Future Firsts and Royal Academy of Music students.

Participants on the LPO’s annual Foyle Future Firsts programme are talented instrumentalists who aspire to become professional orchestral musicians. Across the year Future Firsts benefit from individual mentoring from London Philharmonic Orchestra Principals, mock auditions, involvement in full orchestral rehearsals and Education & Community projects, and wider professional development

sessions. Members of the scheme are supported and nurtured to the highest standards and we are proud to see current and past Foyle Future Firsts consistently taking professional engagements with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and other world-class ensembles.

This evening’s performance sees the Future Firsts perform alongside LPO members and students from the Royal Academy of Music, bringing multiple generations of talent together for tonight’s powerful programme.

The Foyle Future Firsts Development Programme is generously funded by the Foyle Foundation with additional support from the Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust and The Thriplow Charitable Trust.

Programme notes Arson Fahim (born 2000) Journey to the Sea (2021)

Arson Fahim is an Afghan pianist, composer and conductor born in 2000.

He graduated from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in 2021, and only two weeks before the Taliban took control of the country and once again banned music, Arson moved to the US to study at the Longy School of Music where he was awarded a scholarship. Arson believes in the power of music to bring social change. His music is inspired by the tragedies in Afghanistan and beyond, and his compositions are a way for him to protest and raise his voice for justice. Arson hopes to help young, underprivileged Afghans discover music and help them change their lives through learning music.

‘In the summer of 2021 I sat in the practice rooms of my school, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, to write one last piece before I left my war-torn home to study in the United States. I looked back at the challenges I had to go through, the times I had to risk my life simply to be a musician and the times I almost lost it all – I thought about my friends and family who supported me through it all, but whom I was now leaving behind to pursue my dreams. I reflected on how music gave purpose and meaning to my life.

I thought about how one day I may see the sea – and may be able to use the magical powers of music to play my role in making the world a better place.

Journey to the Sea is about how each and every one of us faces challenges – sometimes small ones, sometimes so big that we don’t think we’ll ever be able to overcome them ... yet somehow we always do. The challenges that we overcome are what make us who we are. The tears we shed in the hardest moments of our lives, when struggling to cling to hope is painful beyond words.

When I wrote this piece, I had no idea that the hardest and most painful days of my life were yet to come. Only two weeks after I arrived in the US, my country fell into the hands of the Taliban – an extremist group who, alongside many other crimes such as killing thousands of innocent people and not allowing women to work or study, have banned music. My friends and colleagues have either had to flee or go into hiding in fear of their lives. Now, more than ever, I need to remind myself that we must never give up, because it is in the hardest of times when hope is most vital.’

Arson Fahim, 2022

Programme notes Mark-Anthony Turnage (born 1960) Refugee, for tenor and chamber orchestra (2019) Amar Muchhala tenor 1

These Strangers Emily Dickinson, 1864

2 We Refugees Benjamin Zephaniah, 2000 3 Refugee Blues W H Auden, 1939 4 Interlude 5 Refugees Brian Bilston, 2016

Mark-Anthony Turnage is not shy of confronting difficult issues in his music.

‘It has to be something that really matters’, he says, of the motivation behind each new score. ‘Especially at the moment, with what’s going on, it seems even more important.’ From works of loss and commemoration, to politicallycharged pieces of activism, Turnage’s music reflects the bare – and often harsh – realities of modern life with unflinching conviction. His song-cycle for tenor and orchestra, Refugee, is no exception. Inspired by the current plight of refugees across Europe and a feeling that Turnage describes as ‘helplessness’, Refugee highlights the fact that this could be any of us, that we too could one day find ourselves strangers seeking sanctuary. ‘Imagine if that happened to you’, Turnage says. ‘You would hope other people would accept you, so why are people rejecting these people?’

Carved into five movements, with an instrumental interlude before the final song, Refugee takes texts from four different writers, each with the same theme of displacement. ‘There was a richness of poetry out there, so I was spoiled for choice’, Turnage says. And as his wide-ranging choice of texts makes clear, the refugee crisis is sadly not a modern problem. Sitting alongside 21st-century poetry by Benjamin Zephania and Brian Bilston are 18th- and 19th-century texts by Emily Dickinson and W H Auden. The implications are powerful and unsettling: little appears to have changed in nearly 300 years.

Refugee, then, is a call to arms; it is a plea to sit up, listen and take action.

And Turnage holds nothing back. The opening song is set to Dickinson’s curt, four-line poem These Strangers, its brevity matched by Turnage’s uncompromising delivery. Swells of woodwind herald the soloist’s opening statement, itself a stark message of warning, delivered fortissimo: ‘These Strangers, in a foreign World Protection asked of me – Befriend them, lest Yourself in Heaven Be found a Refugee’. From here Turnage softens, turning to Zephania’s haunting tale of someone who has become a refugee within their own country, estranged by a radical leader, their freedom curtailed and traditions overturned: ‘All it takes is a mad leader, Or no rain to bring forth food, We can all be refugees.’ The soft musicality of Zephaniah’s text is matched here by Turnage’s lilting accompaniment, a nostalgic folk-like story told through song. But its deceptive simplicity is soon overturned, its flowing textures soon peter out. The reality is more stark: with spluttering brass and sharp, pizzicato strings, the soloist’s anger gradually rises in intensity at the injustice of it all.

Like Zephania’s poem, Auden’s Refugee Blues is really a song in all but name.

Written nearly a century earlier, it also has a similar story to tell: not, this time, of a hot country in the modern Middle East but of Hitler’s Germany as the Jews came under siege. Just as its title is deliberately disarming, undermining the seriousness of the subject matter, so too is Turnage’s setting. Combining elements of the blues from the title with the irrepressible march of Hitler’s army, as listeners we find ourselves just as unnerved and dissociated as the Jewish refugees of the poem.

The instrumental movement that follows appears to take stock, collecting together the complex, fragmented emotions of everything we have heard thus far – frustration, anger, disbelief and despair – gathering it into a single, introspective interlude. It ends not with a sigh of resignation but with nothing short of a scream. From here there is only stillness, the muted, barely-there backdrop of the strings in the final movement coloured by the soft intonation of Japanese bells and a single, lone oboe. It is as though we have reset, regrouped, washed the slate clean and begun again. And that is what the final poem goes on to do, its message a reversible one that transforms from hate into love, from ignorance to understanding. The cycle ends, then, with a quiet and understated note of hope: all is not yet lost.

Programme note © Jo Kirkbride

On stage tonight First Violins Lasma Taimina* Leader

LPO chair supported by Irina Gofman & Mr Rodrik V. G. Cave

Vera Beumer# Minn Majoe* Samuel Cutajar§ Muriel Oberhofer§ Kristen Nielsen§

Second Violins Nynke Hijlkema* Naomi Warburton§ Ashley Stevens* Julian Schad§ Miles Ames§ Nikolaus Besthorn§

Violas Martin Wray* Lukas Bowen# Laura Cooper§ Dorota Kolinek§ Cellos Francis Bucknall* Tabitha Selley# Jason Ma§ Jihyo Jung§ Double Basses Hugh Kluger* Georgia Lloyd

Edward Gardner conductor Edward Gardner became the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor in September 2021. He is also Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic, a position he will relinquish at the end of the 2023/24 season. From August 2024 he will undertake the Music Directorship of the Norwegian Opera and Ballet, having commenced the role of Artistic Advisor in February 2022.

This season Edward leads the London Philharmonic Orchestra in celebrating its 90th anniversary with music originally written for the LPO, including Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music and Tippett’s A Child of Our Time. He opened the Orchestra’s season on 24 September with Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, bringing the Orchestra and soloists together with the London Philharmonic Choir and London Symphony Chorus. Future highlights this season include Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, an Elgar symphony cycle, Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass and Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust.

Edward Gardner’s position at the LPO is generously supported

by Aud Jebsen.

Flute Marie Sato#

Trumpet Emily Ashby#

Oboe Christopher Vettraino#

Trombone Gemma Riley#

Clarinet Méline Le Calvez#

Percussion Andrew Barclay*

Bass Clarinet Paul Richards*

LPO chair supported by Gill & Garf Collins

Elliott Gaston-Ross#

Bassoon Bruce Parris#

Piano Iain Clarke#

Soprano Saxophone Tom Kleyn

Harp Nicolette Chin#

Horn Millie Lihoreau#

*LPO member # Foyle Future First 2022/23 § Royal Academy of Music student

Amar Muchhala tenor Now a resident of London, Amar was born in Bombay and studied French literature in the USA before pursuing singing on the opera course at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He made his Royal Opera House debut in 2013 as Chulak in the world premiere of David Bruce’s The Firework Maker’s Daughter, and then starred as Alex in the world premiere of Søren Nils Eichberg’s Glare in 2014.

He also covered the role of Pasterz in the 2015 production of Szymanowski’s Król Roger under Antonio Pappano.

Amar has also sung at English National Opera (Strauss’s Salome under Martyn Brabbins), Staatsoper Hannover, Theater Magdeburg, and as Macduff in English Touring Opera’s 2019 production of Verdi’s Macbeth. In 2019 he also covered Juan Diego Flórez in the title role of Massenet’s Werther at the Royal Opera House, working closely with conductor Edward Gardner. Having sung at the 2021 Glyndebourne Festival and the Birmingham Opera Company, Amar went on to sing the title role of Werther at the Theater Regensburg in Germany.

Save the date: Debut Sounds 2023 Thursday 13 July 2023 | 7.30pm | Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall Five world premieres by members of the LPO’s Young Composers programme, performed by an ensemble of LPO musicians and Foyle Future Firsts, conducted by Composer-in-Residence and Composer Mentor Brett Dean.

Tickets will go on sale in spring 2023: find out more at lpo.org.uk/youngcomposers The LPO Young Composers programme 2022/23 is generously supported by Allianz Musical Insurance, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the Garrick Charitable Trust and the RVW Trust. The Foyle Future Firsts Development Programme 2022/23 is generously funded by the Foyle Foundation with additional support from the Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust and The Thriplow Charitable Trust.