LPO Foyle Future Firsts/Royal Academy of Music pre-concert performance programme: 3 Feb 2024

Pre-concert performance Foyle Future Firsts Saturday 3 February 2024 | 6.00pm Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall

Edward Gardner conductor Members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra LPO Foyle Future Firsts Students from the Royal Academy of Music Igor Stravinsky Symphonies of Wind Instruments (9’) Tania León Ácana (12’) Michael Tippett Little Music for String Orchestra (10’) Mabel Daniels Deep Forest (8’)

Welcome Welcome to this evening’s performance, in which LPO Principal Conductor Edward Gardner brings together an ensemble of LPO members, Foyle Future Firsts and students from the Royal Academy of Music.

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.

Since 1822 the Royal Academy of Music has been inspiring successive generations of musicians to connect, collaborate and create. For over 20 years, professional side-by-side projects, such as this one, have played a unique and indispensable role in high-level musical training at the Academy. They function as artistic work-placements, giving students the experience of rehearsing and performing in a completely professional context. At the heart of this experience is the mentorship provided by partners, such as LPO and Academy alumnus Edward Gardner.

This evening’s performance showcases multiple generations of talent in one powerful programme.

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

On stage tonight First Violins Vesselin Gellev* Leader Camille Buitenhuis# Iohan Coman† Rachael Kwa† Ezo Sarici† Sophie Rogan†

Oboes Jack Tostevin-Hall# Alice Munday*

Second Violins Claudia Tarrant-Matthews*

Cor Anglais Harvey Jones†

Tuba Connor Gingell#

Olivia Ziani§ Isobel Howard† Daisy Wong† Tiago Soares Silva† Olwen Miles†

Clarinets Beth Crouch# Benjamin Mellefont* Ivan Rogachev† Edwin Kwong†

Percussion Tom Plumridge# Andrew Barclay*

LPO chair supported by Friends of the Orchestra

Violas Martin Wray* Teresa Ferreira# Laura Cooper† Emily Clark† Cellos David Lale* Sam Weinstein# Samuel Vincent† Jessica Abrahams† Double Basses Tom Morgan Phoebe Cheng# Flutes Maria Filippova# Stewart McIlwham* Ruby Howells†

Piccolos Maria Filippova# Stewart McIlwham*

Trombones Rhodri Thomas# David Whitehouse* David Anton† Bass Trombone David Anton†

LPO chair supported by Gill & Garf Collins

Bass Clarinet Ivan Rogachev†

Timpani Tom Plumridge#

Bassoons Lucy Gibson# Simon Estell* Fergus Butt†

Harp Anwen Thomas#

Contrabassoon Fergus Butt† Horns Zac Hayward# William Scotland† Mark Vines* Longgang Ji† Trumpets Adam Meyer§

Tom Nielsen* Sophie Kukulies†

Piano Evi Wang# * LPO member # Foyle Future First 2023/24 § Foyle Future First reserve 2023/24 † Royal Academy of Music student Assistant Conductors Dan Hogan (Royal Academy of Music) Charlotte Politi (LPO Fellow Conductor 2023/24)

Edward Gardner conductor Edward Gardner has been the LPO’s Principal Conductor since September 2021. He is also Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic, a position he will relinquish at the end of this season. From August 2024 he will undertake the Music Directorship of the Norwegian Opera and Ballet, having been its Artistic Advisor since February 2022.

This season Edward conducts the LPO in ten concerts at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.

As part of the Orchestra’s cross-arts festival ‘The Music in You’ in March 2024, he will conduct Haydn’s The Creation; a reinvention of Szymanowski’s ballet Harnasie in collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor; Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins; and Mozart’s Mass in C minor. Other highlights with the Orchestra this season include Holst’s The Planets and Stravinsky’s Petrushka.

Edward’s position at the LPO is generously supported by Aud Jebsen.

Programme notes Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920; this revision 1947)

Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments began life as a memorial tribute to his friend Claude Debussy, who died in 1918. It took the form of a piano chorale – a slow, simple and solemn sequence of chords – published in a commemorative issue of a French journal. Later Stravinsky decided to turn this tribute into a longer instrumental piece, for which the chorale would provide the ending, as if concluding a liturgical work. The abstract title uses the word ‘symphony’ in its older sense of ‘sounding together’ – it is certainly not symphonic in the Beethovenian sense of the word.

The work is constructed in a series of short, intercut segments in different tempi and colours – a highly original procedure in 1920, which may have owed something to the then-new art of film editing or ‘montage’, and which had a profound influence on many 20th-century composers. The first section introduces a series of angular motifs that evolve and transform throughout the work. The second brings a poignant elegy, featuring lyrical solos and interweaving textures. The final section returns to the rhythmic intensity of the opening, building towards a powerful and climactic conclusion.

The resulting work is a concise yet deeply expressive exploration of timbre and form, reflecting Stravinsky’s fascination with the neoclassical and ritualistic elements that permeate his oeuvre. The work is characterised by a kaleidoscope of instrumental colours and a meticulous attention to rhythmic intricacies, while the thematic material, derived from Russian Orthodox liturgical chants, adds a contemplative and ceremonial quality. Its brevity, combined with its emotional depth and meticulous craftsmanship, makes the Symphonies a compelling and enigmatic masterpiece.

Adapted from a programme note © Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers

© Gail Hadani

Tania León (born 1943) Ácana (2008)

Tania León became the LPO’s Composer-in-Residence for two seasons from September 2023. As well as presenting several brand new commissions and performances of her earlier works, during her residency Tania will continue her lifelong advocacy for the music of living composers as mentor to the five LPO Young Composers. On 6 March 2024 the LPO and Edward Gardner will give the world premiere of her new orchestra work Raíces (Roots) at the Royal Festival Hall.

Tania left her native Cuba for the United States in 1967. She settled in New York City, where she received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from New York University, and in 1969 staked her place in New York’s cultural scene as a founding member and music director of Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem. Five years later she instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert series. She was New Music Advisor at the New York Philharmonic from 1993–97, and from 1994–2001 she served as Latin American music advisor for the American Composers Orchestra. She is also the founder and artistic director of Composers Now, dedicated to empowering living composers and celebrating the diversity of their voices. In 2022 Tania León received a prestigious Kennedy Center Honor, awarded annually to figures in the performing arts for their contributions to American culture. In addition, she won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her work Stride, and she was recently announced as winner of the 2023 Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition.

Composed in 2008, Ácana was inspired by the Cuban Laureate Nicolás Guillén’s poem of the same name, dedicated to the ácana tree. Sprawling to a height of 90 feet and a width of three feet, the ácana is revered for its strength and wide-spreading roots, and is essential to Cuban life and society.

Its wood is described in Guillén’s poem as being the pitchfork that helps to build homes, a staff to lead people safely home, and finally the table that will hold their coffins. León’s love for her native Cuba can be heard throughout the piece in the vibrant dance rhythms found in the percussion and upper woodwinds.

Adapted from a programme note © The Orchestra Now

Programme notes cont.

Michael Tippett (1905–98) Little Music for String Orchestra (1946)

1 2 3 4

Prelude: Maestoso Fugue: Allegro moderato Air: Andante espressivo Finale: Vivace

© Schott Music

This short piece for strings in four continuously-played movements is aptly described by its title: it is an uncomplicated piece. After completing a major work, Tippett often either spun off a shorter piece based on similar ideas, or wrote a simpler piece more or less for relaxation after the rigours of the major work. This Little Music for strings came shortly after the premiere of his First Symphony in November 1945, and was commissioned by the Jacques String Orchestra to commemmorate its 10th anniversary. Reginald Jacques conducted the premiere in 1946. The opening movement is reminiscent of Hindemith in its spare, linear texture, and serves as a kind of prelude to a fugue that follows, which is in a warmer and less severe mood. The final movement is brisk and energetic, although it concludes with a surprising quiet echo of itself.

Adapted from a programme note © AllMusic

Mabel Daniels (1878–1971) Deep Forest (1933)

Mabel Daniels was a New England composer. She studied at the newly founded Radcliffe College at Harvard, graduating in 1900, and was later the first woman in Ludwig Thuille’s score-reading class at the Munich Conservatoire, before becoming head of music at Simmons College, Boston. She worked for women’s suffrage and was endlessly generous to other musicians, giving anonymous composition prizes and establishing a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music. Daniels’s choral pieces are among her best known works, but she also wrote stage, orchestral and instrumental music. Her musical language includes triadic harmony with occasional diatonic dissonance; the melodic lines are sometimes angular, due partly to modal shifts and unpredictable triads.

Deep Forest was originally written for chamber orchestra in 1931, and revised for full orchestra in 1934. Like many of her New England colleagues, Daniels spent several summers at the MacDowell Colony, and was inspired by the New Hampshire woods. She wrote of Deep Forest, and its companion piece Pirates’ Island: ‘I had no program in mind for these pieces. The idea came to me when looking out from the windows of an old tower on a cliff by the ocean during a summer’s day stroll. Through the window towards the land I saw in my imagination ‘Deep Forest’. It is impossible not to be inspired by the magnificent surroundings at the Colony. I so constantly heard a flute against a background of muted strings, whenever I walked, that I finally had to put it on paper.’

Deep Forest was frequently performed in Daniels’s lifetime, under conductors including Serge Koussevitzky and John Barbirolli. The Ambache Chamber Ensemble gave its European premiere in London in 2004.

Save the date: Debut Sounds 2024 Thursday 27 June 2024 | 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, with live choreography by Trinity Laban postgraduates. Artistically directed and conducted by Composer-in-Residence and Composer Mentor Tania León.

Tickets will go on sale later in the spring: find out more at lpo.org.uk/youngcomposers The LPO Young Composers programme 2023/24 is being delivered in collaboration with Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. The programme is generously supported by Allianz Musical Insurance, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the Vaughan Williams Foundation and The Marchus Trust.

Foyle Future Firsts photo © Benjamin Ealovega

Programme note © Diana Ambache, womenofnote.co.uk