London Philharmonic Orchestra 1 April 2020 concert programme notes

Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor VLADIMIR JUROWSKI Principal Conductor Designate EDWARD GARDNER supported by Mrs Christina Lang Assael Leader PIETER SCHOEMAN supported by Neil Westreich Patron HRH THE DUKE OF KENT KG Chief Executive and Artistic Director TIMOTHY WALKER CBE AM Chief Executive Designate DAVID BURKE

Programme notes Wednesday 1 April 2020 | 7.30pm

Ives The Unanswered Question (6’) Thomas Adès In Seven Days, for piano and orchestra (30’) Beethoven Symphony No. 6, Op. 68 (Pastoral) (40’)

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

PROGRAMME NOTES 2008: LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY The three works in this concert were written exactly 100 years apart, starting in 1808. In that year, when Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 was first performed, the French Revolution was less than a decade old. Beethoven himself was changing the way music was heard, perceived and written – not only radically redefining the scope of the ‘symphony’ but suggesting composers might be innovative freelancers rather than court servants.

Beethoven’s Sixth is actually considered one of his less revolutionary works – a walk in the countryside more than a protest at the barricades. But it nonetheless does new and wonderful things with

1908 One day in the 1880s, bandmaster George Ives arrived home in Danbury, Connecticut, to find his son Charles at the piano playing the melody of a tune he had heard at one of his father’s rehearsals while knocking out the hammering drum-beats at the same time. ‘It’s all right to do that Charlie’, the composer’s father said, ‘as long as you know what you’re doing.’

Charles Ives grew up to be the first wholly and distinctively American composer of art music to be recognised as such. His father’s words that day would guide him artistically: Ives knew precisely what he was doing when he pioneered techniques including free dissonance (discords that don’t smooth the way to ‘proper’ chords), polytonality (music in more than one key at one time), polyrhythm (music in more than one

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actual music, transforming melodies and gestures beyond recognition, leading us through a landscape that can change while remaining the same. Two centuries later, in 2008, Thomas Adès’s work In Seven Days – another hymn to creation – does something similar, placing the same repeating fragments in different contexts, as if to presents different scans of the same visual field.

Plenty of people who know Adès and his music believe In Seven Days is his best piece to date.

It stands with Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ as a work that, in some sense, presents an answer to the unanswered question posed by Charles Ives in 1908: what is life?

Charles Ives (1874–1954) The Unanswered Question

time signature at one time), experimental form and spatial positioning of instruments. In those elements – almost all of which crop up in the short orchestral piece The Unanswered Question – Ives anticipated some of the major musical developments of 20th-century music.

The Unanswered Question was originally conceived in 1906, but revised and re-upholstered for orchestra in 1930–35. It was designed as one of a pair of pieces; its companion, A Contemplation of Nothing Serious or Central Park in the Dark in ‘The Good Old Summertime’, had a purposefully incidental footing designed to offset the serious existential crisis of The Unanswered Question, in which a lone trumpet poses seven times, over hushed strings, ‘the perennial question of existence’.

Sometimes Ives’s trumpet is physically divorced from the accompanying strings, which only underlines the work’s mysticism. Eventually, the trumpet meets with Ives’s ‘flying answerers’, a group of noisy, schizophrenic flutes whose ‘answers’ (if they be such) prove unsettlingly inconclusive.

2008

In Seven Days for piano and orchestra

1 Chaos – Light – Dark – 2 Separation of the waters into sea and sky 3 Land – Grass – Trees – 4 Stars, Sun, Moon – 5 Creatures of sea and sky 6 Creatures of the land 7 Contemplation

Commissioned by the Southbank Centre and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. World premiere 28 April 2008 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London, conducted by the composer with Nicolas Hodges (piano), London Sinfonietta and Tal Rosner (video artist).

As first presented in 2008, In Seven Days was a collaboration not only between piano and orchestra but also between music and video art, the latter created by Adès’s marital partner at the time, Tal Rosner. The music is beautifully adapted to its ally, and at the same time discovers rich possibilities for itself, in how it proceeds in segments, suggesting scans of a visual field, to build a continuity. Such a form allows the composer to treat the subject of Creation by focussing on creation – on how tiny particles of sound can combine, and recombine, and jostle against one another, to produce a half-hour span. In Seven Days is a fractal composition, a work in which certain simple elements – as simple as the rising scale step that kicks the whole thing off – are repeated again and again in

contexts that are in a constant state of change thanks to the composer’s virtuoso control of rhythm and, especially, harmony, his twisted tonality emerging, totally fresh, from decades of popular music as well as from the classical tradition.

Composing against a visual counterpoint, Adès does not attempt to evoke the objects of Creation so much as the processes, and the energies. Often the result of a creative act is not one thing but two. On the first day, for instance, God creates heaven and earth, and light and darkness. Accordingly, Adès works with musical oppositions – of orchestra and piano, of course, but also of different groups within the orchestra, or of extremities of pitch, or rival harmonic forces. His music

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PROGRAMME NOTES CONTINUED for this first day is led off as a perpetuum mobile by the strings, whose larger cycles bring in other orchestral families. These, having been installed, set out on their own courses, the woodwinds spiralling down, the brass moving towards a chorale that heralds the piano.

Racing at double speed, the soloist soon moves into a melodious complexity that engages the orchestra and winds down into the bass, from which a rise leads into the second day.

Tuned percussion enter here, in what develops from note repetitions into an infinite simultaneity of ascending and descending lines, perhaps suggesting

Escher’s perpetual staircases. The plant life of the third day burgeons as growing variation (but then, everything here is growing variation), from the extreme bass to a majestic climax. Divine astronomy in the fourth day is figured as glittering starscapes and the beneficent harmony, perhaps, of the sun. Days five (aquatic life) and six (terrestrial) are represented by a fugue in two sections – one without the piano, the other with the piano to the fore – telling us that everything is gentle, calming benediction. But then, at the end of the following contemplation, the whole process seems about to start over again. Creation is neverending.

Programme note © Paul Griffiths

COMPOSER PROFILE: THOMAS ADÈS Born in London in 1971, Thomas Adès studied piano at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and read music at King’s College, Cambridge. A prodigious composer, conductor and pianist, Adès was described by the New York Times as one of today’s ‘most accomplished overall musicians.’

Adès’s first opera, Powder Her Face (1995) has been performed worldwide, whilst his second, The Tempest, was commissioned by London’s Royal Opera House and was premiered under the baton of the composer in 2004.

It was revived in 2007 and has since had several performances elsewhere, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York where it was recorded for a Deutsche Grammophon DVD which subsequently won a Grammy Award.

Adès’s third opera, after Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, premiered at the Salzburg Festival in July 2016.

Adès’s many musical advocates include Simon Rattle, who performed Asyla (1997) at his final concert with the CBSO and his first as Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Tevot with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2007. In 2011 the orchestral work Polaris was premiered by the New World Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas in Miami and has since been choreographed by Crystal Pite. Adès’s Totentanz for mezzo-soprano, baritone and large orchestra was premiered at the 2013 Proms by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Adès has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Léonie Sonning Music Prize and the prestigious Grawemeyer Award, of which he is the youngest ever recipient. He was awarded a CBE in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Adès was Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1999–2008.

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1808

‘In the entire history of the symphony,’ wrote the British musicologist Hans Keller, ‘no composer traversed as much spiritual space as did Beethoven between his First and Ninth symphonies.’ The spiritual space occupied

by Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony of 1808 stands on its own. The composer may not have consciously designed his symphonies as a chronological journey. But he was acutely aware of creating contrasts in subject matter, character and key from each to each. After the mighty battle of his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven knew he had to express something entirely different.

As he was working on the Fifth’s successor, Beethoven was enjoying walks in the countryside outside Vienna.

He loved the meadows, rocky outcrops, woodland trails and babbling brooks; they gave him strength and stirred something inside him. He decided that the Sixth Symphony would be a picture of the countryside: both a landscape ‘painting in music’ and narrative description of events therein. It might have seemed odd, but it wasn’t unprecedented. The idea of returning to an idealized vision of rural life, an escape from the over-civilised word, had been a recurring theme in art and literature since ancient times. Musically, it had been used in works by Haydn, Handel and even Bach.

When the Sixth Symphony was published a year after it was finished, Beethoven purposefully played-down the descriptive subtitles that the work’s first audience, on 22 December 1808, were presented with. The composer described the Symphony as ‘more an expression of feeling than a painting.’ True enough: his score operates on a purely musical level, presenting and developing a number of themes like its predecessor and successors.

But it’s difficult not to read specific narrative events into the Symphony when they are so vividly described by the composer, in both music and words.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) Symphony No. 6, Op. 68 (Pastoral) 1 Allegro ma non troppo 2 Andante molto mosso 3 Allegro 4 Allegro – 5 Allegretto

The first movement is subtitled ‘awakening of cheerful feelings on arriving in the country.’ Immediately the music feels different to that of the Symphony’s predecessors: more restful, static even, with long-held pedal notes in the bass over which melodic fragments nonchalantly repeat themselves. The secondary idea emerges as if from the same headspace, carried on soft broken chords from the violins. The music arrives at a rustic dance, but it’s those initial feelings of repose that prevail.

Beethoven subtitled his second movement ‘scene by the brook’. The stream itself is conjured by swaying strings suggesting the gentle lapping of waves over which the movement’s first batch of themes are introduced. The most significant is first heard first on a bassoon but soon spreads to surrounding instruments, despite their laconic state. After the reprise of those themes we hear a little avian cadenza: the birdsong of nightingale, quail and cuckoo.

The Allegro, subtitled ‘merry assembly of the country folk’, is often viewed as a musical depiction of village musicians striking up a boisterous and sometimes out-of-control dance (particularly in its lunging trio section). There follows the fourth and extra movement, a short and transitional depiction of a thunderstorm.

The music appears to come to a standstill just errant figurations depict those first, heavy drops of rain that come before the deluge. When the storm breaks after a colossal thunderclap, Beethoven demonstrates his ability to orchestrate with extreme economy: he avoids trombones and drums, instead wreaking havoc with cellos and double basses.

When the thunder and lightning have dissipated, we arrive at Beethoven’s finale: ‘shepherd’s song – happy, grateful feelings after the storm’. Soon the clarinets London Philharmonic Orchestra | 5

PROGRAMME NOTES CONTINUED introduce a radiant hymn of thanks. At the point when that theme returns, well into the movement and on a ‘sotto voce’ (a whisper), Beethoven wrote the words ‘Lord, we thank thee’ onto his sketches. A joyous, broad coda – the Symphony’s last word – expresses those feelings of gratitude once more.

Beethoven was once described by his colleague Anton Schindler as ‘nature personified’, referring to the elemental power with which he made his art. The variegated ways in which the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony conceals its art with art – its transformations and developments, hidden under the simplicity of those stories – demonstrate why the comment was so apt.

Recommended recordings

by Laurie Watt Ives: The Unanswered Question New York Philharmonic Orchestra Leonard Bernstein (Sony) Thomas Adès: In Seven Days Nicolas Hodges | London Sinfonietta | Thomas Adès (Signum) Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) London Philharmonic Orchestra | Klaus Tennstedt (LPO Label LPO-0085: see below)

Ives and Beethoven programme notes © Andrew Mellor

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 on the LPO Label Beethoven: Egmont Overture, Op. 84 Symphony No. 6, Op. 68 (Pastoral) Klaus Tennstedt conductor London Philharmonic Orchestra LPO-0085 | £6.99 Recorded live at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, by BBC Radio 3 on 26 September 1991 (Egmont Overture) and by the LPO on 21 February 1992 (Symphony No. 6).

‘Tennstedt here gives a gripping reading of this life-enhancing score, and his players respond with equal relish.’

MusicWeb International, July 2015

Over 100 LPO Label releases available from lpo.org.uk/recordings, the LPO Ticket Office (020 7840 4242) and all good CD outlets.

Download or stream online via Primephonic, Idagio, Apple Music, Spotify and others.

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