Principal Conductor Edward Gardner supported by Aud Jebsen
Principal Guest Conductor Karina Canellakis
Conductor Emeritus Vladimir Jurowski KBE
Patron HRH The Duke of Kent KG
Artistic Director Elena Dubinets
Chief Executive David Burke
Leader Pieter Schoeman supported by Neil Westreich
FRIDAY 7 MARCH 2025
6.30PM
HANNAH KENDALL VERA (8’)
TANIA LEÓN CUARTETO NO. 2 (20’)
JESSIE MONTGOMERY BREAK AWAY (12’)
DANIEL KIDANE FOREIGN TONGUES (13’)
BRIAN RAPHAEL NABORS JUMP (11’)
Please note there is no interval in tonight’s concert.
A retiring collection will be held at the end of the performance in support of St John’s Waterloo’s community programme, Room for You. This initiative works with individuals experiencing homelessness, isolation, refugees, asylum seekers, and the wider local community.
KATE OSWIN violin LPO chair supported by Eric Tomsett
EMMA OLDFIELD violin
MARTIN WRAY viola LPO chair supported by David & Bettina Harden
WAYNNE KWON cello
IAN HARDWICK oboe
BENJAMIN MELLEFONT clarinet LPO chair supported by Sir Nigel Boardman & Prof. Lynda Gratton
HANNAH KENDALL BORN 1984 (LPO YOUNG COMPOSER 2012/13)
VERA 2008 (8’)
Hannah Kendall’s music has been widely celebrated, and in 2022 she was awarded the Hindemith Prize for outstanding contemporary composers. In 2023 she won an Ivor Novello Award for shouting forever into the receiver. Her 2016 chamber opera The Knife of Dawn received critical acclaim, and a new production was presented on the Royal Opera House’s main stage in 2020. She has worked with ensembles such as the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony, London Symphony, LA Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic orchestras, as well as Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien and London Sinfonietta. Festival appearances include the BBC Proms, Berliner Festspiele, Lucerne Festival and Tanglewood Music Festival, among others.
Born in London, Kendall read music at the University of Exeter before completing a master’s at the Royal College of Music and a doctorate at Columbia University.
Vera received its premiere in 2008 at London’s V&A Museum, in a concert by postgraduate and former students of the Royal College of Music. The composer writes: ‘The melodic and harmonic material in this piece was generated through a 12-tone row. In the first instance, the “white notes” (as on the piano) were removed from the series in order, and the opening playful section is based on these notes only. These pitches, but in retrograde, also form the basis of the clarinet line when it first enters. The remaining notes of the prime row are introduced for the first time in the following “still” section and as these pitches inflect the harmony in turn, a much heavier and darker effect is created. Each instrument is then given a solo before coming back together for a calmer replay of the opening.’
TANIA LEÓN LPO COMPOSER-IN-RESIDENCE | BORN 1943
CUARTETO NO. 2 2011 (20’)
1 SOY! (I AM)
2 DE VEZ EN CUANDO (ONCE IN A WHILE)
3 SON RETAZOS (THEY ARE FRAGMENTS)
In September 2023 Tania León became the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Composerin-Residence for two seasons. Highlights have included the world premiere of Raíces (Origins) at the Royal Festival Hall, with several further performances on tour across the USA, and the UK premiere of Horizons. During her time with us, Tania also has also continued her lifelong advocacy for the music of living composers, as mentor to our LPO Young Composers.
Having studied piano in her native Cuba and earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in music, Tania left Cuba for the United States in 1967. She settled in New York City, 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. 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. She also won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her work Stride (given its UK premiere by the LPO in March 2023), the 2023 Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, and SGAE’s XIX Premio de la Música Iberoamericana Tomás Luis de Victoria 2023.
JESSIE MONTGOMERY BORN 1981
BREAK AWAY 2013 (12’)
Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY-winning American composer, violinist and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry and social consciousness. Her profoundly felt works have been described as ‘turbulent, wildly colourful and exploding with life’, (The Washington Post), and are performed regularly by leading orchestras and ensembles around the world. In June 2024, she concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composerin-Residence.
Break Away was written for PUBLIQuartet, who gave the premiere in 2013 at the Music of Now festival in New York. The composer recalls: ‘The piece was born out of a series of improvisations where we formed a suite of short pieces riffing on several different styles of music from hip-hop to electronica to 20th-century modern. Woven among some of my own chosen specific imagery,
In February 2025 she was recognised at the 67th Grammy Awards with a Trustees Award, for her significant contribution to the field of recording.
Cuarteto No. 2 was commissioned by The ASCAP Foundation and The Sphinx Organization for the Harlem Quartet, who in 2011 gave the world premiere at New York City’s Symphony Space. A free-form string quartet, the work is marked by interactive solos with a ghostly sense of tonality. It features impressions of gestured improvisations, fragments of static episodes, simple and complex dialogues of polyphonic motives, and is sustained at times by an energetic rhythmic drive. Musical ideas are presented in a seemingly broken process, like fragments within the framework of structural principles. Stylistic devices include glissandos, forward motion, and a rustic mosaic of musical expressions derived of Cuban musical traditions such as montuno dance-like elements: son, guajira and trova.
I adapted some of the techniques from that suite into this five-movement work.’
‘The score calls on the quartet to both play with and “break away” from the score at various points, thereby attempting a seamless dialogue between the written score and the whims of the quartet, in which the piece takes on further transformation at each performance.’
‘The first movement, Lilting, is an homage to Anton Webern with a focus on gestural dialogue. The second movement, Songbird, is an image of an individual’s voice trying to emerge against a harsh facade, and includes the first improvised passages in the work. The third movement, Smoke, is loosely based on the form of a jazz tune of my own design. The fourth movement, Quick Pass, serves as a transition to the final movement, Break Away, in which the quartet incorporates its most open improvised sections.’
YOUNG COMPOSER 2012/13)
British composer Daniel Kidane‘s music has been performed extensively across the UK and abroad, as well as being broadcast on BBC Radio 3. It has been described by the Financial Times as ‘quietly impressive’, and by The Times as ‘tautly constructed’ and ’vibrantly imagined’.
Kidane was awarded a Royal Philharmonic Society Prize in 2013, and in 2016 received a prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. He received an honorary doctorate from Coventry University in 2022, and is currently a Visiting Tutor in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Cambridge. In March
2024, the LPO and soloist Julia Fischer gave the world premiere of his violin concerto Aloud under Edward Gardner at the Royal Festival Hall.
Foreign Tongues was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, and premiered on 13 June 2015 by members of the LSO at LSO St Luke’s. The composer explains: ‘Foreign Tongues explores a different way of looking at the standard string quartet setup. Envisaged as a work where the cello is pitted against the rest of the string players, the piece aims to explore the idea of different languages communicating and interacting with each other, sometimes at the same time. This idea stems from my own multilingual and multicultural background and seeks to look at these interactions I experienced growing up. In a more general sense, the piece also acts to highlight the importance of multiculturalism and the need for open-mindedness towards other cultures.’
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Brian Raphael Nabors [Nay-berz] is a composer of emotionally enriching music that tells exciting narratives with its vibrant themes and colourful harmonic language. His music has been performed by the
Boston, Atlanta, Nashville, Cincinnati, Detroit, Fort Worth, and Munich symphony orchestras, as well as the Minnesota Orchestra, American Youth Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic and Chineke!, among others. With an eclectic musical palate and crafty compositional technique to match, Nabors’s music draws from combinations of jazz funk, R&B and gospel, with the modern flair of contemporary classical music. This interesting blend of soundworlds is one that continues to craft his unique musical voice.
Jump was written in 2022 for the San Marco Chamber Music Society in Florida. The composer writes: ‘It is a colourful, fiery work that explores the lyrical and swift nature of the oboe, clarinet and string quartet. Its opening motif carries the listener on a deeply emotive journey.’
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