Prokofiev Festival programme book

Prokofiev Festival programme cover.indd 1

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Contents – 2 Welcome to Southbank Centre 3 Welcome from Artistic Director, Vladimir Jurowski 4 Events at a glance 6 Introduction to the Festival by Simon Morrison 9 Vladimir Jurowski 10 Prokofiev timeline 12 Friday 13 January: pre-concert performance, Royal Festival Hall 13 Friday 13 January 7.30pm, Royal Festival Hall 15 Wednesday 18 January: pre-concert performance, Royal Festival Hall 16 Wednesday 18 January 7.30pm, Royal Festival Hall 18 Saturday 21 January 7.30pm, Royal College of Music 21 Sunday 22 January 3.30pm, Royal Festival Hall 23 Wednesday 25 January 7.30pm, Royal Festival Hall 26 Saturday 28 January 2.00pm, Level 5 Function Room, Royal Festival Hall Level 5 27 Saturday 28 January: pre-concert performance, Royal Festival HallL 28 Saturday 28 January 7.30pm, Royal Festival Hall 31 Saturday 28 January: post-concert event, The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall 32 Wednesday 1 February 7.30pm, Royal Festival Hall 34 London Philharmonic Orchestra 35 London Philharmonic Orchestra members 36 Artist biographies 40 London Philharmonic Choir 41 Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra and Chorus 42 Future London Philharmonic Orchestra concerts 43 Supporters 44 London Philharmonic Orchestra Administration

Programme ÂŁ5 The London Philharmonic Orchestra gratefully acknowledges the financial support of Arts Council England and Southbank Centre.

lpo.org.uk/prokofiev

Welcome to Southbank Centre

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

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Welcome from Artistic Director, Vladimir Jurowski

As with most composers of the 20th century, there’s a discrepancy between our perception of Prokofiev the artist and his ‘persona’. One can’t help feeling involved with the experiences of his life against the backdrop of the Soviet Union, which can lead to misunderstandings.

I feel there has been a reluctance to recognise Prokofiev as a genius because of how his politics are understood. After escaping the restrictive creative environment of his homeland in 1918, moving to the USA and then Paris, Prokofiev felt compelled to return to the Soviet Union in 1936, bearing the brunt of artistic censorship until his death in 1953.

This festival gives us the opportunity to gain a more in-depth understanding of him as a composer and as a man, enriching the black and white over-simplified view that tends to be held – especially in Britain.

© Chris Christodoulou

By sidestepping his popular output and looking at his lesserknown works for the concert hall, stage and screen we will try to analyse his work in terms of its relationship with neighbouring art forms, and his connection or otherwise with fellow composers.

We’ll be giving the world première performance of an unknown oratorio version of the music Prokofiev wrote for Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible, prepared by his confidant Levon Atovmyan.

To me Prokofiev may be clever and virtuosic but he had as much heart as head, and he found ways of including that emotion in his music. He doesn’t readily put it on show or give it away easily.

We are starting out on a new journey – both Orchestra and audience together – to discover the vulnerable soul that lies behind the façade.

Celebrate Prokofiev with Russian specials at Riverside Terrace Café, Royal Festival Hall Enjoy some Borscht (beetroot soup), served with crusty bread and butter – a very popular Eastern and Central European dish at £4.05.

Vladimir Jurowski, Artistic Director

Or come and try our Bigos (pork and cabbage stew), served with crusty bread and butter at £5.10.

For an afternoon treat, enjoy some delicious Russian Tea Cake with your cup of tea. Or if you fancy something stronger, how about our Ivan The Terrible winter drink with Pimm's No. 6 and vodka (£6.50)?

Free download for all festival bookers

Riverside Terrace Café is a spacious, contemporary café with inspiring views of the Thames and the City itself. You can lunch with friends, enjoy a bite before a concert or simply have a sweet treat from our pastry counter.

Sit back, relax and enjoy the food, views and entertainment.

Level 2, Royal Festival Hall Open 7 days a week 10.00am–10.30pm southbankcentre.co.uk/visitor-info/shop-eat-drink

2 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

To discover more about Sergei Prokofiev through resources including audio clips of the music being performed, podcasts, reviews and interviews, visit: lpo.org.uk/prokofiev

Free download of Vladimir Jurowski, Danjulo Ishizaka and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra. lpo.org.uk/download This download is supported by

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 3

Events at a glance

Friday 13 January 2012 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall JTI Friday Series Prokofiev Suite, Lieutenant Kijé Prokofiev Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 58 Prokofiev Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp minor Alexander Vedernikov conductor Danjulo Ishizaka cello Tickets £9–£39 (Premium seats £65) 6.00–6.45pm FREE pre-concert performance Royal Festival Hall Prokofiev Ballade for cello and piano, Op. 15 Prokofiev 'Chout' ('The Buffoon'): Suite from ballet, Op 21 Prokofiev Sonata for solo cello, Op. 133 Rostropovich Humoresque, Op. 5 Gabriel Prokofiev Jerk Driver/Outta Pulser for nine cellos Prokofiev (arr. Rostropovich) Andante from Concertino for cello and orchestra, Op. 132 Alexander Ivashkin cello Coady Green piano TrinityGold Cello Ensemble directed by Natalia Pavlutskaya Wednesday 18 January 2012 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall Prokofiev Symphonic Song, Op. 57 Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 5 in G major* Prokofiev Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor Vladimir Jurowski conductor Steven Osborne piano Tickets £9–£39 (Premium seats £65) * Supported by Dunard Fund.

6.00–6.45pm FREE pre-concert performance Royal Festival Hall Prokofiev String Quartet No. 1 in B minor Prokofiev Quintet Performed by musicians from the Royal College of Music

Friday 20 January 2012 | 1.00pm Level 2 Central Bar at Royal Festival Hall

Saturday 28 January 2012 | 2.00–5.30pm Level 5 Function Room, Royal Festival Hall

Wednesday 1 February 2012 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Part of Southbank Centre’s free Friday Lunch series.

The Unknown Prokofiev Leading Prokofiev experts Simon Morrison, David Nice, Nelly Kravetz and Fiona McKnight discuss Prokofiev’s popular music for Soviet consumption and why these works are virtually unknown. His grandson Gabriel Prokofiev provides a personal insight into the reasons behind Prokofiev’s return to Stalin’s Russia only to endure censorship and difficulties as a Soviet composer.

Prokofiev Symphony No. 1 in D major (Classical) Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major

Prokofiev Piano Sonata No. 4 in C minor, performed by Jun Ishimura Prokofiev Six Pieces from Cinderella, Op. 102, performed

by Petr Limonov Free admission Saturday 21 January 2012 | 7.30pm Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall, Royal College of Music Prokofiev Two Poems for female chorus, Op. 7 Prokofiev (arr. Kabalevsky) Concertino for Cello in G minor Prokofiev Ode to the End of the War Prokofiev Symphony No. 2 in D minor Vladimir Jurowski conductor Kristina Blaumane cello Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Tickets £10–£20 Sunday 22 January 2012 | 3.30pm Royal Festival Hall The Prokofiev Diaries Readings from the diaries and other autobiographical writings, alongside musical extracts.

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Simon Callow as Prokofiev TBC narrator Joan Rodgers soprano Piers Lane piano Rex Lawson pianola Tickets £15 Concert generously supported by Mr Leonid and Mrs Olga Makharinsky.

Wednesday 25 January 2012 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall Prokofiev Chout ('The Buffoon') (excerpts) Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 4 (for the left hand)* Prokofiev Cinderella (excerpts) Vladimir Jurowski conductor Leon Fleisher piano Tickets £9–£39 (Premium seats £65) * Supported by Dunard Fund.

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Tickets £10 In collaboration with The Serge Prokofiev Foundation.

Saturday 28 January 2012 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall Prokofiev Incidental music to 'Egyptian Nights'* Prokofiev (arr. Levon Atovmyan) Ivan the Terrible** (world première of this version) Vladimir Jurowski conductor Ewa Podleš contralto Andrey Breus baritone Simon Callow narrator Miranda Richardson narrator London Philharmonic Choir

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Janine Jansen violin Tickets £9–£39 (Premium seats £65) 6.00–6.45pm FREE pre-concert performance Royal Festival Hall Next generation Prokofiev Over 100 young performers present their brand new work inspired by the music of Prokofiev, the culmination of a project between the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Southwark schools and the Southwark Youth Orchestra.

Free and unticketed – all welcome.

The Prokofiev Composition Project is supported by The Coutts Charitable Trust, The Peter Minet Trust and the Newcomen Collett Foundation.

Booking details

* With texts by George Bernard Shaw, Pushkin and Shakespeare. ** Generously supported by The Serge Prokofiev Foundation.

London Philharmonic Orchestra Box Office 020 7840 4242 Monday to Friday 10.00am–5.00pm lpo.org.uk (no transaction fee)

6.00–6.45pm FREE pre-concert performance Royal Festival Hall

Southbank Centre Ticket Office 0844 847 9920 Daily 9.00am–8.00pm southbankcentre.co.uk (transaction fees apply)

Prokofiev String Quartet No. 2 in F major Prokofiev Humoresque for four bassoons Prokofiev Sonata in C major for two violins Performed by musicians from the Royal College of Music

In person at Royal Festival Hall Box Office Daily 10.00am–8.00pm (no transaction fee)

Tickets £9–£39 (Premium seats £65)

c. 9.45pm FREE post-concert event The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall Trapeze: A classical club night with music and dance A late-night collaboration between the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Rambert Dance Company and Nonclassical. Prokofiev’s early ballet score Trapeze enjoys a fresh new interpretation as part of an hourlong classical club night curated by Gabriel Prokofiev’s Nonclassical, performed by young artists associated with the London Philharmonic Orchestra: Foyle Future Firsts and Quicksilver.

Royal College of Music (21 January only) Box Office 020 7591 4314 Monday to Friday 10.00am–4.00pm rcm.ac.uk/boxoffice (£1.95 booking fee) Concessions A limited allocation of half-price tickets is available for full-time students, benefit recipients (Jobseeker’s Allowance, Income Support, and Pension Credit) and under-16s (maximum 4 per transaction. Not applicable to the concert at Royal College of Music 21 January).

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Simon Morrison introduces the festival

In 1918, after completing the rigorous programme of studies at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, he departed war-torn Russia for the United States. After a two-year stay, he moved to France, where, like most émigré artists of the period, he made Paris his home. Throughout his youth, he sought to stay on the cutting edge of modernist musical fashion, and earned himself a reputation at the Conservatoire as a musical rabble-rouser, an enfant terrible. He shocked his conservative, tradition-bearing teachers by breaking the rules of traditional harmony, disregarding the norms of voice-leading, and indulging in tempestuous chromaticism. His Haydnesque ‘Classical’ Symphony of 1917 was conceived in response to the traditionalism of his teachers, who had rejected his previous symphonic efforts. Jurowski points out that Prokofiev was ‘very, very proud as a young man about having attained a very specifically individual voice as a composer’. And his talent was undeniable. He transcended the complaints of Alexander Glazunov and the ‘dreaded’ Nikolai Tcherepin to receive a prestigious prize for his First Piano Concerto of 1912.

As his music became known in London, Paris and the United States, he was exoticised as a musical Bolshevik. Blanching at the comparison, he nevertheless recognised that success could not come without scandal. Plus a real Bolshevik, Lenin’s Cultural Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, had granted him permission to 6 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

© The Serge Prokofiev Archive

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) enjoyed an idyllic childhood on an estate in Sontsovka, Ukraine, where he was indulged by a doting mother. While she practised Beethoven, Chopin and Mendelssohn, Sergei was allowed to bang away on the piano in tandem. She recognised his prodigious talent, and the need to nurture it, by arranging composition lessons. Prokofiev wrote his first opera, The Giant, for home performance at the age of nine.

Sergei Prokofiev in 1918

leave the Soviet Union. As the chaos of the so-called October Revolution turned into civil war, Prokofiev headed East, making his way through Japan to the West Coast of the United States.

He pledged to remain in contact with his homeland, and adopted the role of a Russian cultural representative.

The reaction to his 20 November 1919 recital at the Aeolian Hall in New York confirmed what had been reported about him in advance. Having anticipated a small crowd of envious local pianists, Prokofiev was amazed to discover that his New York manager had come through for him. He was greeted by an almost full house of some 1,300 enthusiastic listeners. As the performance unfolded, the crowd pressed closer and closer to the stage to hear his scintillating rendition of the Scherzo and Finale of his 1912 Second Piano Sonata. The stiff action of the piano repeatedly flustered him, but he triumphed.

His reputation as a performer and composer for the piano was secured, but success in the larger forms was harder to come by.

In 1919, he completed an opera, The Love for Three Oranges, but the première was delayed by two years and the reaction to the three performances he conducted in Chicago and New York disappointing. He looked to Europe for opportunities. The more progressive opera houses of London and Berlin beckoned, as did the illustrious Ballets Russes of Paris. By 1929, he had completed three operas and four ballet scores (if one included the little-known Trapeze of 1924), fulfilled recording contracts, and continued to perform recitals of his own music. Scores were stored in suitcases; scenarios and librettos drafted on hotel letterhead. Along the way, he married a Madrid-born, New Yorkraised singer, Lina Codina, and they had two sons. Through his wife, he became smitten with Christian Science, and began to absorb its teachings into his life as well as his art.

© The Serge Prokofiev Archive

The performance achieved the intended impression: that of a ‘neo-Scythian’, ultra-modern musician intolerant of mawkishness.

Prokofiev bowed ten times during three breaks in the concert, and the next day tallied 11 reviews, most stressing his phenomenal technique, his ability to hammer ‘hell itself’ into the piano with ‘excruciating dynamics’.

Prokofiev lived a distracted, restless life, always in the moment.

His music, however, suggests careful, patient thought – if not protracted labour. He might be compared to Mozart or, closer to home, Tchaikovsky, both of whom were able to imagine entire worlds of sound and commit them to paper in nearly finished form. And remarkably for a modern composer, Prokofiev’s music is just as popular. As Vladimir Jurowski, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's Principal Conductor and Festival Artistic Director observes, however, much of his oeuvre ‘remains widely unknown to the general – and even to the music-loving – audience’, despite the fact that the neglected works are ‘important and almost indispensable in understanding him as an artist’.

Prokofiev with his two sons, Svyatoslav and Oleg, in 1936

than a celebration – of Soviet industrial development. Following its stormy Parisian première, critics described it as a satire.

When Diaghilev died in 1929, Prokofiev was devastated, both personally and professionally. He had lost a crucial mentor.

Meantime, his latest opera, a mystical parable of real-or-imagined demonic possession called The Fiery Angel, met with a cool reception when it received its partial première in Paris, in a concert version conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in 1928.

Performances were promised in several cities, but each fell through, leaving Prokofiev to lament his eight years of labour on the score.

For Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes, Prokofiev composed and recomposed the ballets Chout (‘The Buffoon’, 1920), Le Pas d’acier (‘The Step of Steel’, 1926) and Le Fils prodigue (‘The Prodigal Son’, 1929). The second of these sparked a furore in Paris as well as Moscow, despite the fact that it was not even staged in the Soviet Union. In 1925, on Diaghilev’s counsel, Prokofiev teamed up with the Soviet artist Georgiy Yakulov to create a ‘Soviet’ ballet – one that he hoped would prove a hit He continued to give concerts 'Prokofiev has made an immense, priceless contribution as a pianist, and by the time he with audiences on both sides of the ideological to the musical culture of Russia. A composer of genius, was 41 had composed five piano divide in Europe. Diaghilev concertos, of which the third from he has expanded the artistic heritage left to us by the imagined that, for French 1921 ranks among the greatest great classical masters of Russian music – Glinka, critics, a ballet about Soviet in the repertoire.

Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov life would be just as exotic as the fairytale and folkloric and Rachmaninoff.' Dmitri Shostakovich In the early 1930s, Prokofiev’s ballets that had earned his creative outlook changed, troupe immense fame, if not fortune. His conception of Le Pas and with it the form and content of his scores. He allowed his d’acier, however, contradicted Prokofiev’s own (Yakulov’s too) astonishing gift for melody to come to the fore, and aspired to and caused the composer no end of trouble in 1929, when he engage rather than outrage audiences. The shift began when he tried to arrange a production in Moscow. Diaghilev rearranged lived in France, but it reflected his exposure to American musical the scenes so that the ballet became a condemnation – rather trends, notably Aaron Copland’s aesthetic of ‘imposed simplicity’,

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 7

Prokofiev began to think seriously about moving back East, to Prokofiev is often branded a neoclassicist, though he himself the Soviet Union, after an enormously successful homecoming neither embraced nor respected that complicated term, preferring tour in 1927 that prompted a spate of enticing commissions instead to see his music as the product of competing stylistic from Soviet cultural officials. In 1936, after several years of attitudes, from the grotesque to the playful to the sentimental hesitation, Prokofiev and his family left France to take up – with the division between the sincere and the satiric carefully permanent residence in Russia, an altogether transformed obscured. He was a man of the people in the sense that, during nation. Prokofiev thereafter found himself trapped, unable after the Soviet period, he received the title of ‘People’s Artist’ and 1938 to travel abroad, and unable to compose in the manner he sought, with mixed results, to fulfil official demands for folksy desired. Though valued by the Stalinist regime and supported tunefulness and transparent textures. But he cared little for the by its institutions, he suffered correction and censorship, the politics, even though many of his later works are on political result being a gradual sapping of his creative energies. Prokofiev themes – the most notorious, and chillingly beautiful being the revised and re-revised his late ballets and operas in an attempt cantata Zdravitsa ('A Toast!'), his 1939 paean to Stalin on the to appease cultural officials but more often than not, his labours occasion of the ruler’s 60th birthday. In accordance with the went to waste. He had much greater success with his piano teachings of Christian Science, music and symphonies, receiving Prokofiev regarded his numerous official prizes for them. His 'In my view, the composer, just as the poet, the talent as God-given, divinely score to the film Alexander Nevsky was sculptor or the painter, is in duty bound to serve bestowed and detached from likewise hailed. Following his official Man, the people. He must beautify human life earthly concerns. Even the denunciation in 1948, jittery concert piece for Stalin would stand and theatre managers pulled his works and defend it. He must be a citizen first and from the repertoire. Then his wife Lina, foremost, so that his art might consciously extol the test of time, he believed.

His compromised final works whom he had left just before the start of human life and lead man to a radiant future.' make for painful listening the Second World War in Russia, was when compared to those from arrested on false charges of treason and Sergei Prokofiev the 1930s and 1920s, but sent to the prison camps; she would there remain glimpses of his spiritually optimistic outlook even in not be released until after Prokofiev’s death. These ordeals the scores, like the Concertino for Cello, that he left unfinished. and long-standing physical illness cast a pall on his last years.

The unlettered ideologues in charge of Soviet cultural affairs Housebound, he turned inward, fulfilling modest commissions for denounced him for not making his music more like the world modest venues, writing works on the theme of youth. around him. Yet he wanted the world around him to be more like his music.

However clichéd, it remains the case that Prokofiev’s life teems with mysteries. What convinced him to return to Russia in 1936? © Simon Morrison Why exactly was his first wife, a singer of modest talent, arrested in 1948, and how did this arrest relate to his own political Simon Morrison is a Professor of Music at Princeton University, problems? How did Prokofiev’s Christian Science faith inform his career? And what guided his stylistic modulations? Jurowski also where he teaches 19th- and 20th-century Russian and French music. His most recent book, a biography of Lina Prokofiev, will wonders: ‘How honest was Prokofiev with himself and with other be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012. people when describing himself as “the people’s artist”?’

This festival addresses such mysteries while also deepening our understanding of Prokofiev’s achievement, from the halcyon beginning of his career to its troubled conclusion. Jurowski describes the programme and its rationale: ‘Following the Orchestra's Tchaikovsky and Schnittke festivals of previous years, we want to explore Prokofiev’s music; put it in context through his own writings, his diaries, his letters, his statements about his music; but also put him in context compositionally and historically, to see who influenced him, and who he influenced in return. As usual with these series, we’ll be trying to avoid works that are too famous, or trying to put them in a slightly different context; so there will be the ‘Classical’ Symphony and Symphony No. 5, but alongside them you will hear the much less frequently performed Symphony No. 2, Piano Concertos Nos. 4 and 5, works such as the Symphonic Song, and the recent, unknown version of the Ivan the Terrible oratorio prepared by Prokofiev’s assistant and secretary Levon Atovmyan, with Prokofiev’s permission. There will be some 8 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Vladimir Jurowski: Artistic Director

film music by Prokofiev, there will be incidental music presented with actors, there will be vocal music, there will be ballets; and this time it’s not going to be Romeo and Juliet, it’s going to be Cinderella and Chout. Of course we cannot embrace the entire oeuvre of such a prolific man as Prokofiev within the two weeks of the festival, but we’ll try to do as much as possible, to play as much chamber music as possible around our concerts and also to present public discussions, symposiums and exhibitions, to make people’s view of Prokofiev as complete as physically possible.’

Los Angeles Philharmonic and Philadelphia orchestras, as well as the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig.

Highlights of the 2011/12 season and beyond include his débuts with the Vienna Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo and San Francisco Symphony, and return visits to the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Staatskapelle Dresden, Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Chicago Symphony, St Petersburg Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw and Philadelphia orchestras.

© Chris Christodoulou

which he sought to improve upon. As Jurowski notes, Prokofiev ‘started looking for new ways of writing music that would be intelligent yet not intellectual, complex and yet accessible’.

The title of this festival, ‘Man of the People?’, is a quote from Prokofiev himself, taken from an interview he gave upon his return to Soviet Russia. ‘He stated his wish to become the people’s artist’, Jurowski explains, ‘as opposed to being typically separated from the people as an individualist – the model of artists in the West.’

Born in Moscow, the son of conductor Mikhail Jurowski, Vladimir Jurowski completed his initial musical studies at the Music College of the Moscow Conservatoire. In 1990 he relocated with his family to Germany where he continued his studies in Dresden and Berlin, studying conducting with Rolf Reuter and vocal coaching with Semion Skigin. In 1995 he made his international début at the Wexford Festival, where he conducted RimskyKorsakov’s May Night. The same year saw his brilliant début at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in Nabucco. In 1996 he joined the ensemble of Komische Oper Berlin, becoming First Kapellmeister in 1997 and continuing to work at the Komische Oper on a permanent basis until 2001.

Since 1997 Vladimir Jurowski has been a guest at some of the world’s leading musical institutions including the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Teatro La Fenice di Venezia, Opéra Bastille de Paris, Théâtre de la Monnaie Bruxelles, Maggio Musicale Festival Florence, Rossini Opera Festival Pesaro, Edinburgh International Festival, Dresden Semperoper and the Teatro Comunale di Bologna (where he served as Principal Guest Conductor between 2000 and 2003). In 1999 he made his début at the Metropolitan Opera New York with Rigoletto.

Jurowski’s operatic engagements have included Jenůfa, The Queen of Spades and Hänsel und Gretel at the Metropolitan Opera, Parsifal and Wozzeck at Welsh National Opera, War and Peace at the Opéra National de Paris, Eugene Onegin at La Scala Milan and Iolanta at the Dresden Semperoper, as well as The Magic Flute, La Cenerentola, Otello, Macbeth, Falstaff, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Don Giovanni, The Rake’s Progress, and Peter Eötvös’s Love and Other Demons at Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Future engagements include new productions of Ariadne auf Naxos and The Cunning Little Vixen at Glyndebourne, Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Metropolitan Opera, Moses und Aron at the Komische Oper Berlin and Ruslan and Ludmila at the Bolshoi Theatre.

Jurowski’s discography includes the first ever recording of Giya Kancheli’s cantata Exil for ECM (1994), Meyerbeer’s L’étoile du nord for Naxos-Marco Polo (1996), and Werther for BMG (1999) as well as live recordings of works by Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Turnage, Tchaikovsky, Britten and Shostakovich on the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s own label, and Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery on Glyndebourne Opera’s own label. He has also recorded works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky for PentaTone with the Russian National Orchestra. Glyndebourne have released DVD recordings of his performances of La Cenerentola, Gianni Schicchi, Die Fledermaus and Rachmaninoff’s The Miserly Knight, and other recent DVD releases include Hänsel und Gretel from the Metropolitan Opera, his first concert as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor featuring works by Wagner, Berg and Mahler, and DVDs with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, all released

by Medici Arts.

In January 2001 Vladimir Jurowski took up the position of Music Director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera and in 2003 was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, becoming the Orchestra’s Principal Conductor in September 2007. He also holds the titles of Principal Artist with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Artistic Director of the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra. From 2005 to 2009 he served as Principal Guest Conductor of the Russian National Orchestra, with whom he will continue to work in the years ahead.

Vladimir Jurowski is a regular guest with many of the world’s leading orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Bavarian Radio Symphony, London Philharmonic Orchestra | 9

23 April Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev is born in the farming village of Sontsovka, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire)

Bolshevik overthrow of the Czar and ensuing Civil War plunge Russia into famine.

Like Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, Prokofiev sees no future for his music there; he leaves for America. _

Timeline

Prokofiev’s first visit to Moscow, where he sees Gounod’s opera Faust and Borodin’s Prince Igor. Both have a profound effect on him and he immediately decides to begin composing his own opera, called The Giant

Writes his first composition, a piano piece called Indian Galop

1913–14 Prokofiev first visits Paris and London, where he meets Sergei Diaghilev and the highly successful Ballets Russes.

Diaghilev commissions Prokofiev to write a ballet, which eventually became Chout ('The Buffoon')

7 August Premières his own First Piano Concerto in Moscow, which he later describes as his ‘first more or less mature composition as regards to conception and fulfilment’

September Age 13, Prokofiev becomes the youngest-ever student accepted into the St Petersburg Conservatoire where his teachers include Glazunov, RimskyKorsakov and Liadov

10 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Prokofiev collaborates with film director Sergei Eisenstein on the historical epic Alexander Nevsky

Prokofiev receives a contract from the Chicago Opera for a new opera The Love for Three Oranges, but the première is postponed after the director’s death and Prokofiev is left unpaid

Prokofiev composes his Third Symphony, praised by conductor Sergei Koussevitzky as ‘the greatest symphony since Tchaikovsky’s Sixth’

Russian Revolution: Czar Nicholas II is overthrown, ending Imperial Russian rule forever _ Summer 1917 Prokofiev composes his First Symphony.

He names it the ‘Classical’ – according to Prokofiev, it was written in the style that Haydn would have used if he had been alive at the time

Outbreak of First World War: Prokofiev returns to St Petersburg Conservatoire, studying the organ to avoid conscription

Prokofiev, and others, become a target of the government censorship and intimidation campaign known as ‘Zhdanovshchina’, and his works fall out of official favour _

Union of Soviet Composers established, which becomes the major regulatory body for Russian music.

Stalin’s cultural policy of Socialist Realism dictates that ‘the main attention of the Soviet composer must be directed towards the victorious progressive principles of reality, towards all that is heroic, bright and beautiful’

Prokofiev joins Eisenstein in Kazakhstan, where he composes the film score Ivan the Terrible and the ballet Cinderella

22 June German invasion of Russia. Prokofiev begins work on the opera War and Peace based on Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel

Prokofiev composes the ballet Romeo and Juliet

Prokofiev marries the Spanish-born soprano Lina Codina, whom he had met in New York

April Prokofiev leaves the USA due to financial difficulties and travels to Paris

Prokofiev marries his second wife, Mira Mendelson, after separating from Lina in 1941

Despite being weakened by illness, Prokofiev completes his final Symphony, the Seventh

Prokofiev composes his Fifth Symphony in just two months – it would turn out to be the most popular of all his symphonies Outbreak of Second World War. During the war years, government restrictions on music are loosened and Prokofiev is able to compose more freely

Missing his homeland, Prokofiev returns permanently to the Soviet Union with Lina and their two sons _ Prokofiev composes Lieutenant Kijé, his first Soviet commission

5 March Prokofiev dies aged 61, the day Stalin’s death is announced. He lived near Red Square, and for three days the throngs gathered to mourn Stalin, making it impossible to carry Prokofiev’s body out for the funeral service

January Prokofiev suffers near-fatal concussion following a fall. He never completely recovers, suffering recurring headaches and dangerously high blood pressure until his death _ End of the Second World War, and the Soviet authorities are once again able to tighten their grip on artistic output

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Friday 13 January 2012 Free pre-concert performance 6.00–6.45pm Royal Festival Hall – Prokofiev Ballade for cello and piano, Op. 15 Prokofiev Chout ('The Buffoon'): Suite from ballet, Op. 21 (Arranged for cello and piano by Roman Sapozhnikov) 1 Chout and Choutikha (The Buffoon and the Buffooness) 2 The Merchant is dreaming 3 Dance of the Buffoon’s daughters Prokofiev Sonata for solo cello (Unfinished), Op. 133 Rostropovich Humoresque, Op. 5 Gabriel Prokofiev Jerk Driver/Outta Pulser for nine cellos (World première, introduced by the composer) Prokofiev Andante from Concertino for cello and orchestra, Op. 132 (Arranged for five cellos by Mstislav Rostropovich) – Alexander Ivashkin cello/speaker/conductor Coady Green piano TrinityGold Cello Ensemble directed by Natalia Pavlutskaya Peter Gregson, Deniss Jankovskis, Wei-Tsen Lin, Alisa Liubarskaya, Thomas Shelley, Matthew Strover, Rebecca Turner, Miriam Wakeling, Valerie Welbanks – In association with the Centre for Russian Music, Goldsmiths, University of London

At the end of his life Prokofiev was busy with several works for cello: the Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra (a new version of his Cello Concerto, which he had written in the 1930s); the Sonata for cello and piano; the Concertino for cello and orchestra (1952); and the Sonata for solo cello (1953). All were inspired by Mstislav Rostropovich, who was just beginning his fantastic career. The latter two of these works were left unfinished at the time of Prokofiev's death in 1953.

Prokofiev's interest in the cello was first revealed in his early years. Ballade (1912), is an extended one-movement piece.

A gifted pianist himself, Prokofiev considerably developed the piano part, while the cello plays long, intense lines, sometimes in an unusually high register. Prokofiev here used material from his early 'notebooks'; the melody for Ballade was borrowed from his Violin Sonata of 1903. The piece was written at the request of Nikolai Ruzsky – ‘a very nice person, a wealthy businessman, who played the cello well and loved to organise chamber groups’ – with whom Prokofiev often played. Prokofiev performed Ballade for the first time with the cellist Evsei Belousov in the Maly Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire on 23 January 1914, a few months before his triumphant graduation concert.

The ballet Chout ('The Buffoon'), composed in 1920, was definitely intended as a parallel to Stravinsky's 'Russianisms': Petrushka and The Soldier's Tale. The libretto was based on a Russian fairytale from Alexander Afanasiev's collection. The first performance, by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, took place in Paris. This little-known 1971 arrangement for cello and piano by Roman Sapozhnikov reveals brilliant details of Prokofiev’s early instrumental style.

7.30pm Royal Festival Hall JTI Friday Series

– Prokofiev Suite, Lieutenant Kijé (19') Prokofiev Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 58 (35') Interval Prokofiev Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp minor (31') – Alexander Vedernikov conductor Danjulo Ishizaka cello – Performer biographies on pages 36–41.

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

The Sonata for solo cello (planned as a work in four movements) is the very last piece that Prokofiev began in the latter half of 1952, and did not finish, only managing to complete sketches for the first movement. The single movement was completed by Mstislav Rostropovich and edited by Vladimir Blok.

At the time he met Prokofiev, Rostropovich was studying composition and orchestration under Dmitri Shostakovich and Vissarion Shebalin at the Moscow Conservatoire. His Humoresque was a birthday present for his cello professor Semyon Kozolupov.

Kozolupov used to 'torture' his students with boring exercises, so Rostropovich decided to write his own piece which would be both effective musically and demanding technically.

In 1952 Prokofiev wrote, 'After recomposing the Cello Concerto, I wanted to continue writing music for the cello and to compose a light, transparent Concertino for this instrument.' He finished only the second movement of the Concertino, the Andante, in the cello and piano version. In this movement he wanted to emulate the beautiful cantilenas in Italian operatic arias, even asking Rostropovich to provide him with all the known arrangements for cello of existing operatic arias. The Andante is played here in Rostropovich’s unpublished arrangement for five cellos. © Alexander Ivashkin (Biography on page 37) Australian pianist Coady Green is acknowledged as a major rising talent on the international concert circuit. Before relocating to Europe from Australia in 2006, he won almost all the most prestigious prizes and awards his native Australia had to offer.

He regularly performs in prominent venues throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

TrinityGold Cello Ensemble is a group of students from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and Goldsmiths, University of London. Under director Natalia Pavlutskaya it has performed at London's Wigmore Hall and Southbank Centre; The Queen's Hall in Edinburgh; and at various festivals in France.

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Friday 13 January 2012

Free download for all festival bookers Free download of Vladimir Jurowski, Danjulo Ishizaka and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra. lpo.org.uk/download This download is supported by

Sergei Prokofiev Suite, Lieutenant Kijé (1934) 1 Kijé's Birth 2 Romance 3 Kijé's Wedding 4 Troika 5 Kijé's Burial In 1933, while living in Paris, Prokofiev received a commission from the Soviet Union – the first in the series that would eventually convince him to relocate to Moscow. This one came from Belgoskino, a film studio in Leningrad, for an antiTsarist farce called Lieutenant Kijé. The script was based on an anecdote about Tsar Pavel I, who reigned for just five years (1796–1801) before being murdered. The anecdote at the heart of the film concerns the creation of a non-existent lieutenant in the service of the Tsar by bureaucratic error. Whereas the original tale trafficked in rumours about the Tsar’s frail mental health, in the film the story becomes a satire about the absurdities of late 18th-century bureaucracy.

When a flustered young scribe, drawing up a regimental order for the Tsar, is interrupted by an impatient aide, he erroneously writes 'Poruchik Kizhe' ('Lieutenant Kijé') instead of 'Poruchiki zhe' ('While the lieutenants'). The mistake cannot be undone: Kijé now exists thanks to a slip of the pen, and so must be accounted for.

He is assigned to a guard post, blamed for waking the napping Tsar, flogged and sent by foot to Siberia, restored to honour on a technicality, and summoned back to St Petersburg. He marries a lovely maid-in-waiting, and sires a son. At the end of his career, the fictitious officer earns fictitious promotions to the ranks of Colonel and General, followed by a fictitious fatal illness and burial with full honours.

Prokofiev composed the bulk of the score in Paris between July and September 1933, sending it in instalments to the director, Aleksandr Faintsimmer, with instructions as to how the music could be lengthened or shortened to facilitate the editing and sound recording processes. The score comprises 17 short numbers ranging from 15 to 105 seconds in length, excluding repeats. There are two songs in the film: one of them, 'Gagarina’s Song', appears to have been dubbed using the voice of Prokofiev’s wife Lina, a singer of some talent. (The actress who played the role of Gagarina in the film was tone deaf.)

By the time Prokofiev finished the orchestration in October 1933, the film had been reworked, with certain scenes added and others removed. He summed up the state of affairs as follows: 'I somehow had no doubts whatsoever about the musical language for this film ... Unfortunately the ending was altered so many times that the film became confused and heavy as a result. The following year I made a symphonic suite out of the music. This gave me much more trouble than the music for the film itself, since I had to find the proper form, re-orchestrate the whole thing, polish it up and even combine several of the themes.'

Both in the Suite and the actual film score, the choice of timbre is crucial. The flute, a conventional bearer of sincere feeling, can be interpreted as maintaining the fiction of Kijé’s existence, while the mocking, disrupting alto saxophone seeks to expose it.

Awkward key changes likewise underscore the division between the invented and the real, as do Prokofiev’s capricious harmonies.

The now-obscure film was a modest success both in the Soviet Union and abroad, but the surrealistic images and the intentional

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misalignment of music and image proved to be fodder for ideological critique. In the opinion of one critic, Lieutenant Kijé was 'a curious picture, worthy of attention, however it lies outside the mainstream of Soviet cinematographic development.' In later years, Prokofiev would seek to define this mainstream for himself.

Arguably his greatest Soviet successes would be in the realm of cinema.

Sergei Prokofiev Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 58 (1938) Danjulo Ishizaka cello 1 2 3

Andante – Poco meno mosso (Andante assai) – Adagio Allegro giusto Tema (Allegro) – Interludio 1 – Variations 1-3 – Interludio 2 – Variation 4 – Reminiscenza (Meno mosso) – Coda (Poco sostenuto) – Più mosso

The Cello Concerto in E minor was composed for Gregor Piatigorsky (1903–76), a famous cellist whose relationship with the composer has not been studied in depth by music historians.

(Prokofiev’s late collaborations with Mstislav Rostropovich, in contrast, are well documented – primarily by Rostropovich himself.) The work was sketched in Paris in 1933, with Prokofiev seeking advice from Piatigorsky about his 'crazy instrument'.

He then put the three-movement score aside for several years in favour of other commissions. By the time the Concerto was finished in 1938, Prokofiev had relocated to the Soviet Union; he was thus obligated to offer the première to a cellist based in Moscow, Lev Berezovsky. Overwhelmed by its technical demands, Berezovsky made a hash of it. The Soviet première was a fiasco. 'Nothing could have been worse', Prokofiev lamented.

Piatigorsky received the rights to the American première, but also found the score troublesome. He wrote to the composer, suggesting numerous alterations – including the addition of a traditional bravura cadenza and refinements to the passagework.

The revisions were completed in the summer of 1939. Satisfied with the changes, Piatigorsky reported in advance of his performance with the Boston Symphony that the score was 'superb', though he continued to fret about the 'uncomfortable and difficult' solo part. The critics agreed with him on both counts. The Boston Herald critic Alexander Williams lauded the first movement, in which 'a charming lyrical melody is heard against a varying ostinato background'. The tunefulness of the second movement, a spirited Allegro with an Andante coda, likewise met with praise. The theme and variations finale, however, stumped the critics, as it did Piatigorsky and the entire Boston Symphony. 'It would take a number of hearings to place a finger on what seems to be the trouble', Williams remarked, adding that, in the middle variation, the music 'bogs down in a queer, static way. For a highly rhythmical composer this is an odd position to be caught in.' Part of the problem was the shaky conducting of Serge Koussevitzky, who could not navigate the subtle tempo changes. Prokofiev, for his part, transcended the criticism. Towards the end of his life, he rewrote the Concerto, transforming it into his showcase Symphony-Concerto of 1952.

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

Sergei Prokofiev Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp minor (1952) 1 Moderato 2 Allegretto 3 Andante espressivo 4 Vivace In his final years, a gravely ill Prokofiev fell under political pressure to adhere to the strictures of official artistic doctrine, which stressed traditionalism and tunefulness. He was obliged to radically simplify his musical syntax. He tried, but often failed to appease his bureaucratic overseers, who in the final years of Stalin’s rule found it much easier to ban music altogether than risk it being performed and criticised. Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony was a rare exception. In keeping with the spirit of the commission for the children’s division of Soviet Radio, Prokofiev considered calling it a 'Symphony for Children', but then decided that the music had adult appeal. It was premièred on 11 October 1952. The ovation brought Prokofiev to the stage for the final bow of his career.

The composer’s second wife Mira Mendelson claimed that the Symphony represented 'Soviet youth' as well as Prokofiev’s 'own youth'. Thus it is at once forward- and backward-looking, public and private. The music sounds sincere but fragile. It clings to traditional forms and syntax, but the melodic writing meanders, with abrupt tonal shifts that do not dramatise the four movements but slacken them.

The first movement is cast in a semblance of traditional sonata form. There are three (rather than two) opening themes, ranging in affect from nostalgic to inspired to withdrawn. Over the course of the exposition, the dynamic level dips to that of a lullaby, with the woodwinds and glockenspiel paired in the closing theme.

There is little drama in the middle development section, but in the recapitulation, Prokofiev enriches the key scheme. The movement ends with the woodwinds and glockenspiel rousing the spectre of the first theme.

The remainder of the Symphony is more spirited, with the composer manipulating waltz genres in the second movement and paying homage to a previous work, Eugene Onegin, in the third. The fourth and final movement combines a valse à deux temps, the historical precursor of the polka, with a giddy march.

To some listeners, the music is half-hearted and pallid, a thesaurus of Soviet musical clichés; for others, it suggests a retreat by the composer into the refuge of childhood. The successful première signalled that the Seventh Symphony would receive an official award, but not before the conductor Samuil Samosud had his say. There was 'a potential snag' in the deliberations of the Stalin Prize Committee, he reported to the composer. 'The finale does not end in joy so, in order not to forfeit first prize for second prize, would it not be possible to create an alternate finale with a happy ending?'. Prokofiev balked, calling the task 'impossible', but then acquiesced and wrote a new, optimistic coda for the fourth movement. Samosud premièred the revised version, which Prokofiev pretended to like, on 6 November 1952. To the melancholic recollection of the second and third themes from the first movement he added a jarring reprise of the glib opening tune of the fourth. Today the original, sombre ending is preferred by conductors, though a side-by-side pairing better reflects the political and creative constraints within which Prokofiev laboured at the end of his life.

Wednesday 18 January 2012 Free pre-concert performance 6.00–6.45pm Royal Festival Hall – Prokofiev String Quartet No. 1 in B minor Prokofiev Quintet – Performed by musicians from the Royal College of Music Menasseh String Quartet: Hannah Tarley violin Lyrit Milgram violin Joshua Hayward viola Anton Crayton cello Alasdair Hill oboe Adrian Somogy clarinet Molly Cockburn violin Jessica Tickle viola Rodrigo Moro Martin double bass

Sergei Prokofiev String Quartet No. 1 in B minor (1930/31) 1 Allegro 2 Andante molto 3 Andante Commissioned by the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 1930, Prokofiev’s First String Quartet was carefully calibrated for greatness: it was meant to enter the canon. The score attests to his careful study of Beethoven’s and Bartók’s chamber works, but stands out for its reliance on Russian folksong allusions (a rare source of inspiration for Prokofiev, ironically intended for the American audiences) and for its slow-motion finale. In a 1941 autobiographical essay, Prokofiev admitted to overtaxing himself by casting the Quartet in B minor, which posed an array of technical problems, because that key is ‘just a half tone below the limits of the cello and viola range’. As David Nice remarks, ‘The whole work had to be composed with this "absent" note in mind, an interesting puzzle for Prokofiev’s complicated mind.’

Sergei Prokofiev Quintet (1924) 1 Theme and Variations: Moderato 2 Andante energico 3 Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio 4 Adagio pesante 5 Allegro precipitato, ma non troppo presto 6 Andantino The Quintet of 1924 was likewise intended as an instant classic insofar as it relies on conventional 18th-century genres and forms. Its traditionalism is ironic given that the music was conceived for a modernist ‘circus ballet’, Trapeze, commissioned

by Boris Romanov, the director of a dance group in Berlin. Its trifling plot, which finds loose reflection in the six movements of the Quintet, involves a ballerina, a dance for louts (or ‘boors’), a scene for tumblers, a duel (concluding with the detonation of firecrackers) and a funeral episode. The first movement, a set of theme and variations, encompasses the ballerina’s solo variation, while the sixth, a march, marks her demise. The lumbering, harmonically obtuse second movement represents the louts, the imitative third movement the tumblers. The duel is spread out over the fourth and fifth movements, which trip from comedy into tragedy. © Simon Morrison A performance of the ballet Trapeze, 1925

© Simon Morrison

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Wednesday 18 January 2012 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall – Prokofiev Symphonic Song, Op. 57 (13') Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 5 in G major* (22') Interval Prokofiev Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor (43') – Vladimir Jurowski conductor Steven Osborne piano – Performer biographies on pages 36–41.

The timings shown are not precise and are only given as a guide. * Supported by Dunard Fund

This concert is being broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 in 'Radio 3 Live in Concert'.

Sergei Prokofiev Symphonic Song, Op. 57 (1933) Prokofiev had the greatest gift for melody of any 20th-century composer, but that gift came to be realized only gradually. The early 1930s witnessed Prokofiev’s uncertain stylistic transition away from hardline, discordant modernism toward the aesthetic of 'new simplicity'. This relatively more accessible style privileged sophisticated melodic writing – not the kind of 'tra-la-la' heard on Broadway and in Hollywood musical comedies, but something much more subtle and still hard-edged. Prokofiev believed that his conversion, which predated his permanent relocation from France to the Soviet Union, would allow him to present himself to Soviet cultural officials as a traditionalist with modernist leanings.

The path from stridency to grace is traced, uncomfortably, in his Symphonic Song of 1933, a piece that progresses from the kind of discord found in his noise- (and demon-) filled opera The Fiery Angel through a martial middle section and ultimately to a radiant chorale – all in keeping with a three-part narrative that the composer called 'darkness–conflict–achievement'.

The achievement, however, is parodic, recalling the C major apotheosis of Alexander Scriabin’s mystical tone-poem Prometheus, wherein the revelation of consonance at the end is meant to symbolise a higher state of being. Comparison could also be made to Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration.

The consonant ending of the work might have been meant to solve the problem of the dissonant beginning, but Prokofiev’s colleague and trusted friend Nikolay Myaskovsky remained unconvinced by it. It was not the kind of work that would please the Soviet public, he insisted. The Symphonic Song lacked the requisite 'monumentalism' that would become the essence of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, and the melodic writing was diffuse.

His old modernist habits would prove hard for him to break.

Sergei Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 5 in G major (1932) Steven Osborne piano 1 Allegro con brio 2 Moderato ben accentuato 3 Toccata: Allegro con fuoco 4 Larghetto 5 Vivo The Fifth Piano Concerto, which came into being on the heels of the Fourth Concerto for the Left Hand, was a parallel exercise in stylistic transformation. Prokofiev explained to Myaskovsky that he was engaged in a 'search for a new melodic style and for a new simplicity', while also acknowledging that he had 'drifted from shore' in his efforts to keep up with his rival Stravinsky, the arbiter of Parisian modernist chic.

Prokofiev described the conception of the work in his admittedly less-than-candid 1941 autobiography: 'I had not intended the concerto to be difficult and at first had even contemplated calling it "Music for Piano and Orchestra", partly to avoid confusing the concerto numbers.

But in the end it turned out to be complicated, as indeed was the case with a good many other compositions of this period. What was the explanation? In my desire for simplicity I was hampered by the fear of repeating old formulas, of reverting to "old simplicity", which is something all modern composers seek to avoid. I searched for "new simplicity" 16 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

only to discover that this new simplicity, with its novel forms and, chiefly, new tonal structure, was not understood. The fact that here and there my efforts to write simply were not successful is beside the point. I did not give up, hoping that the bulk of my music would in time prove to be quite simple when the ear grew accustomed to the new melodies, that is, when these melodies became the accepted idiom.'

The Fifth Piano Concerto is cast in five movements, with all but the fourth, a burdened dreamscape, having brittle, angular contours. The melodic writing in the first three movements is of a piece, and deliberately so, since Prokofiev tends to present his themes in rapid succession, broken apart in the upper and lower registers of both the solo and orchestral parts. The glissandi in the second movement and staccato runs in the third test the precision of the soloist’s technique (Prokofiev himself performed the 31 October 1932 première in Berlin), while the fifth movement seems to have been intended to demonstrate not pianistic, but compositional virtuosity. Most critics note that the home key of G major arrives as though unannounced at the end of the work. Prokofiev all but avoids articulating the key, choosing instead to displace it – to present it, like the themes of the opening movements, in shattered reflection.

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

Sergei Prokofiev Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor (1947) 1 Allegro moderato 2 Largo 3 Vivace Prokofiev considered his Sixth Symphony the sequel to his wartime Fifth Symphony, which had earned a lucrative Stalin Prize following its stunning première in 1945. The Sixth is, however, an altogether different work – alternately tranquil and traumatised, containing references to Mahler and Wagner, with an enigmatic conclusion evocative of a primal scream. It has nothing in common with the poster-art music produced by his Soviet colleagues, and no parallel in Prokofiev’s own oeuvre, with the possible exceptions of his introspective First Violin Sonata and Ninth Piano Sonata, written during the same period in his career.

The Sixth Symphony is cast in three movements, the first being a hybrid sonata form with three themes (instead of two) in the opening exposition. The middle, development section transforms the first theme, while the concluding recapitulation section reconsiders the second and third themes. The second movement is an arch form comprising the same pensive strains as the first movement, though with new melodic material; the third movement, a conventional sonata form, affirms the home key of E-flat, and contrasts musical material of a positive character with its negative opposite.

Such was the boring, dutiful way Prokofiev described the Sixth Symphony to his colleagues. (Shostakovich, in response, asked Prokofiev about the weather.) What he did not talk about, at least in public, was the stunning climax. The third movement concludes with a recapitulation of music from the first movement in portentous rhythmic expansion, the result being a fracturing of the form and deterioration of the mood. There follows a staggering interpolation of chromatic sonorities – walls of sound built of the descending motifs assigned to the upper and

lower brasses at the beginning of the first movement – whose aftershocks resonate through a pair of fermatas.

At a 9 October 1947 rehearsal of the Symphony in Leningrad, Prokofiev privately disclosed that the interpolations represented 'questions cast into eternity'. One of the questions, he continued, concerned the meaning of life. This rare acknowledgement of programmatic intent permits a nihilistic reading of the finale, one in which a celebration of life cedes to a premonition of death – musical, physical, and metaphysical. The concluding bars suggest less heroic affirmation than acceptance of the unknown. These were not qualities typical of Soviet composition at the time, but Prokofiev thought that he had reached a point in his career where he could compose the kind of symphony he wanted. Such was the case in 1947. A year later, it was not.

The Symphony was premièred on 11 October 1947 by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Yevgeny Mravinsky, who had burnished his credentials in 1937 with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony – the standard-bearer for heroic Soviet symphonism. The most detailed review came from the musicologist Izrail Nestyev. Puzzled by the score, Nestyev pestered Prokofiev for technical insights. He received the tersest of responses, and found himself having to concoct his own politically correct interpretation of the music, one that turned it into a narrative of war and peace along the lines of Prokofiev’s prize-winning Fifth Symphony.

Nestyev strongly argues that Prokofiev had reversed the traditional roles of the exposition and development sections of the first and second movements, which he considered to be hybrid sonata forms. Melodic material, he reasoned, is no sooner introduced than transformed in the opening sections; in contrast, the middles involve a kaleidoscopic succession of images.

Nestyev’s description of these images tends to be heavy-handed.

Concerning the second movement, for example, he enthuses: 'The new theme of the Largo is less a contrast than a continuation of the first – a beautiful instrumental arioso, suffused with reserved wisdom. Suddenly the lyric tone is superseded anew by the fantastic spectres of war.' The movement culminates in a ‘circular’ reprise of the first two themes. ‘I am young, I am strong, I defeated the powers of evil and I earned the right to happiness’ – such can be divined from the assured major sounds of the Largo.'

Nestyev applied similar terms to the third movement. Here 'a cheerful melody in the spirit of Mozart or Glinka' is intertwined with the strains of a rustic dance. But the lifeaffirming tableau is once more marred by the incursion of a 'titan,' a passage of 'incessantly repeating fanfares' that revisits the traumas of the past.

On 25 December 1947, Mravinsky conducted the Moscow première of the Sixth Symphony. The concert was the last unhampered, unmediated success of Prokofiev’s career. The following year he would be denounced by the Stalinist regime for his deviations from the puerile Romanticism expected of Soviet composers, and reviewers like Nestyev would turn decisively against him. © Simon Morrison

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Saturday 21 January 2012

Sergei Prokofiev Two Poems for female chorus, Op. 7 (1910)

7.30pm Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall, Royal College of Music

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Prokofiev Two Poems for female chorus, Op. 7 (10') Prokofiev (arr. Kabalevsky) Concertino for Cello in G minor (19') Prokofiev Ode to the End of the War (14') Interval Prokofiev Symphony No. 2 in D minor (36') – Vladimir Jurowski conductor Kristina Blaumane cello Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra and Chorus – Performer biographies on pages 36–41.

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

Copies of the song texts can be obtained free of charge from the programme sellers.

The Steinway concert pianos chosen and hired by the Royal College of Music for these performances are supplied and maintained by Steinway & Sons, London.

Prokofiev composed several vocal works in his youth to poems by the Russian Symbolist writer Konstantin Balmont, who was both a source of inspiration and a personal friend. The White Swan and The Wave, the two poems Prokofiev set in 1910, seek out musical corollaries to Balmont’s nature mysticism. Provocative word combinations – a 'snowdrift of white feathers', for example, and the 'velvet black cushion' of night in the first setting – are assigned to music of elusive character. Tonal, whole-tone, and chromatic passages are offset in a fashion that suggests on the one hand, a synaesthetic combination of the senses and on the other, altered consciousness. The music is at once a dreamscape as well as an evocation of that richer, more real existence that the Symbolists believed existed beyond our own.

The Two Poems received their première in 1910 at a student choral concert at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. Prokofiev conducted, shakily, and had to endure the inevitable comparisons between his painterly textures and those of the Symbolist composers Debussy and Scriabin. In a sense, nothing could be further from the sound of Prokofiev’s later Soviet works than this score, but a connection has been made by David Nice, who proposes that the 'harmonic side-slips of the choral writing look forward ... to the flavourings he was to add when he composed essentially diatonic Russian themes for Soviet ceremonials.'

What sounds dreamlike in one context, however, can sound the opposite in another, and in Prokofiev’s career, context was everything – as the other works in tonight's programme jarringly demonstrate.

Sergei Prokofiev (arr. Kabalevsky) Concertino for Cello in G minor (Unfinished) Kristina Blaumane cello 1 Andante mosso 2 Andante 3 Allegretto

Prokofiev receiving applause following an encore performance of the Ode to the End of the War, Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, Moscow, 17 October 1947

score of the second movement, but only sketched the first and third movements. Steven Isserlis describes the general outline of the work: 'It was presumably intended for student cellists as much as for Rostropovich himself. It is not a ‘great’ work – it is not trying to be one! It is what it is: tuneful, amusing, appealing.

The first movement opens with a brooding melody exploring the darker regions of the cello; the second subject, in complete contrast, brings out the sun. The slow movement is relaxed, lyrical, with perhaps a touch of irony; as in the Sonata for Cello and Piano, one can feel, in the aftermath of the 1948 Resolution, Prokofiev’s genuine desire to write accessible music mixed with a certain detachment, a musical raised eyebrow. The last movement opens with a gruffly humorous melody taken from the Symphony-Concerto ...

The second subject, like that in the first movement, is charming, innocent.'

Prokofiev completed his final works under the shadow of a 1948 Soviet government resolution denouncing him and several other elite composers who had supposedly allowed their music to stray from official artistic policy. But there was more to it. Charges of financial corruption preceded the ideological crackdown, and so part of the denunciation stemmed from the overgenerous commissions provided to Prokofiev by the Union of Soviet Composers. The resolution hit hard. Much of the music he completed after the resolution is listless, even lifeless, compared to that composed before.

After Prokofiev’s death, Rostropovich completed the first and third movements according to his understanding of Prokofiev’s methods. He gave the première, with piano accompaniment, on 29 December 1956. Dmitri Kabalevsky, meanwhile, completed an orchestration that, despite referring to Prokofiev’s partial manuscript, was decidedly overblown – a violation of the composer’s neoclassical design. Another orchestration, much more in keeping with Prokofiev’s original intent, was completed in 1997 by Vladimir Blok.

Seeking ideological guidance in the last five years of his life, and struggling with a myriad of ailments precipitated by high blood pressure, he accepted offers of assistance from the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, among others. The products of Prokofiev’s relationship with Rostropovich include a Sonata for Cello and Piano; a peculiar (to say the least) tone-poem about the construction of a canal linking two Russian rivers; a hybrid Symphony-Concerto for Cello; an unfinished Sonata for unaccompanied cello inspired by Bach; and what the composer himself described as a 'transparent' Concertino for Cello.

Sergei Prokofiev Ode to the End of the War (1945)

At the time of his death, Prokofiev had completed the piano 18 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

© RGAKFD

–

The White Swan The Wave

that Soviet aesthetics fostered and demanded. The Ode is cast from beginning to end in the major mode; the choice of melodic gestures seems intended to overwhelm the listener.

Prokofiev outlined the score in a 1945 notebook as follows: 'Slow' opening; a 'fast, workman-like' passage recycled from his Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution; another slow passage, though more 'ornate' than the first; a depiction of the 'birth of joy'; a passage of folksy cheer; then a reordered reprise of all of these passages followed by a cacophonous coda highlighting the timpani. Prokofiev does not seem to have been especially inspired while assembling the score, although it provided an opportunity to parody Igor Stravinsky, his compositional rival in the 1920s. The orchestration, which took several weeks longer to finish than he expected, derives from Stravinsky’s rustic wedding ballet Les Noces.

Poor health prevented Prokofiev from attending the November 1945 première. Two years later, he heard a performance at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. In the audience was a group of Soviet Boy Scouts, to whom sweets were handed out as a special treat for their attentive listening; Prokofiev feigned snatching them away when he rose to take his bow, wearing the medals awarded for his musical service to the regime during the war. The children shouted their bravos on cue, and the Ode was encored.

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

Prokofiev described his Ode to the End of the War as a glorification of 'the arrival of peace' and a reflection on 'the joy of peaceful labour and the pathos of renewal'. These banal points fail, however, to capture the oddness of the 12-minute score, which translates Soviet architectural monumentalism into sound.

It is the musical equivalent of a Stalinist skyscraper, a stack of musical building blocks of increasing heaviness. The scoring includes eight harps, four pianos, three tubas, three saxophones, and an expanded brass and wind section – the kind of excess London Philharmonic Orchestra | 19

Sergei Prokofiev Symphony No. 2 in D minor (1925)

Sunday 22 January 2012

1 2

3.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Allegro ben articolato Theme and Variations

Prokofiev’s Second Symphony was one of the great hopes of his years living in Paris, but ended up being one of the worst disappointments. The fiasco of its French première under the baton of Serge Koussevitzky proved instructive, because Prokofiev realised that he could not achieve artistic success through self-conscious modernist means alone. The excesses of this score, like that of his Balmont-inspired cantata Seven, They Are Seven, would later yield to a lyrical idiom that Prokofiev called 'new simplicity.' The Second Symphony was his experiment with its opposite: new complexity.

The first section provides a fanfare-like first theme and choralelike second theme; the ensuing section, which substitutes for the development, presents a hair-raising fugue that progresses to earsplitting unison; the third section provides respite by reprising the opening material. The culminating coda superimposes a slowed-down version of the fanfare with offbeat, syncopated trumpets.

The theme that opens the second movement is tuneful and diatonic, drifting from C major into A minor. The six variations that follow entail fragmentation, 'bitonal' harmonisation, and various generic mutations, from grotesque dance to march to chorale.

The sixth and final variation has neo-primitivist, Stravinskian contours. It presents the theme in parallel, stacked chords and an asymmetrical (7/4) metre. The Symphony concludes in a tranquil D minor, the oft-overwhelmed home key, which establishes itself through sheer insistence.

Few heard that muted ending when the work received its 6 June 1925 première. The audience had fled the hall. Prokofiev himself confessed, in a letter to his colleague Nikolay Myaskovsky, that even he could not make head nor tail of the music during the performance, never mind the public. Still, he believed in the score, sensing that it was somewhat beyond the technique of orchestras of the time, and that the texture just needed to be thinned for the rigid, mechanical logic of its construction to be appreciated. He planned to make the needed changes in his later, Soviet years. But monumental – as opposed to mechanical – commissions like the Ode to the End of the War intervened. © Simon Morrison

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The Prokofiev Diaries – Vladimir Jurowski conductor Simon Callow as Prokofiev TBC narrator Joan Rodgers soprano Piers Lane piano Rex Lawson pianola

Prokofiev (right) with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in Moscow, 1952

© New York Philharmonic Archives

The work is cast in two movements, the second of which, a set of six variations on a theme, can be partitioned into three sections that fulfil the traditional roles of a symphonic scherzo, slow movement, and finale (though the idea that the work is at all traditional would have been anathema to Prokofiev at the time). The first movement celebrates the industrial age, drawing inspiration from Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231, a tone-poem that mimics the actions of a lurching, straining locomotive. The movement preserves the three-part schema of sonata form, but it neither possesses a middle development section nor preserves the functional articulation of keys through harmonies. The movement nearly lacks harmony altogether, since the emphasis is on thickly interwoven contrapuntal lines. Chords, when articulated, tend to be of Mahlerian thickness, and result from two simultaneously unfolding keys.

–

– Performer biographies on pages 36–41.

There will be an interval in this performance.

Concert generously supported by Mr Leonid and Mrs Olga Makharinsky.

The Prokofiev Diaries From student days in St Petersburg until 1933, just before he finally returned from the West to live out the remainder of his life in the Soviet Union, Prokofiev kept a uniquely revealing diary to which he confided his innermost thoughts, the struggles and triumphs of his creative life; his spiritual strivings; his relationships with lovers, friends, fellow musicians and other prominent artists; the events and encounters of his turbulent life at the centre of the most explosive period of 20th-century art. Anthony Phillips, who translated the diaries into English, has devised today's programme in which readings from the diaries and other autobiographical writings, alongside musical extracts, throw light on what lies behind some of the music created by this most complex, elusive and original genius.

Prokofiev's Inner World Anthony Phillips introduces The Prokofiev Diaries One can make a good case for claiming that for Prokofiev the written word was nearly as important as the musical note. Not only was his literary output very large – opera libretti, ballet plots, diaries, letters, two autobiographies, poetry, short stories, essays and articles – in it he explored style, vocabulary, turns of phrase, wit, literary devices, just as when composing he searched for melody, phrasing, harmonic relations and rhythmic contrasts.

To make his effects on the reader, Prokofiev the writer summons technique and imagination in the same way as Prokofiev the composer acts on the listener.

An avid but discriminating reader, mainly in Russian but also widely in English, French and German, he read memoirs, biographies, letters, philosophy (especially Kant and Schopenhauer), a huge amount of poetry, classic and contemporary fiction. Language fascinated him. He cared for it, polished it and exploited its power to convey passion, drama and character in the libretti he created for his operas, and in a small but highly interesting clutch of experimental short stories.

Starting a diary at the age of 12, he abandoned it a year later (he did after all have some normal teenage attributes) but took it up again as a 16-year-old Conservatoire student, and this time kept it up for 26 years. He preserved, filed, and bound letters he received, copies and drafts of letters he sent.

What was it that in 1933 brought to an end such a comprehensive documentation of a life? Well, a reasonable guess would be that it was when he had more or less decided to make his home, and that of his wife and young family, in the country of his birth (they took up permanent residence in 1936).

This was now the Soviet Union, a place where prudent folk took care to avoid needlessly keeping or acquiring potentially compromising documents. The correspondence and the notebooks containing the diaries were safely deposited in an American bank, a circumstance his two sons and his second wife were informed of only after the composer’s death. (Lina, his first wife, the children’s mother, knew but by then she was serving a 20-year prison sentence in labour camps, convicted on spurious charges of spying and anti-Soviet activity.)

In 1945, with the shadow of mortality already upon his brow (soon after the première of the Fifth Symphony he had suffered a crippling seizure brought on by high blood pressure from which he never fully recovered) he began an Autobiography, disarmingly prefaced by an ‘Apologetic Introduction’:

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‘When I was 21, someone said in my presence: “I would oblige all remarkable people to write their autobiographies.”

I thought at the time, ‘I already have the material! All I have to do now is become famous. But when I reached the age of 40 my youthful swagger had evaporated and my view of life was more sensible. I lost interest in keeping my diary, and the idea of writing an autobiography no longer appealed. Now, however, I believe that, first, I have achieved some things in my lifetime so my autobiography might be useful to someone.

Second, I have met many interesting people, and accounts of them might be interesting.’

Disingenuous? Perhaps, but remember this was the Soviet Union, where concealment was universally practised as an art form. The 1945 Autobiography, actually his second essay in the genre, resembles the Diaries in its relish for describing its subject, his family, friends and preoccupations. It’s a delight to read, but after 180,000 or so words he had travelled only as far as his fourth year of study at the St Petersburg Conservatoire – hardly the full story. The Diaries are the thing and we are so lucky to have them, in all their startling candour, their range and wit, the sharpness of their observations of personalities and events from a vantage point at the centre of an exceptionally vibrant period in European music, theatre, art and literature. Even more gripping, I find, is the unique window through which we can peer into the creative processes of a great, utterly distinctive composer.

The Diaries were Prokofiev’s lifeblood. When he thought he had lost a part of them, along with other cherished manuscripts and possessions abandoned in the family flat in Petrograd as he left Russia for the West in 1918, he wrote in anguish: ‘The greatest tragedy is the loss of the diary.’ It meant more to him even than his treasured piano, won as First Prize in the Conservatoire’s Rubinstein Competition, or the manuscript score of the Second Piano Concerto. Happily, he was wrong – the notebook he believed had perished had survived after all.

In 1955, two years after Prokofiev died, the USSR Board of Foreign Jurisprudence and Mira Mendelson, the composer’s second wife – neither the children nor, naturally, their mother, were given any say in the matter – decreed that the Diaries must be recovered from America and deposited in the State Archive of Literary Art, with access denied for 50 years. Mira died in 1968, and come Gorbachev’s perestroika followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the words of the composer’s elder son, Svyatoslav: ‘We decided that changed times had made it our duty to publish this priceless document.’ Thanks to years of dedicated work by Svyatoslav, who sadly died at the end of last year, and his son Serge, the composer’s grandson and namesake, we can now read Prokofiev’s Diaries, all 850,000 words (or thereabouts) of them, in a meticulously transcribed and published form. So it is that we have Prokofiev’s own account of himself to form the basis of this afternoon’s sketch of a composer’s life, loves, music and mind. © Anthony Phillips After a career in music administration in Britain and America, Anthony Phillips was General Manager of the South Bank Concert Halls until 1986. Since then he has mainly devoted himself to writing and translating books on Russian literature and music, including Prokofiev’s Diaries, the first two volumes of which, ‘Prodigious Youth’ and ‘Behind The Mask’, have been published by Faber. The third and final volume will be published

by Faber later this year.

22 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Musical Extracts Part 1 1 Indian Galop 2 Piano Concerto No. 1 (first movement) 3 Piano Concerto No. 2 (finale) 4 Andante for orchestra, Op. 29bis 5 ‘Rigaudon’, Op. 12 No. 3 6 The Ugly Duckling 7 Scythian Suite (Sunrise) 8 ‘True Tenderness’ (Five Akhmatova Songs, Op. 27 No. 2) 9 Suite from The Gambler (No. 5: Dénouement) 10 March from The Love for Three Oranges 11 Suite from Chout (The Transformation into a Goat) 12 Symphony No. 3 (finale) Part 2 13 Gavotte and Scherzo, Op. 12 Nos. 2 & 10) 14 Five Songs Without Words, No. 1 15 Le pas d’acier (‘The Factory’, ‘Hammers’) 16 Symphonic Song, Op. 57 (conclusion) 17 Piano Sonata No. 4 (finale) 18 March from Spartakiad, Op. 69 No. 1 19 Lieutenant Kijé Suite (The Birth of Kijé) 20 Peter and the Wolf (Triumphal March) 21 Egyptian Nights (Night over Egypt) 22 Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution, Op. 74 (Second Interlude) 23 Ivan The Terrible (overture) 24 Symphony No. 5 (first movement) 25 The Stone Flower (Prologue) 26 Waltz from War and Peace 27 Symphony No. 7 (finale)

Prokofiev and the Pianola Prokofiev travelled to the USA in 1918, making his New York début as a concert pianist in November of that year. He was immediately noticed by the Aeolian Company, manufacturers of the Pianola, and he signed a contract to record for the Company’s Duo-Art reproducing piano in February 1919.

A total of 17 recorded piano rolls were published, one of them posthumously.

The Duo-Art was one of a number of reproducing piano systems found in the homes of wealthy music-lovers in the years between the two World Wars. Unlike the normal Pianola, which was originally designed to use non-recorded music rolls in order to allow the individual performer to create a personal interpretation, the Duo-Art reproduced all the nuances of a recorded performance – rubato, dynamics and pedalling – by means of complex music rolls and pneumatic control mechanisms.

Further information about the Duo-Art may be found on the website of the Pianola Institute, whose Duo-Art instrument is bringing Prokofiev back to life this afternoon. www.pianola.org

Wednesday 25 January 2012 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall – Prokofiev Chout ('The Buffoon') (excerpts) (20') Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 4 in B-flat major (for the left hand)* (25') Interval Prokofiev Cinderella (excerpts) (60') – Vladimir Jurowski conductor Leon Fleisher piano – Performer biographies on pages 36–41.

The timings shown are not precise and are only given as a guide. * Supported by Dunard Fund

Sergei Prokofiev Chout ('The Buffoon') (excerpts) (1915/21) Buffoon and his Wife Dance of the Wives Buffoon as a Young Woman Dance of the Buffoon's Daughters The Young Woman Becomes a Goat Fifth Entr'acte and the Goat's Burial Final Dance Chout was Prokofiev’s first ballet to reach the stage. The first he ever wrote, a neo-primitivist spectacle conceived along the lines of Igor Stravinsky’s shockingly successful ballet The Rite of Spring, was never performed. Titled Ala and Lolli, it was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev and the illustrious Ballets Russes, the troupe that defined Parisian modernism by way of Russian exoticism. Diaghilev rejected the ballet – its music and plot were trite, in his opinion – leaving Prokofiev free to rework the score for symphonic performance. Ala and Lolli thus became the Scythian Suite. Diaghilev still believed in Prokofiev, however, and encouraged him to keep trying. He commissioned three additional ballets, each of which was subject to revision and considerable second-guessing, but which eventually earned the composer renown. Diaghilev taught Prokofiev how to compose for dance, and in so doing put him into contact with some of the most innovative visual artists and choreographers of the 20th century. Yet this early exposure to the avant-garde later had its pitfalls: during his Soviet years, Prokofiev repeatedly clashed with his collaborators, who for ideological reasons clung to tradition while he continued to push ahead.

The complete Russian-language title of Chout, an absurdist, fairytale-inspired ballet conceived in 1915, gives a fair sense of the plot: Skazka pro shuta, semerikh shutov pereshutivshago ('The Tale of the Buffoon Who Outwits Seven Other Buffoons').

The actual sequence of events is rather hideous, involving multiple murders – the seven buffoons kill their wives after being told by an eighth that he has a magic whip that can bring them back to life – and much debauched chicanery. The eighth buffoon escapes death at the hands of the other seven by first disguising himself as a woman and winning the heart of a rich but pathetic merchant, then swindling his saviour of 300 roubles.

The young Prokofiev needed Chout to succeed, and heeded almost every request from Diaghilev for revisions – to the extent that he was still orchestrating the final two scenes and an entr’acte on the eve of the première. This took place on 17 May 1921, with Prokofiev conducting, at Le théâtre de la Gaîté Lyrique in Paris.

The score is a tour de force of outrageous musical illustration, with archaic, pseudo-folkloric tunes joining in the mayhem with passages of brilliant chromaticism and lumbering, out-of-kilter ostinatos. The seven wives, who are unceremoniously put to death near the start of the ballet, are assigned a grotesque round dance and a fugue, the latter used to mock their dreadful table manners. The eighth buffoon dances to nuanced, shape-shifting melodic phrases, while the seven others he has deceived, the victims of groupthink, move to suitably obtuse harmonies and rhythms.

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Leon Fleisher piano 1 Vivace 2 Andante 3 Moderato 4 Vivace Prokofiev composed his ill-starred Fourth Piano Concerto for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, the Viennese-born son of a fabulously well-to-do industrial magnate and brother of the famous philosopher. During the First World War, Wittgenstein was captured by the Russians and dispatched to a prison camp near Omsk, Siberia. He was gravely wounded, and lost his right arm. Even before his release, he vowed to continue his concert career, using family money to commission a series of compositions for the left hand. The most famous of these went to Maurice Ravel, another later one to Prokofiev. Wittgenstein was generous with his commissions but extremely particular when it came to the kind of music he wanted to perform. Having devoted the post-war years to the development of techniques that would allow him to replicate some of the effects of two-handed playing through a combination of pedalling and one-handed figuration, he expected the composers he commissioned to stress those technical advances in their music.

Prokofiev responded to the $5,000 fee with a work in four rather unequal movements, the repeated rondos of the opening and finale being much briefer than the middle Andante and Moderato movements. He made a distinct choice to avoid anything in common with Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, in part out of an allergic reaction to Ravel’s ironic romanticism. But at this point in his career, he was also groping toward a cerebral form of neoclassicism that, in the critic Bernard Holland’s opinion, set out 'to report in musical terms on the harsh circumstances of life around it'. Even so, there is considerable mirth in his Concerto, with the final movement serving as an encore of the first – lest audiences forget to demand one of their own. And despite the acerbic nature of much of the melodic writing, both the first and second themes in the slow movement are extremely affective, especially given the desolation of their accompaniment.

Prokofiev and Wittgenstein discussed the score before its completion, with the pianist arguing for the inclusion of a short cadenza in the third movement, although the solo line in the

© RGAKFD

Prokofiev composing at the piano, Moscow, 22 July 1940

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two rondos proved much more taxing. Wittgenstein ended up rejecting the Concerto, however, claiming that he simply did not understand it. Yet he declined Prokofiev’s request to reuse the unperformed music in another form; hedging his bets, he argued that perhaps one day he would come to appreciate it.

He never did, leaving the Concerto unperformed during Prokofiev’s lifetime.

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

Sergei Prokofiev Cinderella (excerpts) (1944) Act One No. 1 Introduction No. 2 Shawl Dance No. 3 Cinderella No. 6 The Sisters' New Clothes No. 7 The Dancing Lesson No. 9 Cinderella Dreams of the Ball No. 11 Second Appearance of the Fairy Godmother Act Two No. 20 Dance of the Courtiers No. 26 Mazurka and Entrance of the Prince No. 29 Cinderella's Arrival at the Ball No. 30 Grand Waltz No. 31 Promenade No. 36 Duet of the Prince and Cinderella No. 37 Waltz-Coda No. 38 Midnight Act Three No. 40 First Galop of the Prince No. 41 Temptation No. 42 Second Galop of the Prince No. 47 The Prince's Visit No. 48 The Prince Recognises Cinderella No. 50 Amoroso Following the successful Leningrad production of his ballet Romeo and Juliet in 1940, Prokofiev entered into discussions with the Kirov Theatre for a sequel, one that would match the success of Romeo and Juliet while avoiding the political and logistical problems that had long delayed its première. Once the contract for Cinderella was signed and the scenario devised, Prokofiev began to compose a score in the spirit of Tchaikovsky’s three great ballets. He worked in the number format, with each dance stopping and starting on choreographic cue, but sought to retain the unusual rhythms and chromatic detours that defined his own musical syntax.

In an article for the Kirov Theatre newspaper Za sovetskoye iskusstvo ('For Soviet Art'), the scenarist Nikolay Volkhov offers a cheerful account of the ballet’s creation, and supplies the striking image of Prokofiev solving technical problems in his head while playing the card game solitaire on the lid of his piano. Yet the genesis of the scenario was more fraught than Volkhov relates, and by the time Cinderella reached the stage, its storyline had been altered beyond Prokofiev’s recognition. Whereas Volkhov created a traditional balletic storybook with elaborate descriptions of decor and dress, Prokofiev argued for concision, and wanted the group dances, rather than stock-in-trade pantomime, to drive the action forward.

© RIA Novosti

Sergei Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 4 in B-flat major (for the left hand) (1931)

A 1968 production of Prokofiev's ballet Cinderella at the Odessa Opera and Ballet Theatre

The 1945 Moscow première was delayed several times owing to the war, and Prokofiev had to deal with the humiliation of the orchestration being altered against his wishes. His intentions were more or less restored for the Leningrad première a year later. Stalinist aesthetics being what they were, the ballet became heavier, more lugubrious, than Prokofiev initially intended.

Comparing this score to the melodic miracles of Romeo and Juliet (never mind the grotesque caprice of Chout) is instructive.

Cinderella lacks the lightness of a fairytale; musically, the heroine never escapes her dreary domestic chores and the abuses of the Ugly Stepsisters. In the words of the dance critic Arlene Croce, Cinderella 'is not a conventional, sweet storybook romance; it is a brooding, disjointed affair'.

The three waltzes capture the essence of the romance between Cinderella and the Prince who discovers her at the ball. The first two – the 'Grand Waltz' and the 'Waltz-Coda' – dominate Act Two. The third 'Slow Waltz' comes in Act Three before the concluding 'Amoroso.' Other highlights include an exquisite nocturnal tableau drawn from Prokofiev’s 1919 opera The Love for Three Oranges, and the comical out-of-kilter dance assigned to the Ugly Stepsisters.

by experience. In the scenario, Prokofiev noted that the concluding 'Amoroso' would begin with a 'broad melody, at first calm, then the growth of an exposition, then something of an abatement, and then the first melody once again, like a triumphant love song'. He might have added that the happy ending unfolds in a soundscape reminiscent of Swan Lake.

But the tenuousness of this vision is denoted by its brevity: the magical 'Amoroso', a digression in the narrative, lasts just 38 bars. © Simon Morrison

Cinderella makes it to the ball with the aid of a magical helper.

But her time there is limited. The tolling of midnight and the end of her evening becomes, in Prokofiev’s hands, a modernist nightmare controlled by clockwork automata. Woodblock tick-tocks are interpolated with orchestral references to the march of the grotesque dwarf Chernomor in Mikhail Glinka’s 1836 opera Ruslan and Ludmila, and blended with a chortling brass ostinato borrowed from Prokofiev’s 1925 machine-age ballet Le Pas d’acier. High society imperils the chambermaid and her royal suitor, as does the inexorable progression of time.

The Act Three apotheosis finds Cinderella and the Prince escaping into a nostalgic cosmos where love stays pure, unsullied

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Saturday 28 January 2012 2.00–5.30pm Level 5 Function Room Royal Festival Hall –

The Unknown Prokofiev Leading Prokofiev experts Simon Morrison, David Nice, Nelly Kravetz and Fiona McKnight discuss Prokofiev’s popular music for Soviet consumption and why these works are virtually unknown. His grandson Gabriel Prokofiev provides a personal insight into the reasons behind Prokofiev’s return to Stalin’s Russia only to endure censorship and difficulties as a Soviet composer.

– In collaboration with The Serge Prokofiev Foundation.

Timetable for the afternoon 1.30pm

Registration and welcome.

2.00–3.00pm Simon Morrison, David Nice, Nelly Kravetz and

Fiona McKnight discuss censorship in

Stalinist Russia, focusing on the film Ivan the Terrible – whose Part 2 was banned – and

Prokofiev’s response to this and other

setbacks to his career after his fateful 1936

relocation to Moscow from Paris.

Showing of the little-known Soviet wartime film Tonya (approx. 25’), with score by Prokofiev.

Discussion, with audio excerpts, of Prokofiev’s little-known Music for Gymnasts, which was

prohibited from performance in 1939, along

with other rarities, such as his wartime

arrangements of English folksongs and

unfinished comic opera Distant Seas.

3.00–3.30pm

Q&A session – Prokofiev’s popular music for Soviet consumption, and the political challenges he confronted, and partially overcame, from 1936–53.

3.30pm

Coffee/tea break – Level 5 Function Room.

4.00–5.30pm Round table discussion with Simon Morrison,

David Nice, Nelly Kravetz and Fiona McKnight,

who will be joined by Gabriel Prokofiev to

provide his personal insights into the reasons

behind his grandfather’s return to Stalinist Russia.

Q&A session to conclude the day.

5.30pm

Study afternoon ends.

Saturday 28 January 2012

Sergei Prokofiev String Quartet No. 2 in F major (1941)

Free pre-concert performance

1 Allegro sostenuto 2 Adagio 3 Allegro – Andante molto – Allegro I

6.00–6.45pm Royal Festival Hall – Prokofiev String Quartet No. 2 in F major Prokofiev Humoresque for four bassoons Prokofiev Sonata in C major for two violins – Performed by musicians from the Royal College of Music Silver Quartet: Amy Tress violin Joseph Devalle violin Natasha Silver viola Frida Waaler Waervaagen cello Benjamin Exell bassoon Carrie To bassoon Tamsin Thorn bassoon Susanne Simma bassoon Galya Bisengalieva violin Agata Darashkaite violin

In 1941, when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, Prokofiev was evacuated with other elite artists to Nalchik, a city in southeastern Russia perched on the northern slope of the Caucasus Mountains. There he received a generous commission to compose a string quartet using stylized, semi-authentic transcriptions of regional songs and dances. Although he had never before done much with folk material, he now found himself supporting official Soviet efforts to promote native musics – whether real or imagined.

The first movement of the Quartet is based on a ritualistic Caucasian dance for old men in pairs, 'Udzh starikov', which involves slow turns and elaborate arm and hand gestures. The melody is solemn, the rhythms even. Prokofiev also quotes from the song 'Sosruko', named after the trickster god in Caucasian mythology. He assigns the tune of the latter to the first violin, with the other three instruments mimicking the sound of an accordion.

The movement also includes a dance taken from an 1885 folksong collection, 'On the Music of the Mountain Tatars'.

The second movement contrasts a haunting, ethereal version of another exotic dance, 'Izlamey', with an animated shepherd’s song. The finale, in sonata-rondo form, emulates regional hopping and skipping. Non-Caucasian sources of inspiration include Ukrainian folk accordion and Turkish spike fiddle. Ultimately, Prokofiev was less interested in geographical precision than thrilling music. His colleague Nikolay Myaskovsky aptly described the Second String Quartet as 'wild-eyed and fantastical' as well as 'monstrously, even nightmarishly interesting'.

Sergei Prokofiev Humoresque for four bassoons (1915) Today's speakers Simon Morrison is a Professor of Music at Princeton University, where he teaches 19th- and 20th-century Russian and French music. His most recent book, a biography of Lina Prokofiev, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012.

David Nice is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. A regular contributor to theartsdesk.com and BBC Radio 3, his interest in Russian music led to a study of Russian language and the first volume of his Prokofiev biography, From Russia to the West 1891–1935, published in 2003 by Yale University Press. He keeps a popular blog, I'll think of something later.

Nelly Kravetz is Associate Professor of Musicology at Tel Aviv University. She is an expert on Russian music, specialising in Prokofiev, and has written a book on Levon Atovmyan which will be published by GITIS later this year. She discovered the oratorio arrangement of the Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible, which is being premièred as part of the festival on 28 January.

Fiona McKnight has been the archivist of the Serge Prokofiev Archive at Goldsmiths, University of London, since 2006.

Previously a music teacher, her research on Prokofiev's years in the West inspired a career change, and she now devotes her time to facilitating research of all kinds for writers, performers, students and enthusiasts through the Archive.

The 1915 Humoresque for four bassoons is a transcription of Prokofiev’s own Humoresque Scherzo, a character piece for piano. Its chortling ostinati and besotted melodies (in the middle section) foiled those critics outside Russia who expected Bolshevik barbarism from him.

Sergei Prokofiev Sonata in C major for two violins (1932) 1 Andante cantabile 2 Allegro 3 Commodo (quasi Allegretto) 4 Allegro con brio Prokofiev's Sonata for two violins of 1932 likewise stumped reviewers. He based this masterpiece of braided lyricism on the slow–fast–slow–fast layout of a Baroque sonata da chiesa, suppressing 'wild-eyed and fantastical' virtuosity for restrained, constrained lyricism. © Simon Morrison

Gabriel Prokofiev is a London-based composer, producer and founder of the Nonclassical record label and club night.

In 2003 he returned to his classical roots, composing a critically acclaimed String Quartet No. 1 for the Elysian Quartet.

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Saturday 28 January 2012

Sergei Prokofiev Incidental music to 'Egyptian Nights' (1934)

7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Andrey Breus baritone Simon Callow narrator Miranda Richardson narrator Gentlemen of the London Philharmonic Choir

– Prokofiev Incidental music to 'Egyptian Nights' (50') With excerpts from texts by George Bernard Shaw, Pushkin and Shakespeare

Interval Prokofiev (arr. Levon Atovmyan) Ivan the Terrible (world première of this version)* (50') – Vladimir Jurowski conductor Ewa Podleš contralto Andrey Breus baritone Simon Callow narrator Miranda Richardson narrator London Philharmonic Choir Surtitles by Paula Kennedy

–

When Prokofiev moved to Moscow, he brought with him a new musical style emphasising greater melodiousness and economy of expression. The shift can be heard in his works for Soviet theatre and cinema from the mid-1930s, including the incidental music for Egyptian Nights. Prokofiev’s second Soviet commission, Egyptian Nights was a theatrical experiment directed by Alexander Tairov that brought together scenes from Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and the 1828 poem Cleopatra by Alexander Pushkin. As the composer explained in an article for Soviet Travel magazine, 'The reason that inspired Tairov to combine these plays lies in the fact that Shaw depicted Cleopatra in the bloom of her youth; and Shakespeare, at the moment of her decline.' The 44 numbers in his score represent the experiences of the principal characters and denote changes in locale: Rome is bellicose, oppressive, freighted with brass; Egypt is languorous, represented by harp, piano, and woodwinds. The music features mildly exotic dances, on- and off-stage choruses, and instrumental interludes (marking scene changes). The production was a success, though it did not take long for dilettantish Soviet critics to scorn Tairov for conflating canonic writers. © Simon Morrison

Performer biographies on pages 36–41.

The timings shown are not precise and are only given as a guide. * Generously supported by The Serge Prokofiev Foundation

c. 9.45pm FREE post-concert event The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall Trapeze: A classical club night with music and dance See page 31 for details

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

Sergei Prokofiev (arr. Levon Atovmyan, 1961) Ivan the Terrible (world première of this version) Ewa Podleš contralto Andrey Breus baritone London Philharmonic Choir In the summer of 2007, I met Svetlana Levonovna Atovmyan, the daughter of Levon Atovmyan, at her apartment in the House of Composers on a side street in the heart of Moscow.

She fetched from the shelf a dusty, faded folder containing a manuscript with the inscription 'S.S. Prokofiev. Ivan the Terrible.

Oratorio based on the film score of the same name. Compiled and orchestrated by L.T. Atovmyan. Full score.' This version of Prokofiev’s score has been hidden from history for almost 50 years. I received it as a gift from Svetlana Levonovna, who told me, in parting, 'I’m indebted to my father ... Do something to prevent his name from being forever confined to oblivion.'

– Nelly Kravetz, January 2012 Following the success of Alexander Nevsky (1938), Sergei Eisenstein received a commission from Soviet State Cinema for another film on an historic subject, Ivan the Terrible. The first phase in the collaboration between Eisenstein and Prokofiev extended from June 1932 until the spring of 1943; the two worked together in Alma-Ata, where the Mosfilm studios had been relocated during the war. Prokofiev continued work on the music after his return to Moscow in 1944, at which time filming of Part 1 of Ivan the Terrible resumed.

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Still from Eisenstein's film Ivan The Terrible with Nikolai Cherkasov as Ivan

It was conceived as a trilogy. Part 1 was released on 18 January 1945; a year later the director and his crew received a FirstClass Stalin Prize for it. After a closed-door screening of Part 2, however, Eisenstein was accused of ignoring and distorting historical facts; on 4 September 1946 the Central Committee of the Communist Party resolved to ban the film. The prohibition of Part 2 was not lifted until 1958, five years after Stalin’s death.

Part 3 went unrealized; the extant materials comprise a scenario, notes, drawings, and a few filmed excerpts.

The epic film narrates Ivan the Terrible’s struggle to unify feudal Russia (or Rus’) as a powerful centralized state. In 1547 the 17-year-old Moscow prince Ivan Vasilyevich mounted the throne as the first Russian Tsar; several years later he achieved victory in the campaign against the Tatars. He had to endure the death of his beloved first wife Anastasia, the betrayal of a friend, defeat in the Livonian War, and the boyars’ plot against him. Ivan was merciless in his pursuit of power, thus earning the epithet 'Terrible'. Upon establishing the virtual police state known as the Oprichnina, he launched a campaign of mass terror throughout the Russian lands.

Unlike the music for Alexander Nevsky, from which Prokofiev himself devised a cantata, and unlike the music for Lieutenant Kijé, which he transformed into an orchestral suite, Prokofiev did not generate a concert version of Ivan the Terrible. After the composer’s death this task was taken on by the conductor Abram Stasevich, who had recorded the original soundtrack for the film in 1945. From the musical excerpts for the film Stasevich arranged an oratorio for chorus, soloists, and orchestra. It was premièred on 23 April 1961 in posthumous celebration of Prokofiev’s 70th birthday.

Unknown before now was the fact that three months before that première, on 16 January 1961, the Union of Soviet Composers arranged a hearing of an Ivan the Terrible oratorio for chorus, soloists, and orchestra by Levon Atovmyan. This version of the oratorio was thereafter forwarded to a repertoire control commission (Dmitri Shostakovich was one of the judges).

The commission deemed the oratorio acceptable for performance and publication but recommended some changes and cuts. Immediately following the presentation of the score at the Union of Soviet Composers, however, Atovmyan suffered a pair of strokes: the setback brought the discussion of the oratorio to an end, and the manuscript was consigned to oblivion in Atovmyan’s private archive. There it remained unnoticed for over 50 years. In 2007, Atovmyan’s daughter Svetlana Levonovna Atovmyan (1926–2007) gave me the

manuscript in the hope of securing a performance.

Levon Atovmyan (1901–73) is a shadowy figure in the history of Soviet music, despite occupying a position of influence. In November 1932, while serving as the chairman of a Moscow composers' collective, he received a directive from the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to invite Prokofiev, then living in Paris, to tour the Soviet Union. Their initial acquaintance developed into a close collegial friendship. Atovmyan influenced Prokofiev’s ultimate decision to relocate to his homeland after 18 years abroad. And as the director of Muzfond, the financial division of the Union of Soviet Composers, Atovmyan commissioned numerous works from Prokofiev, published his music, and assisted with various day-to-day and material concerns. Prokofiev esteemed Atovmyan as a musician. On his request Atovmyan made some 25 transcriptions of his ballets, operas, and symphonies for piano. Prokofiev likewise entrusted him with the orchestration of his works. After Nikolay Myaskovsky, Atovmyan was Prokofiev’s most trusted confidant.

There is no doubt that if Prokofiev had had to choose between Stasevich and Atovmyan for the oratorio, he would have selected the latter. And there exists indirect evidence that Atovmyan conceived the oratorio as early as 1947 and discussed it with Prokofiev, meaning that the composer probably not only knew about Atovmyan’s intentions, but also sanctioned them.

Unlike Stasevich, who placed together episodes from the film side by side without making any changes, Atovmyan assumed the role of Prokofiev’s co-author. His oratorio is something in between a 'fantasy on a theme' and a reworking of the original score: it is not independent of the original, but at the same time it deviates from it. The following points distinguish Stasevich’s and Atovmyan’s versions: a. Atovmyan did not maintain the chronology of the cinematic narrative, but instead created a well-balanced score in keeping with musical conventions. Three of the odd-numbered movements (1, 3 and 7; see synopsis overleaf) take the form of grand, quasi-operatic scenes; the even-numbered movements (and movement 5) are smaller in scale and highlight one or two melodies.

Atovmyan’s architectural design has a lyrical centre (movements 4, 5 and 6) with movements of increasing dramatic intensity radiating outward. b. Atovmyan altered Prokofiev’s scoring. He understood that film music conceived for a recording studio could not be brought into a concert hall unchanged. (Such was also Prokofiev’s belief, as evidenced by his work on the Alexander Nevsky cantata.) He made only minor changes to the overall size of the orchestra. c. Atovmyan made significant alterations to the choral score. d. Atovmyan excludes the Narrator that Stasevich employed to explain the story and to fashion the diverse episodes into a unified whole. Atovmyan evidently felt that the Narrator exerted too much of a drag on the unfolding of the music. e. Atovmyan excludes the passages in the score that Prokofiev did not compose, namely the traditional Orthodox Church singing. f. Atovmyan permitted himself some insignificant changes to the music and text.

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1. Ivan and the Boyars (chorus and orchestra) Text by Vladimir Lugovskoy

2. Song of the Beaver (solo contralto and orchestra) Folk text The song was conceived by Eisenstein as a 'deeply macabre lullaby' sung by boyarina Yevfrosinya Staritskaya (Ivan the Terrible’s aunt) to her son, Prince Vladimir. Yevfrosinya plans to murder the Tsar and dreams of seeing her son on the throne.

Her malice is captured by sul ponticello (at the bridge) string bowing and her own pinched vocal timbre. Prokofiev wanted the voice to sound as senile as possible, 'as though holding a cigarette between the lips, as though through a comb'. The song takes the form of a through-composed ballad; the opening contralto tune immediately transforms into free recitative.

3. Oprichnina (solo baritone, chorus and orchestra) Text by Vladimir Lugovskoy The episode featuring the raucous feasting of the Tsar’s mercenaries – the Oprichniki – includes a dance, an oath, and sung verses. The wild, unbridled dance of the mercenaries was originally filmed in bright red rather than black and white – making the association with hellish flame or blood explicit while also suggesting a dance of death. The oath of the mercenaries is hummed by the male chorus, and it then becomes a verse recitative (albeit without the spoken word overlay heard in the film). The menacing verses of Fyodor Basmanov (solo baritone) with the 'burn, burn, burn' exclamations of the intoxicated bacchanalia and the whistles and glissandi heard in the orchestra – all intensify the sensation of horror in the face of a raging, out-of-control force.

4. Swan (orchestra and chorus) Text by Vladimir Lugovskoy This is the episode of Ivan and Anastasia’s marriage; the female chorus celebrates the bride. The music involves two themes, composed by Prokofiev in the spirit of a choral round dance.

The text is likewise stylized, with the image of the white swan analogous to that of the bride.

5. Anastasia (orchestra) Anastasia’s suffering after being poisoned by Yevfrosinya Staritskaya is represented by the opening theme – a keening lament scored for flute and clarinet. The instrumentation of this episode deviates somewhat from the original: Atovmyan excludes Prokofiev’s muted violins, and adds a celeste to enhance the deathly, otherworldly colouring of the chimes. The role of the strings is reduced; the cold timbres of the woodwinds and the timpani further convey the sense of tragedy.

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London Philharmonic Orchestra Foyle Future Firsts Development Programme

Free post-concert event

The Foyle Future Firsts development programme bridges the transition between college and the professional platform for up to 16 outstanding young musicians each year. The programme is designed to nurture and develop talented orchestral players, to form the base for future appointments to the London Philharmonic Orchestra and other world-class orchestras and ensembles.

c. 9.45pm The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall –

© Alamy

The oratorio begins with an overture titled 'An Approaching Thunder' in the scenario. From the vortex of ascending and descending semiquavers Ivan the Terrible’s laconic main theme emerges, combining trombone and horn in unison. The brief chorus, 'A Black Cloud', attests to the betrayal of the boyars; unlike Prokofiev’s original score, Atovmyan uses alternating male and female voices. The theme of the people’s determined rebellion transforms into a grief-filled melody in the basses, expressing anguish and sorrow at Ivan’s illness. Ivan beseeches the boyars to recognize the young Dmitri as the legal heir to the throne, but the boyars refuse. The solemn chorus 'On the Bones of Enemies', sounding before final presentation of Ivan’s theme, calls for the unification of Russia against its foes.

Saturday 28 January 2012

Sergei Prokofiev and film director Sergei Eisenstein in 1931

6. Ocean-Sea (solo contralto and orchestra) Text by Vladimir Lugovskoy This song is sung to Ivan by his elderly nursemaid in the episode of his mother’s murder. It becomes the embodiment of Ivan’s dream to liberate the Russian lands and open the route to the Baltic Sea. For reasons that remain unclear, this episode and its music were not included in the film. Atovmyan (not Stasevich, as previously assumed) published this song in 1958, thereafter including it in the oratorio.

7. The Capture of Kazan (chorus and orchestra) The battle scene, representing the march of Moscow forces on Kazan, makes a harsh musical contrast between Russians and Tatars. The broad Russian theme frames the movement, appearing at the start in the violins and becoming, by the end, a choral hymn that glorifies the people (in the original score this theme is heard only in the orchestra). The imprisoned Tatars are denoted by the squealing oboe and piccolo clarinet against a backdrop of thudding timpani in strict tempo. The heroic song and stamping of the cannoneers, along with the lumbering theme in the lower registers of the orchestra (mimicking the laborious action of the cannons), culminate in the attack itself, represented by ostinato triplets in the brass.

8. Magnification (chorus and orchestra) Folk text The finale does not have a connection with the end of the film.

The oratorio concludes with a chorus of celebration for the bridegroom ('The Young Oaks are Standing on the Hill'), stylized along the lines of an authentic folksong. It becomes a grandiose hymn setting a patriotic text not in the original score: 'Magnificent Rus’, strengthened in battle, has gathered the Russian people as one. Glory, glory!' Adding these lyrics to the chorus here and in other movements increased the likelihood that the music for the banned film would receive permission for performance from 'above'. The oratorio concludes with Ivan the Terrible’s theme from the overture, rounding off the work.

Programme notes © Nelly Kravetz, English translation by Simon Morrison

Trapeze: A classical club night with music and dance A late-night collaboration between the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Rambert Dance Company and Nonclassical.

Prokofiev’s early ballet score Trapeze enjoys a fresh new interpretation as part of an hour-long classical club night curated by Gabriel Prokofiev’s Nonclassical. It is performed by young artists associated with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Rambert Dance Company: Foyle Future Firsts and Quicksilver.

Admission free and unticketed.

The Foyle Future Firsts are offered a range of opportunities to widen their experience and develop new skills throughout the year. This classical club night is a rare opportunity to work in collaboration with high-quality dancers, as well as experiencing Nonclassical’s definitive club night style. lpo.org.uk/education The Foyle Future Firsts Programme is generously funded by The Foyle Foundation with additional support from the Angus Allnatt Charitable Foundation, the Idlewild Trust, the Lord and Lady Lurgan Trust and the Musicians Benevolent Fund.

Quicksilver Rambert’s youth dance company is a group of talented young dancers aged 15–24 who focus on new contemporary works as well as learning Rambert repertoire. Previous performances have included the opening of the Eurostar from St Pancras International station; various dance platforms at the Lilian Baylis Studio and Sadler’s Wells; and performances at RichDance festival and Big Dance 2010. Quicksilver meet each Thursday between 6.30–8.00pm at the Rambert Studios in Chiswick, and more frequently leading up to performances. Classes are led by Rambert Animateur Laura Harvey. rambert.org.uk

Nonclassical Founded by composer Gabriel Prokofiev in 2003, Nonclassical is a club night currently held at Troy Bar in Shoreditch, East London, on the first Wednesday of every month. They also hold events through special invitation and partnerships at other venues across London.

Each club night presents classical music as if it were rock or electronic music. Innovative and virtuosic classical musicians perform through a pub PA, whilst DJs spin classical recordings with cutting-edge style.

Nonclassical’s audience represents a young generation of music lovers who are searching for the latest exciting developments in music. The message from the organisers is strong: classical music can be part of everyone’s lives and these nights are part of rediscovering its relevance. nonclassical.co.uk

Forthcoming events Thursday 5 April 2012 | Troy Bar, Shoreditch Nonclassical Club Night Foyle Future Firsts join Nonclassical at Troy Bar for their regular club night event. Expect exciting new music, talented contemporary DJs and a well-stocked bar.

Saturday 28 April 2012 | 6.00pm | Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall Foyle Future Firsts free pre-concert performance Thomas Blunt conducts the Foyle Future Firsts in UK premières of works by David Bruce and Luke Bedford before the evening's main concert.

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Wednesday 1 February 2012

Sergei Prokofiev Symphony No. 1 in D major (Classical) (1917)

7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

1 Allegro 2 Larghetto 3 Gavotte: Non troppo allegro 4 Finale: Molto vivace

– Prokofiev Symphony No. 1 in D major (Classical) (15') Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor (26') Interval Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major (46') – Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Janine Jansen violin – Performer biographies on pages 36–41.

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

6.00–6.45pm FREE pre-concert performance Royal Festival Hall

Prokofiev conceived his First Symphony in 1917 along selfconsciously 18th-century lines, purposefully blending classical and modern. ‘If Haydn had lived to our day,’ the composer imagined in his autobiography, ‘he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time.’

Yet the symphony was more than a tribute to the Enlightenment: as Russian musicologist Yuriy Kholopov has revealed, Prokofiev conceived the work in reaction to the failure of his 1909 Symphony in E minor, a Conservatoire project that he had hoped would garner praise from his teachers, but that instead earned sustained criticism for lapses in orchestration and style. Upset that his classmates, notably Nikolay Myaskovsky, had fared better with their diploma projects, Prokofiev vowed, several years later, to compose the work that he should have written in the first place. ‘Classical’ in this sense means ‘of the Conservatoire’.

The happily inspired work abounds with tongue-in-cheek distortions of Haydnesque norms that were meant, as Prokofiev put it, to ‘tease the geese’. The historical markers include a ‘Mannheim rocket’ opening theme, Alberti bass figuration, and a Gavotte; among the musical puns are out-of-sync contrapuntal writing, asymmetrical phrasing and unexpected modulations.

Haydn would have blushed, but Prokofiev’s ambition that his symphony would actually become ‘Classical’ – that is to say, canonic – came true almost immediately.

Next generation Prokofiev Over 100 young performers present their brand new work inspired by the music of Prokofiev, the culmination of a project between the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Southwark schools and the Southwark Youth Orchestra.

Free and unticketed – all welcome.

The Prokofiev Composition Project is supported by The Coutts Charitable Trust, The Peter Minet Trust and the Newcomen Collett Foundation.

Sergei Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor (1935) Janine Jansen violin 1 2 3

Allegro moderato Andante assai Allegro, ben marcato

Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto was composed for the French violinist Robert Soetens, who premièred the work in Spain – which helps explain the unusual inclusion of castanets in the third movement. The three movements of the Concerto were assembled in several cities, during a period in his career when Prokofiev earned the bulk of his income as a touring pianist.

He began the score in Paris, then took it to Voronezh and Baku before applying a final coat of polish on the eve of its première in Madrid. Its cosmopolitan genesis has not stopped writers from claiming that the melodies bear the direct and distinct influence of Russian folksong – something said of every Russian composer, whatever his or her knowledge of the supposed folk.

If the music of Prokofiev’s homeland somehow informed the score, then any such references are no less stylized than those to Brahms.

From start to finish, Prokofiev conceived the Concerto as an antivirtuosic exercise in audience-appealing melodicism. In the early 1930s, after he had come to the conclusion that his future as a composer lay not in France or the United States but the Soviet Union, Prokofiev relaxed his sound, draining dissonance from his scores and emphasising long-breathed melodies. He sought, in short, to produce works of sophisticated populism. Examples abound in this concerto, from the Allegro first movement,

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whose first theme arches from the lower through the middle ranges of the violin, to the mesmerising opening of the Andante second movement, which places the soloist in one metre (4/4) and the chamber-sized orchestra in another (12/8). For all the tunefulness, however, there is a peculiar emptiness to the sound, as though Prokofiev wanted to make the point that a concerto could be beautiful – and beautifully moving –without defaulting to the maudlin sentiment of the 19th-century repertoire. His is an air-conditioned riposte to the hothouse Romantic violin concerti – a kind of romanticism with modern musical conveniences. That Brahms’s Violin Concerto was in Prokofiev’s mind also explains the use of castanets in the Allegro finale: he was again ‘teasing the geese’, here mocking the gypsy dance that concludes Brahms’s score.

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

Sergei Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major (1944) 1 Andante 2 Allegro marcato 3 Adagio 4 Allegro giocoso Composed during the Soviet phase of the Second World War, Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony bears the imprint of official artistic doctrine, which stressed, in accord with the troubled times, themes of heroic sacrifice and triumph of the will. Unlike the ‘Classical’ Symphony and the Violin Concerto, the Fifth Symphony represents a monumental Soviet sound. It shows just how much Prokofiev was forced to change under Stalin: his music could no longer be capricious; now it had serious work to do in the service of the nation.

Prokofiev composed the Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1944 at the Union of Soviet Composers resort in Ivanovo, about seven hours east by train from Moscow. The resort, a former estate, provided its residents with housing, a meal hall, pianoequipped huts, and recreation in the form of volleyball and board games. (Livestock roamed the grounds; there survives a photograph of Dmitri Shostakovich and his daughter Galina fraternising with piglets.) In the company of generally supportive colleagues, Prokofiev completed the draft piano score of the Fifth Symphony in late August, then devoted an additional month to its orchestration. He consulted throughout the creative process with Dmitri Kabalevsky, a second-tier composer who occupied a high rank in the Union of Soviet Composers, recommending works for commission, performance and publication. To his delight, Prokofiev produced a score that alternated pastoral, ballroom and military tropes. Most important from an official standpoint, the Fifth Symphony could be interpreted as a parable about the war – before, during, and after – and seemed to convey the message that civilisation would thwart annihilation.

But the Symphony exceeded its wartime context. The melodic material for the first and fourth movements evolved over the course of 11 years in Prokofiev’s sketchbooks. Although these movements are cast in conventional forms (sonata allegro and ritornello, respectively), Prokofiev avoids traditional means of development. He subjects his melodies to expansion, extension and mutation within individual subsections of the forms.

Dislocation and unexpected modulation is the norm. The B-flat major opening theme of the first movement, a languid arioso in

three phrases, is thrice interrupted – by an E-flat minor chord, a dotted rhythmic figure evocative of a distant fanfare, and an ascending B-flat minor scale fragment. Here and elsewhere in the movement, the destabilising enrichment of the syntax has a dramatic purpose, lending the placid texture a strange feeling of disquiet.

And some of the music was recycled by Prokofiev from earlier scores that had nothing to do with war. The second movement revisits two sections of the original 1935 version of Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. (This version had a ‘happy’ ending, which was anathema to Soviet Shakespeare purists and prohibited from performance.) For its middle trio, Prokofiev wrote another waltz, whose disorienting, Spanish-style percussion recalls Ravel; the transition into and out of this waltz, moreover, features a shrill theme that recalls the music of Ravel’s would-be disciple George Gershwin. Excluding a bellicose fanfare motive, the movement maintains the character of a capricious digression.

The Adagio third movement opens with an elegiac waltz theme salvaged from Prokofiev’s score for an unrealized film adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s novella The Queen of Spades. In the middle section, a languid lament enters, with the asymmetrical accompaniment ceding to a bombastic, brass-and-percussionladen sequence. At the massive, violent climax, the lament is overtaken by a funeral march, after which the skewed dance pattern returns intact, ignorant, bearing no traces of trauma.

The fourth movement juxtaposes traces of the languid arioso of the first movement with an impish clarinet solo and a soaring hymn in the strings and brass. The composer conceived the discordant final bars as a celebratory jamboree. Those who admire the Fifth Symphony, but cannot countenance its Stalinist context, like to imagine that the music of the fourth movement is secretly subversive, as if the composer were thumbing his nose at the officials who oversaw his activities. Too bad that none of those officials – Kabalevsky included – heard it that way. And in fact Prokofiev received a coveted Stalin Prize for the Symphony, worth 100,000 roubles.

The composer conducted the première on 13 January 1945 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. The performance glorified him in the eyes of the critics and the public, and the Symphony became both a national and international success.

The pianist Svyatoslav Richter, who attended the première, sat in awe of the composer’s aura: ‘The hall was probably lit as usual, but when Prokofiev stood up, it seemed as though the light poured down on him from on high. He stood there, like a monument on a pedestal.’ As Prokofiev prepared to give the downbeat for the first movement, the concert’s host entered the stage to update the audience on the progress of the Red Army on its final march to Berlin. The music hung suspended as guns blasted in celebration in the distance. ‘There was something deeply significant, deeply symbolic in this,’ Richter recalled, ‘as if the movement marked a dividing line in the lives of everyone present, including Prokofiev himself.’ Just days later, on or around 20 January, Prokofiev tumbled from that metaphorical podium-cum-pedestal, collapsing and suffering a concussion in his apartment. He survived, but his health never recovered. The Fifth Symphony entered the canon of great wartime works, but the accolades that he received in the official Soviet press turned, after the war’s end, to censure. Prokofiev’s final years were difficult in the extreme. © Simon Morrison

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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 forwardlooking orchestras. As well as performing classical concerts, the Orchestra also records film and computer 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 has been headed by many of the great names in the conducting world, including Sir Adrian Boult, Bernard Haitink, Sir Georg Solti, Klaus Tennstedt and Kurt Masur. The current Principal Conductor is Russian Vladimir Jurowski, appointed in 2007, with French-Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin as Principal Guest Conductor.

The Orchestra is based at Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre, where it has performed since it opened in 1951 and been Resident Orchestra since 1992. It gives around 40 concerts there each season with many of the world’s top conductors and soloists. As well as the 'Prokofiev: Man of the People?' festival, concert highlights in 2011/12 include concerts with artists including Sir Mark Elder, Marin Alsop, Renée Fleming, Stephen Hough and Joshua Bell; and several premières of works by living composers including the Orchestra’s Composer in Residence, Julian Anderson.

In addition to its London concerts, the Orchestra has flourishing residencies in Brighton and Eastbourne, and performs regularly around the UK. Every summer, the Orchestra leaves London for four months and takes up its annual residency accompanying the famous Glyndebourne Festival Opera in the Sussex countryside, where it has been Resident Symphony Orchestra since 1964.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra tours internationally, performing to sell-out audiences worldwide. In 1956 it became the first British orchestra to appear in Soviet Russia and in 1973 made the first-ever visit to China by a Western orchestra. Touring remains a big part of the Orchestra’s life: tours in the 2011/12 season include visits to Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the US, Spain, China, Russia, Oman, Brazil and France.

You may well have heard the London Philharmonic Orchestra on film soundtrack recordings: it has recorded many blockbuster scores, from The Lord of the Rings trilogy to Lawrence of Arabia, The Mission, Philadelphia and East is East. The Orchestra also broadcasts regularly on television and radio, and in 2005 established its own record label. There are now over 50 releases on the label, which are available on CD and to download. Recent additions include Dvorˇák's Symphonic Variations and Symphony No. 8 conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras; Holst’s The Planets conducted by Vladimir Jurowski; Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 under Klaus Tennstedt; Shostakovich Piano Concertos with Martin Helmchen under Vladimir Jurowski; and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5, Pohjola’s Daughter and Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra under Jukka-Pekka Saraste. The Orchestra was also recently honoured with the commission to record all 205 of the world’s national anthems for the London 2012 Olympics Team Welcome Ceremonies and Medal Ceremonies.

To help maintain its high standards and diverse workload, the Orchestra is committed to the welfare of its musicians and in December 2007 received the Association of British Orchestras/ Musicians Benevolent Fund Healthy Orchestra Bronze Charter Mark.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra maintains an energetic programme of activities for young people and local communities.

Highlights include the ever-popular family and schools concerts, fusion ensemble The Band, the Leverhulme Young Composers project and the Foyle Future Firsts orchestral training scheme for outstanding young players. Over the last few years, developments in technology and social networks have enabled the Orchestra to reach even more people worldwide: all its recordings are available to download from iTunes and, as well as a YouTube channel, news blog, iPhone app and regular podcasts, the Orchestra has a thriving presence on Facebook and Twitter.

Find out more and get involved! lpo.org.uk facebook.com/londonphilharmonicorchestra twitter.com/LPOrchestra

London Philharmonic Orchestra members

Patron HRH The Duke of Kent KG Principal Conductor Vladimir Jurowski Supported by the Tsukanov Family

Principal Guest Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin Leader Pieter Schoeman Composer in Residence Julian Anderson

First Violins Pieter Schoeman* Leader Vesselin Gellev Sub-Leader Chair supported by John & Angela Kessler

Katalin Varnagy Catherine Craig Tina Gruenberg Martin Höhmann Chair supported by Richard Karl Goeltz

Geoffrey Lynn Robert Pool Yang Zhang Second Violins Clare Duckworth Co-Principal Chair supported by the Sharp Family

Jeongmin Kim Joseph Maher Kate Birchall

© Richard Cannon

Chair supported by David & Victoria Graham Fuller

34 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Cellos Kristina Blaumane Principal Susanne Beer Co-Principal Francis Bucknall Laura Donoghue Santiago Sabino Carvalho† Jonathan Ayling Chair supported by Caroline, Jamie & Zander Sharp

Gregory Walmsley Sue Sutherley Susanna Riddell Double Basses Kevin Rundell* Principal Tim Gibbs Co-Principal Laurence Lovelle George Peniston Richard Lewis Flutes Jaime Martin* Principal Susan Thomas Stewart McIlwham* Piccolo Stewart McIlwham* Principal Oboes lan Hardwick Principal Angela Tennick Sue Bohling Cor Anglais Sue Bohling Principal

Horns John Ryan Principal Martin Hobbs Mark Vines Co-Principal Gareth Mollison Trumpets Paul Beniston* Principal Anne McAneney* Chair supported by Geoff & Meg Mann

Nicholas Betts Co-Principal Daniel Newell Trombones Mark Templeton* Principal David Whitehouse Bass Trombone Lyndon Meredith Principal Tuba Lee Tsarmaklis* Principal Timpani Simon Carrington* Principal Percussion Andrew Barclay* Co-Principal Chair supported by Andrew Davenport

Keith Millar Harp Rachel Masters* Principal

Chair supported by Julian & Gill Simmonds

Clarinets Robert Hill* Principal Nicholas Carpenter* Paul Richards

Fiona Higham Nynke Hijlkema Marie-Anne Mairesse Ashley Stevens Andrew Thurgood

E-flat Clarinet Nicholas Carpenter* Principal

Violas Robert Duncan Gregory Aronovich Katharine Leek Susanne Martens Benedetto Pollani Emmanuella Reiter-Bootiman Laura Vallejo

Bassoons Gareth Newman* Sub-Principal Simon Estell

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

Bass Clarinet Paul Richards Principal

Contra-bassoon Simon Estell Principal

A complete list of the players on stage for each concert can be obtained free of charge from the programme sellers or the London Philharmonic Orchestra Information Desk on Level 2.

Pieter Schoeman Leader Pieter Schoeman joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra as Co-Leader in 2002, and was appointed Leader in 2008.

He studied with Jack de Wet in his native South Africa; with Eduard Schmieder in Los Angeles and with Sylvia Rosenberg in New York. In 1994 he became her teaching assistant at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Pieter has performed worldwide as a soloist and recitalist in such famous halls as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Moscow’s Rachmaninov Hall, Capella Hall in St Petersburg, Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. As a chamber musician he regularly performs at London’s prestigious Wigmore Hall.

As a soloist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Pieter has performed Arvo Pärt’s Double Concerto with Boris Garlitsky, Brahms’s Double Concerto with Kristina Blaumane, and Britten’s Double Concerto with Alexander Zemtsov. He has recorded numerous violin solos with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for Chandos, Opera Rara, Naxos, X5, the BBC and for American film and television, and led the Orchestra in its soundtrack recordings for The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In 1995 Pieter became Co-Leader of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice. Since then he has performed frequently as Guest Leader with leading symphony orchestras worldwide.

Pieter is a Professor of Violin at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 35

© Clive Barda

© Felix Broede

© Duncan Smith

© Janis Deinats

© Marco Borggreve

Artist biographies

Kristina Blaumane cello

Andrey Breus baritone

Simon Callow CBE narrator

Leon Fleisher piano

Danjulo Ishizaka cello

Alexander Ivashkin cello/speaker/conductor

Janine Jansen violin

Piers Lane piano

Kristina was born in Riga, Latvia. After graduating from the Latvian Academy of Music, she moved to England to study at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. She has won many competitions and awards including Latvian Philharmonic Young Musician of the Year, and has twice become a laureate of the Great Music Award – the highest music prize awarded by the Latvian State.

Born in Russia, Andrey Breus studied at the Russian Theatre Academy in Moscow and participated in masterclasses with Pavel Lisitsian. In 1995 he joined the Novaya Opera (New Opera) Theatre of Moscow, and has since been the principal baritone there. Since 1999 he has been a guest soloist with the Moscow Stanislavsky and NemirovichDanchenko Musical Theatre, and with the Bolshoi Theatre.

Simon Callow is an actor, author and director. He studied at Queen’s University, Belfast, before training as an actor at the Drama Centre in London.

He joined the National Theatre in 1979, where he created the role of Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.

Legendary pianist Leon Fleisher represents the gold standard of musicianship and continues to impart his artistry throughout the world, thriving in a sustained career as conductor, soloist, recitalist, chamber musician and masterclass mentor.

German-Japanese cellist Danjulo Ishizaka was born in 1979 and studied in Berlin with Boris Pergamenschikow. From 2006–08 he was a participant in the BBC New Generation Artists scheme.

As a soloist Alexander Ivashkin has performed in more than 40 countries and has appeared with the London, St Petersburg and Netherlands Philharmonic orchestras, as well as the Australian ABC orchestras, RAI Torino, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Hamburger Sinfoniker. He has recorded the complete cello works of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Schnittke, Kancheli, Roslavets and Tcherepnin.

Janine Jansen is internationally recognised as one of the great violinists and a truly exciting and versatile artist.

The 2011/12 season includes residencies at Wigmore Hall and with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. She will tour Asia with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Myung-Whun Chung, and Europe with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Antonio Pappano. She will also return to the Bavarian Radio Symphony, Dresden Staatskapelle, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Finnish Radio Symphony orchestras.

London-based Australian pianist Piers Lane enjoys a flourishing international career, which has taken him to more than 40 countries.

In 2011/12 he will perform at New York's Carnegie Hall and make his débuts with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in Prague and the La Verdi Orchestra in Milan. He will also appear with the Royal Philharmonic, Bournemouth Symphony and Melbourne Symphony orchestras, tour throughout the UK in solo and chamber concerts, and perform in New Zealand and India.

Kristina has given recitals and performed with orchestras throughout Europe including the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and Kremerata Baltica. She has also been a guest at major international festivals including Lockenhaus, Gstaad, Salzburg, Verbier, Basel, Jerusalem, Utrecht, Spitalfields, Cheltenham and Aldeburgh, as well as the Homecoming and Crescendo Festivals in Moscow. As a chamber musician she has played with artists including Isaac Stern, Gidon Kremer, Yo-Yo Ma, Yuri Bashmet, Leif Ove Andsnes, Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky, Nikolaj Znaider and Tatiana Grindenko.

In 2008 Kristina released her début recital CD with Russian pianist Jacob Katsnelson, featuring works by Barber, Grieg and Martinu˚.

Guest appearances include Il trovatore and The Barber of Seville in Frankfurt; Madame Butterfly in Washington and at Los Angeles Opera; The Queen of Spades in Bologna, Modena, Washington, Barcelona and Budapest; La traviata in Malmö, Boris Godunov at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and in Florence and Brussels; War and Peace at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, Andrea Chénier in concert at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw; Betrothal in a Monastery at Glyndebourne Festival Opera; and Luisa Miller in Stuttgart.

His repertoire also includes leading baritone roles in many operas by Verdi, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, Catalani, and many others.

She became Principal Cello of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2008.

36 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

He has appeared in many films and TV dramas, including A Room with a View, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, Phantom of the Opera and Dr Who. He directed Shirley Valentine in the West End and on Broadway, Single Spies at the National Theatre and Carmen Jones at the Old Vic, as well as the film of The Ballad of the Sad Café. His many one-man shows include The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Being Shakespeare and A Christmas Carol.

He has written acclaimed biographies of Oscar Wilde, Orson Welles and Charles Laughton; his autobiography, My Life in Pieces, recently won the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography.

His next book, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, appears in February 2012.

He made his début with the New York Philharmonic in 1944 and in 1952 became the first American to win the prestigious Queen Elisabeth of Belgium competition, establishing himself as one of the world’s foremost pianists and thereafter performing with every major orchestra as well as making numerous recordings for Columbia/Epic (now Sony).

Aged 36, at the height of his success, he was suddenly struck by focal dystonia, rendering two fingers on his right hand immobile. Rather than end his career, Fleisher began focusing on repertoire for the left hand only, forging a new path as a soloist, conductor and teacher.

Experimental treatments including Botox finally restored the mobility in his hand, and for years he has played with both hands, winning enormous acclaim for his 2004 recording titled Two Hands, and several subsequent recordings.

A recipient of numerous awards, Fleisher received the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors in 2007 for his contribution to US culture.

A winner of the Emanuel Feuermann Grand Prix and the ARD International Music competitions, Danjulo Ishizaka is a regular guest at international festivals including the Kronberg Cello, SchleswigHolstein, Rheingau, Jerusalem Chamber Music, Kissinger Summer and Salzburg Easter festivals. His touring activities have taken him to Europe, the USA, China, Russia and Japan.

He made his début at New York's Carnegie Hall in March 2006.

He has performed with many world-class artists including Gidon Kremer, Lisa Batiashvili and Viviane Hagner, as well as with renowned orchestras such as the Baltimore, Vienna and Bavarian Radio symphony orchestras.

Danjulo Ishizaka plays the 1696 ‘Lord Aylesford’ Stradivarius, on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation.

In 2011 he was appointed Professor of Cello at the Carl Maria von Weber University of Music in Dresden.

A Professor of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, Ivashkin is also Artistic Director of the Adam International Cello Festival and Competition, and the VTB Capital International Cello Competition. He is the dedicatee of many contemporary works and has collaborated with composers including John Cage, George Crumb, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, Giya Kancheli, Arvo Pärt, Rodion Shchedrin and James MacMillan.

Janine is also a devoted chamber musician. This season she will perform a chamber project including Schubert’s String Quintet and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht in addition to duo recitals in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Dortmund, Lyon and Eindhoven. She established and curates the annual International Chamber Music Festival in Utrecht, and since 1998 has performed at the Recent highlights have included Berlin Philharmonie’s Spectrum the world première of Brahms' Concerts series. Her chamber Cello Concerto in Hamburg and partners include Jean-Yves Moscow; performances of both Thibaudet, Mischa Maisky, Shostakovich's cello concertos Itamar Golan, Martin Fröst, in the USA, Gubaidulina's Khatia Buniatishvili, Leif Ove cello concertos in London, Andsnes and Torleif Thedéen.

Holland and Italy, Schumann's Cello Concerto in Holland and Janine Jansen plays the Russia; and a new version of ‘Barrere’ Stradivarius, on Penderecki's Largo under the extended loan from the Elise baton of the composer.

Mathilde Foundation.

Recent additions to his extensive discography include the Piano Quintets by Elgar, Bloch, Bridge and Dvorˇák, all with the Goldner String Quartet, and a disc with clarinettist Michael Collins.

Piers Lane is in great demand as a collaborative artist, and enjoys longstanding partnerships with violinist Tasmin Little and clarinettist Michael Collins. Tours in recent years have included performances with singers Cheryl Barker and Peter Coleman-Wright, and with violist/composer Brett Dean.

Piers Lane has been Artistic Director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music since 2007. He is also Artistic Director of the annual Myra Hess Day at the National Gallery in London.

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 37

© Bel Perez-Gabilondo

© Rose Daniel

© Eric Richmond

© Marco Borggreve

Artist biographies

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor

Steven Osborne piano

Ewa Podleš contralto

Miranda Richardson narrator

Joan Rodgers CBE soprano

Alexander Vedernikov conductor

Yannick Nézet-Séguin is Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Music Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Music Director Designate of The Philadelphia Orchestra (taking up the full title from 2012/13) and Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal.

Steven Osborne’s sensitive musicianship, exquisite tone and intellectual approach to both the music and his carefully crafted programmes have established him as one of Britain’s most highly respected pianists.

Endowed with a velvety timbre, dark colour and exceptionally wide vocal range, Warsawborn Ewa Podleš is considered one of the rare true contraltos of our time. Winner of many prestigious competitions including the Tchaikovsky International Competition, she studied at the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw.

British actress Miranda Richardson has enjoyed a career spanning over 30 years, during which she has been nominated for two Academy Awards, and has won two Golden Globes and a BAFTA.

Internationally renowned, Joan Rodgers is equally established in opera, concert, and as a recitalist. She has appeared with conductors including Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim, Zubin Mehta, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Sir Charles Mackerras, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Simon Rattle, and is a regular guest at the BBC Proms. Operatic engagements have included the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; English National Opera; Opera North; and Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and in Paris, Munich, Brussels, Amsterdam, Vienna and New York. She has also appeared in recital throughout Europe and the USA.

Alexander Vedernikov was Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Bolshoi Theatre from 2001–09, and has been credited with rebuilding the Bolshoi Theatre’s historical reputation for excellence. Under his direction, the orchestra of the Bolshoi toured extensively including at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where the orchestra was singled out for its exceptional playing.

He has conducted all the major Canadian orchestras and also appears regularly with the Dresden Staatskapelle, Orchestre National de France, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He has also conducted the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Bavarian Radio Symphony, Boston Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Zürich Tonhalle orchestras. A notable operatic conductor, Yannick has worked at the Metropolitan Opera, Netherlands Opera, Salzburg Festival, Teatro alla Scala and Opera de Montreal.

He débuts at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, in spring 2012.

Yannick trained at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec. His honours include a RPS Award and Canada’s National Arts Centre Award. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Quebec in Montreal in 2011.

He performs at major concert venues worldwide including the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Konzerthaus Berlin, Konzerthaus Vienna and Carnegie Hall in New York.

His concerts are frequently broadcast by the BBC and he performs every year at Wigmore Hall. He has made nine appearances at the BBC Proms, most recently in 2011 when he performed Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain. He has performed with many leading conductors and orchestras including the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, Deutsches Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin, Salzburg Mozarteum, and the Dallas Symphony and Finnish Radio Symphony orchestras.

Steven records for Hyperion and his CDs have collected numerous awards including five Gramophone Award nominations. In 2009 he won a Gramophone Award for his CD of the Britten Piano Concerto.

His latest release, Ravel’s complete music for solo piano, was shortlisted for a 2011 Gramophone Award.

38 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Her repertoire spans from Baroque to Penderecki, including Rossini’s bel canto; the dark heroines of Verdi and Strauss; and works

by Romantic and Russian composers. She has performed at the world's greatest opera houses including La Scala, Milan; the Metropolitan Opera, New York; Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris; Deutsche Oper, Berlin; Teatro del Liceo, Barcelona; and Teatro Real, Madrid. Since 1978 Ewa Podleš has been a principal soloist at the Grand Theatre National Opera in Warsaw.

An avid recitalist, she has made many successful appearances at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center; London’s Wigmore Hall; the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra.

A dozen of her numerous CD recordings have received prestigious prizes.

After studying at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Richardson enjoyed a successful theatre career, making her début in Moving at the Queen's Theatre in 1981. Soon afterwards, she found recognition in the West End, ultimately receiving an Olivier Award nomination for her performance in A Lie of the Mind. She returned to the London stage in May 2009 to play the lead role in Wallace Shawn's play Grasses of a Thousand Colours at the Royal Court Theatre.

Her recordings include

In 1985, Richardson made her film début as Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK, in Dance With A Stranger. Within a year, she had been cast by Steven Spielberg to appear in Empire of the Sun (1987). Recent film appearances include Rita Skeeter in Harry Potter and Barbara Castle in Made in Dagenham, as well as Sleepy Hollow, The Hours and Gideon's Daughter.

Mozart’s da Ponte trilogy with Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic; The Turn of the Screw; solo discs of Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Wolf; Haydn's The Creation; Rachmaninoff songs with Howard Shelley; Shostakovich's Seven Romances on Verses by Alexander Blok with the Beaux Arts Trio; and most recently, a recording of songs

by Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich and Britten.

She is well-known for her television roles as Bettina in Absolutely Fabulous and Queenie in Blackadder II, returning in guest roles in Blackadder the Third and Blackadder Goes Forth.

Joan Rodgers received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Liverpool University in July 2005. She was awarded the CBE in the 2001 New Year Honours List.

As well as in Russia, Alexander performs extensively worldwide.

Recent engagements have included the Bavarian Radio Symphony, NHK Symphony and China Philharmonic orchestras. In 2009 he became Chief Conductor of the Odense Orchestra in Denmark.

Highlights of 2011/12 include débuts with the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Bournemouth Symphony orchestras, and performances with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Gothenburg Symphony and Czech Philharmonic orchestras.

Alexander Vedernikov is a frequent conductor at Berlin’s Komische Oper, and has also worked throughout Italy at La Scala Milan, La Fenice, the Teatro Comunale Bologna, the Teatro Reggio Turin, and Rome Opera. He recently made his début at the Finnish National Opera and in 2012/13 makes début at the Zurich Opera, followed by New York's Metropolitan Opera in 2013/14.

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 39

© GreenEgg Ltd

London Philharmonic Choir

PATRON HRH Princess Alexandra PRESIDENT Sir Roger Norrington ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Neville Creed ACCOMPANIST Jonathan Beatty CHAIRMAN Mary Moore CHOIR MANAGER Kevin Darnell Founded in 1947, the London Philharmonic Choir is widely regarded as one of Britain’s finest choirs, consistently meeting with great critical acclaim. It has performed under leading international conductors throughout its history and made numerous recordings for CD, radio and television. Its Artistic Director is Neville Creed.

Enjoying a close relationship with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Choir frequently joins it for concerts in the UK and abroad. In 2010/11, engagements included Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 and Das klagende Lied, Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, Dvorˇák’s Te Deum and Stabat Mater, Fauré’s Requiem, Holst’s The Planets and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. This season, concerts with the LPO include Scriabin’s Prometheus, Poem of Fire, Rossini's Stabat Mater, Bruckner’s Te Deum, Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 3, Zemlinsky’s Psalm 23, Delius’s Sea Drift and Suk’s The Ripening.

Recently released CDs with the London Philharmonic Orchestra include Dvorˇák’s Requiem conducted by Neeme Järvi, Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Holst’s The Planets, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross under Vladimir Jurowski.

Appearing regularly at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, the Choir’s performances have included Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, Rachmaninoff’s The Bells and the UK premières of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s A Relic of Memory and Goldie’s Sine Tempore in the Evolution! Prom. The Choir performed at the Doctor Who Proms in 2008 and 2010, and in 2011 appeared in Verdi’s Requiem, Liszt’s A Faust Symphony and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

The Choir works with other leading orchestras, has visited numerous European countries and performed in Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Perth, Australia. Last May it joined forces with the London Symphony Chorus to perform Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrew Litton at the Royal Festival Hall, and in December sang Messiah with the Mozart Festival Orchestra under Oliver Gooch.

The Choir also sings in Raymond Gubbay’s Classical Spectacular, Organ Gala and Christmas Classics concerts.

The London Philharmonic Choir prides itself on achieving first-class performances from its members, who are volunteers from all walks of life. For more information, including details about how to join, please visit lpc.org.uk 40 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

Sopranos Annette Argent, Clare Brady, Charlotte Cantrell, Harriet Carey, Olivia Carter, Paula Chessell, Alana Clark, Emily Clarke, Sally Cottam, Sheila Cox, Sarah Deane-Cutler, Timotia Devi, Lucy Doig, Sally Donegani, Astrid Dupuis, Alison Flood, Lauren Fowler, Claudie Gheno, Rachel Gibbon, Elisabeth Giselbrecht, Emily Grey, Jane Hanson, Sally Harrison, Carolyn Hayman, Elizabeth Hicks, Laura Hunt, Georgina Kaim, Mai Kikkawa, Jenni Kilvert, Olivia Knibbs, Ilona Kratochvilova, Frances Lake, Suzannah Lipmann, Clare Lovett, Janey Maxwell, Katie Milton, Alexia Prakas, Diana Richards, Rebecca Schendel, Victoria Smith, Claire Spencer, Tania Stanier, Rachael Stokes, Louisa Sullivan, Tracey Szwagrzak, Susan Thomas, Nicola Ward, Frances Wheare Altos Joanna Arnold, Phye Bell, Susannah Bellingham, Sally Brien, Alexis Calice, Isobel Chester, Noel Chow, Yvonne Cohen, Liz Cole, Alice Conway, Joanna Corr, Janik Dale, Margaret de Valois Rowney, Margaret Driver, Moira Duckworth, Fiona Duffy-Farrell, Andrea Easey, Lynn Eaton, Regina Frank, Kathryn Gilfoy, Sophy Holland, Katy Jones-Pritchard, Claire Lawrence, Lisa MacDonald, Laetitia Malan, Mary Moore, Marjana Morrison, Rachel Murray, Raluca Negriuc, Angela Pascoe, Helene Richards, Jenny Ryall, Carolyn Saunders, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Catherine Travers, Susi Underwood, Jenny Watson, Suzanne Weaver, Chloë White Tenors Scott Addison, David Aldred, Geir Andreassen, Nicholas Arratoon, Simon Best, Chris Beynon, Tom Cameron, Lorne Cuthbert, Kevin Darnell, Aloysius Fekete, Colin Fleming, Sipan Hakobyan, Josh Haley, Iain Handyside, Stephen Hodges, Geoff Hodgkins, Rob Home, Patrick Hughes, Rhydian Peters, Miles Philips, Luke Phillips, Tony Wren Basses Jonathon Bird, Gordon Buky-Webster, Geoff Clare, David Clark, Rob Collis, Phillip Dangerfield, Marcus Daniels, Ian Frost, Nigel Grieve, Mark Hillier, Stephen Hines, David Hodgson, Rylan Holey, Martin Hudson, Aidan Jones, Steve Kirby, John Luff, John Morris, Ashley Morrison, William Parsons, Sheevam Pattni, Johan Pieters, Tony Piper, David Regan, Fraser Riddell, John Salmon, Peter Sollich, Peter Taylor, Alex Thomas, Hin-Yan Wong, John Wood

The Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra regularly plays with conductors and musicians of international stature performing a wide range of repertoire. Over the past few years, the Royal College of Music has forged close relationships with conductors and musicians including Bernard Haitink (Eine Alpensinfonie, February 2011), Vladimir Ashkenazy (Brahms Symphony No. 1, October 2010), Sir Roger Norrington (Brahms Symphony No. 2, July 2010), Gordan Nikolitch (Beethoven Symphony No. 2, January 2009) and Esa-Pekka Salonen (Mahler Symphony No. 9, June 2009). Their willingness to return is evidence of the consistently high standard of playing the RCM orchestral musicians achieve. Future projects include a performance of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 conducted by Bernard Haitink in June 2012.

First Violins Galya Bisengalieva Principal Jens Lynen Joo Yeon Sir Wonhyee Bae Anna Blackmur* Joseph Devalle Aiko Kojima Josephine Robertson Douglas Harrison Olivia Scheepers Rachel Gorman Selena Choi Oscar Perks Jeffrey Sit Katherine Sullivan Javier Garcia Aranda Second Violins Alessandro Ruisi Principal Brigid Coleridge Shaun Ho Yeil Ko Amy Tress Agnes Daniel Kaya Kuwabara Francina Moll Salord Anne Kim Tim Wright Radu Ropotan Ingrid Clement Colette Overdijk Violas Nina Poskin Principal Duncan Anderson Emma Fetherston* Anna Growns Shiry Rashkovsky Lidia Palomo Felicity Matthews Patrick McEntee Natasha Silver Liam Brolly Jennifer MacCallum Brian Jankanish

Cellos Jane Lindsay Principal Domitille Jordan Anne Chauveau Solène Chevalier Clio Erte Feargus Egan Eun Cho Romain Malan Willemijn Knodler Sarah Joyce Double Basses David McIlfatrick Principal Frances Emery Margarida Castro James Kenny Bruno Oliveira Carneiro David Johnson Jonathan Brewer Antonio Romerocienfuegos Flute/Piccolo Alex Leese Principal Philippa Mercer Kelsey Seymour Oboe/Cor Anglais John Roberts Principal Lydia Griffiths Daniel Finney* Clarinet/E-flat Clarinet/ Bass Clarinet James Maltby Principal Eunji Nam Alex Cattell Jessamy Holder Saxophones Amy Green Principal Eleanor McMurray Ruth Hayes Bassoon/Contra-bassoon Frederick Scadding* Principal Nina Ashton Carrie To

Horns James Pillai Principal Magdalena Was Vittorio Ferrari Daniel Kitchens Matthew Kibble Lorenzo Bassano Mark Billingsley Trumpets Sam Kinrade Principal Alberto Mastrocostas Charlotte Buchanan Kirby Haughland Trombones Katherine Hart Principal Andrew Groom Martyn Hunter Tubas Elliot Launn William Roberts Stephen Calow Timpani Toby Kearney Percussion Joseph Richards Principal Ruairi Glasheen William Edwards Jack Fawcett Daniel Day Samuel Hoile Peter Handley Harps Martino Panizza Principal Cecilia Sultana de Maria Sylvana Labeyrie Melissa Parmar Bethan Semmens Helena Pearson Emma Spandrzyk Isabella-Maria Asbjornsen Celeste Ziliang Song Pianos Gamal Khamis Principal Katherine Tinker Pedro Gomes Oliver Poole Jennifer Hughes

Sopranos Jay Britton Ji Won Chung Josephine Goddard Emily Jennings Stephanie Jennings-Adams Erin McHugh Anna Migallos Rowan Pierce Victoria Pym Joana Songi Altos Katherine Aitken Rosemarie Braddy Vivien Conacher Rachael Cox Victoria Gray Katheryn Garden Fiona MacKenzie Felicity Smith Laura Wright * Recipient of Leverhulme Orchestral Mentorship Award.

Personnel correct at the time of going to print.

The RCM would like to thank the following orchestral and chorus coaches: Tom Dunn viola Jennie Brown cello Tim Gibbs double bass Stewart McIlwham woodwind John Ryan horn Mark Templeton brass Robin O’Neill woodwind, brass, percussion & tutti Rachel Masters harp Dina Parakhina piano Tom Blunt tutti Stephen Johns chorus Sergey Rybin language coach & rehearsal pianist

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 41

Future London Philharmonic Orchestra concerts

Supporters

Saturday 4 February 2012 | 7.30pm

Wednesday 22 February 2012 | 7.30pm

Bruckner Christus factus est Bruckner Symphony No. 9 Bruckner Te Deum

Mozart Symphony No. 32 Brahms Violin Concerto Zemlinsky Psalm 23, Op. 14 Szymanowski Symphony No. 3 (The Song of the Night)

We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the following Thomas Beecham Group Patrons, Principal Benefactors and Benefactors:

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conductor Christine Brewer soprano Mihoko Fujimura mezzo soprano Toby Spence tenor Franz-Josef Selig bass London Philharmonic Choir

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Joshua Bell violin Jeremy Ovenden tenor London Philharmonic Choir

FREE Barlines post-concert event Level 2 Central Bar, Royal Festival Hall An informal discussion with Yannick Nézet-Séguin following the evening’s performance.

Wednesday 8 February 2012 | 7.30pm

The Sharp Family Julian & Gill Simmonds

Concert generously supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music grant programme.

6.15–6.45pm FREE pre-concert event Royal Festival Hall Dr Stephen Downes, Reader in Musicology at the University of Surrey, discusses the music of Szymanowski and Zemlinsky.

MartinU˚ Symphony No. 6 (Fantaisies symphoniques) Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1* Liszt Piano Concerto No. 2* DvoRˇák Symphony No. 8

Saturday 24 March 2012 | 7.30pm

Marin Alsop conductor Stephen Hough piano

Sir Mark Elder conductor Roderick Williams baritone London Philharmonic Choir

* Supported by Dunard Fund.

6.15–6.45pm FREE pre-concert event Royal Festival Hall A discussion of the symphonies of Bohuslav Martinu˚ with Marin Alsop.

Julian Anderson The Discovery of Heaven* (world première) Delius Sea Drift** Elgar Symphony No. 1

* Commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with kind support from The Boltini Trust and the Britten-Pears Foundation, and the New York Philharmonic (Alan Gilbert, Music Director). ** Performance generously supported by The Delius Trust.

FREE Barlines post-concert event Level 2 Central Bar, Royal Festival Hall Sir Mark Elder and Julian Anderson discuss his new work, The Discovery of Heaven.

Marin Alsop and Stephen Hough

Friday 10 February 2012 | 7.30pm JTI Friday Series

Sir Mark Elder and Roderick Williams

Kodály Concerto for Orchestra Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1* DvoRˇák Symphony No. 7 Marin Alsop conductor Lukáš Vondrácˇek piano * Supported by Dunard Fund.

Tuesday 14 & Friday 17 February 2012 | 7.30pm JTI Friday Series (17 February) Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2* Kreisler (arr. Rachmaninoff/orch. Leytush) Liebesleid Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 Neeme Järvi conductor Boris Giltburg piano * Supported by Dunard Fund.

In co-operation with the Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation.

42 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Thomas Beecham Group The Tsukanov Family Anonymous

Booking details Tickets £9–£39 (Premium seats £65) London Philharmonic Orchestra Box Office 020 7840 4242 Monday to Friday 10.00am–5.00pm lpo.org.uk (no transaction fee) Southbank Centre Ticket Office 0844 847 9920 Daily 9.00am–8.00pm southbankcentre.co.uk (transaction fees apply) In person at Royal Festival Hall Box Office Daily 10.00am–8.00pm (no transaction fee)

Garf & Gill Collins Andrew Davenport David & Victoria Graham Fuller Richard Karl Goeltz John & Angela Kessler Mr & Mrs Makharinsky Geoff & Meg Mann Caroline, Jamie & Zander Sharp Eric Tomsett Mrs Sonja Drexler Guy & Utti Whittaker 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 & Mrs Jeffrey Herrmann Peter MacDonald Eggers Mr & Mrs David Malpas Andrew T Mills 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 Howard & Sheelagh Watson Mr Laurie Watt Mr Anthony Yolland

Michael & Christine Henry 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 John Montgomery Edmund Pirouet Mr Peter Tausig Mrs Kazue Turner Lady Marina Vaizey Mr D Whitelock Bill Yoe

Benefactors Mrs A Beare Dr & Mrs Alan Carrington CBE FRS Mr & Mrs Stewart Cohen Mr Alistair Corbett Mr David Edgecombe Mr Richard Fernyhough Ken Follett Pauline & Peter Halliday

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 Appleyard & Trew LLP AREVA UK Berkeley Law British American Business Charles Russell Destination Québec – UK Lazard Leventis Overseas Man Group plc Corporate Donor Lombard Street Research In-kind Sponsors Google Inc Heineken Lindt & Sprüngli Ltd Sela / Tilley’s Sweets Villa Maria

Trusts and Foundations Arts and Business Allianz Cultural Foundation Angus Allnatt Charitable Foundation The Boltini Trust Britten-Pears Foundation The Candide Charitable Trust The Coutts Charitable Trust The Delius Trust Dunard Fund The Equitable Charitable Trust The Eranda Foundation The Fenton Arts Trust The Foyle Foundation The Jeniffer and Jonathan Harris Charitable Trust Hattori Foundation for Music and the Arts Capital Radio’s Help a London Child The Hobson Charity The Kirby Laing Foundation The Idlewild Trust The Leverhulme Trust Lord and Lady Lurgan Trust Maurice Marks Charitable Trust

Marsh Christian Trust The Mercers’ Company Adam Mickiewicz Institute The Peter Minet Trust Paul Morgan Charitable Trust Maxwell Morrison Charitable Trust Musicians Benevolent Fund Newcomen Collett Foundation The Austin & Hope Pilkington Trust The Serge Prokofiev Foundation Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation The Reed Foundation The Seary Charitable Trust The Samuel Sebba Charitable Trust The David Solomons Charitable Trust The Steel Charitable Trust The Stansfield Trust The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation The Swan Trust John Thaw Foundation The Thistle Trust The Underwood Trust Garfield Weston Foundation Youth Music and others who wish to remain anonymous

London Philharmonic Orchestra | 43

London Philharmonic Orchestra Administration

Board of Directors

General Administration

Education & Community

Martin Höhmann Chair Stewart McIlwham Vice-Chair Sue Bohling Lord Currie* Jonathan Dawson* Gareth Newman George Peniston Sir Bernard Rix* Kevin Rundell Sir Philip Thomas* Timothy Walker AM†

Timothy Walker AM Chief Executive and Artistic Director

Patrick Bailey Education and Community Director

Alison Atkinson Digital Projects Manager

Anne Findlay Education Manager

Finance

Caz Vale Community and Young Talent Manager

*Non-Executive Directors

The London Philharmonic Trust Victoria Sharp Chair Desmond Cecil CMG Jonathan Harris CBE FRICS Dr Catherine C. Høgel Martin Höhmann Angela Kessler Clive Marks OBE FCA Julian Simmonds Timothy Walker AM† Laurence Watt American Friends of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Inc. We are very grateful to the Board of the American Friends of the London Philharmonic Orchestra for its support of the Orchestra’s activities in the USA.

†

David Burke General Manager and Finance Director David Greenslade Finance and IT Manager Concert Management Roanna Gibson Concerts Director Ruth Sansom Artistic Administrator Graham Wood Concerts, Recordings and Glyndebourne Manager Alison Jones Concerts Co-ordinator Jenny Chadwick Tours and Engagements Manager Jo Orr PA to the Executive / Concerts Assistant Matthew Freeman Recordings Consultant

Professional Services Charles Russell Solicitors Crowe Clark Whitehill LLP Auditors Dr Louise Miller Honorary Doctor

Marketing Kath Trout Marketing Director Ellie Dragonetti Marketing Manager Rachel Fryer Publications Manager Helen Boddy Marketing Co-ordinator Samantha Kendall Box Office Manager (Tel: 020 7840 4242) John Barnett Intern Valerie Barber Press Consultant (Tel: 020 7586 8560)

44 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

Richard Mallett Education and Community Producer

London Philharmonic Orchestra 89 Albert Embankment London SE1 7TP Tel: 020 7840 4200 Fax: 020 7840 4201 Box Office: 020 7840 4242 lpo.org.uk The London Philharmonic Orchestra Limited is a registered charity No. 238045.

Orchestra Personnel Andrew Chenery Orchestra Personnel Manager Sarah Thomas Librarian Michael Pattison Stage Manager Julia Boon Assistant Orchestra Personnel Manager Ken Graham Trucking Instrument Transportation (Tel: 01737 373305) Development Nick Jackman Development Director Harriet Mesher Charitable Giving Manager Alexandra Rowlands Corporate Relations Manager Melissa Van Emden Events Manager Laura Luckhurst Corporate Relations and Events Officer Elisenda Ayats Development and Finance Officer Archives Philip Stuart Discographer Gillian Pole Recordings Archive

Printed by Cantate.

Cover design by Roundel.

Prokofiev front cover imagery: The Serge Prokofiev Estate. †

Supported by Macquarie Group