Sunday 22 April 2018 7–9.25pm Barbican Hall

LSO SEASON CONCERT TIPPETT & MAHLER

Tippett The Rose Lake * Interval Mahler comp Cooke Symphony No 10

Sir Simon Rattle conductor

* Supported by Resonate, a PRS Foundation

initiative in partnership with the Association of

British Orchestras, BBC Radio 3 and The Boltini Trust

Streamed live on YouTube and recorded for

broadcast on Monday 23 April on BBC Radio 3

RATTLE

2 Welcome

Welcome

It has been a long-term project for the LSO and Sir Simon Rattle to revive Tippett’s final masterpiece, and it is thanks to Resonate, a PRS Foundation initiative in partnership with the Association of British Orchestras, BBC Radio 3 and The Boltini Trust, that this performance has been possible.

Today we hosted a Discovery Day focused on Tippett at the Barbican and LSO St Luke’s, with an open rehearsal, chamber music and talks. A warm welcome to attendees who join us in the audience this evening.

As well as being recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, tonight’s performance is also being streamed live on the LSO’s YouTube channel, and will be available to watch again for 90 days.

I hope that you enjoy tonight’s concert and that you can join us again soon. On 17 and 20 May the LSO’s Conductor Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Sibelius and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director

Welcome to tonight’s concert, as the LSO’s Music Director Sir Simon Rattle guides us through the final works of two great composers – Sir Michael Tippett and Gustav Mahler. This season we have explored the late works that Mahler never heard in his lifetime, from Das Lied von der Erde to the Ninth Symphony. We finally arrive at the composer’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, published posthumously in a ‘performing version’ by Deryck Cooke in the 1960s.

Tonight’s performance of The Rose Lake is a very special occasion for the Orchestra. The piece was originally commissioned by the LSO to mark Tippett’s 90th birthday, and it is fitting that we will hear it exactly 25 years after it was completed, on 22 April 1993. The work was premiered at the Barbican in February 1995, and was last conducted here with the LSO in 2005.

22 April 2018

Read our news, watch videos and more • lso.co.uk/news • youtube.com/lso • lso.co.uk/blog

OnlineLSO NewsTHE LSO’S 2018/19 SEASON

The LSO’s 2018/19 season is now on sale. Highlights include Music Director Sir Simon Rattle’s exploration of folk-inspired music in his series Roots and Origins; the continuation of Gianandrea Noseda’s Shostakovich cycle; Artist Portraits with soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan and pianist Daniil Trifonov; and seven world premieres across the season. Full listings are available at lso.co.uk/201819season.

BMW CLASSICS IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE

The LSO and Sir Simon Rattle will perform a free open-air concert in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 1 July, alongside 50 young musicians from the LSO On Track programme and musicians from the Guildhall School. Visit lso.co.uk/bmwclassics for details.

STOCKHAUSEN AT TATE MODERN On Saturday 30 June the LSO and Sir Simon Rattle will bring Stockhausen’s orchestral masterpiece Gruppen to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Tickets go on sale at 10am on Monday 23 April. Visit lso.co.uk/tate for full details.

LIVE STREAMS

Tonight’s concert will be broadcast live on the LSO’s YouTube channel, and will also be available to watch back in full for 90 days. Visit youtube.com/lso for more. Our next live stream will take place on Sunday 24 June 2018 at 7pm, as the LSO’s Principal Guest Conductor Gianandrea Noseda conducts Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10 and Violin Concerto No 1, with soloist Nicola Benedetti, live from the Barbican Hall.

WELCOME TO THE NEW MEMBERS OF THE VIOLA SECTION

On Monday 16 April we welcomed two new Members to the LSO, Steve Doman and Carol Ella, both joining the Viola section. Find out more on our blog.

3Tonight'sConcert

Tonight’s Concert / by Oliver Soden

onight’s is a concert of last works and incomplete manuscripts. Mahler, suffering from a defective

heart valve, knew he might not live to complete his Tenth Symphony, and didn’t. Tippett, beginning The Rose Lake at the age of 86, knew he might not finish his ‘song without words for orchestra’, but did.

Mahler’s work, left unfinished and heard tonight in Deryck Cooke’s performing version, was composed in the knowledge that his wife, Alma, had been unfaithful. Its score is annotated with anguish: ‘To live for you! To die for you!’ the composer wrote on the final page of the final movement. Tippett, seeking with The Rose Lake to capture in sound the effect of light playing on the pink waters of an African lake, was suffering from near blindness. At some parts of the manuscript his swollen handwriting gives out altogether, and, depressed and exhausted, he was at the mercy of dictation and amanuenses. The piece that resulted is one of joy and sunlight, with little or no Mahlerian anguish, and a chirruping, cheeky coda that punctures the reverie.

Why programme the works together? ‘Wisdom. Colour.’ replies Simon Rattle.

Coming UpSunday 3 June 2018 7pm Barbican Hall PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Ravel Rhapsodie espagnole Beethoven Piano Concerto No 3 MussorgskyarrRavel Pictures at an Exhibition

Gianandrea Noseda conductor YefimBronfmanpiano

Recommended by Classic FM

Sunday 24 June 2018 7pm Barbican Hall SHOSTAKOVICH

Shostakovich Violin Concerto No 1 Shostakovich Symphony No 10

Gianandrea Noseda conductor Nicola Benedetti violin

Generously supported by Reignwood

‘I think the minute you hear The Rose Lake and you hear the finale of the Tenth you’ll know what I was after – both of them, they’re in some kind of transcendent region that only comes to people near the end of the journey. It’s as simple as that.’

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITERS

Oliver Soden is a writer and broadcaster on music and the arts. His work includes an edition of John Barton’s ten-play epic Tantalus; articles in publications such as Gramophone and The Guardian; and a number of appearances on BBC Radio. His biography of Michael Tippett will be published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2019.

Stephen Johnson is the author of Bruckner Remembered. He contributes regularly to BBC Music Magazine and The Guardian, and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service.

Andrew Stewart is a freelance music journalist and writer. He is the author of The LSO at 90, and contributes to a wide variety of specialist classical music publications.

Thursday 17 May 2018 7.30pm Barbican Hall

MTT & JANINE JANSEN

Sibelius Violin Concerto Sibelius Symphonies Nos 6 & 7

Michael Tilson Thomas conductor Janine Jansen violin

Recommended by Classic FM

Sunday 20 May 2018 7pm Barbican Hall

MISSA SOLEMNIS

Beethoven Missa Solemnis

Michael Tilson Thomas conductor

CamillaTillingsoprano

Sasha Cooke mezzo-soprano

Toby Spence tenor

Luca Pisaroni bass-baritone

London Symphony Chorus

Simon Halsey chorus director

Generously supported by The Atkin Foundation

4 ProgrammeNotes 22 April 2018

Michael Tippett The Rose Lake, a song without words for orchestra 1991–3 / note by Oliver Soden

extensive battery of percussion, including two tam-tams, a gong and tubular bells. The horn section is augmented to six players. And most clear to an audience at a live performance is the array of rototoms: drums tuned to a specific pitch by rotating the head. Invented in the late 60s, less cumbersome and with a lighter sound than timpani, they were soon beloved of pop groups such as Pink Floyd. Tippett had used rototoms before, in his large-scale setting of Yeats’ Byzantium (1988–90), but they are more prominent in The Rose Lake, which calls for three octaves, no fewer than 38 individual drums, spread one-to-a-note like a gigantic keyboard across the back of the stage. The rototom part, one of the most difficult and extensive in the instrument’s repertoire, takes no prisoners, requiring the players literally to sprint back and forth along the drums, mallets flashing.

Studded through The Rose Lake are five Lake Songs, rapturously lyrical, densely but somehow translucently orchestrated. They are also developmental, each song a variation reflecting and refracting motifs from the first: a yearning major ninth, first rising and then setting; a curl of notes introduced during a Wagnerian passage for the horns above a deep-sea drone of E-flat (the first note of The Ring), as if

mediumfast– The Lake begins to sing: slow – fast– The Lake Song is echoed from the sky: slow – fast–mediumslow– The Lake is in full song: slow – mediumslow-mediumfast–mediumslow– The Lake Song leaves the sky: slow – fast– The Lake sings itself to sleep: medium slow – mediumfast

n Senegal, north-west Africa, a little way north-east of the capital, Dakar, there is a pink lake,

separated from the Atlantic ocean only by a narrow line of sand dunes. Lake Retba, as it is called, contains an algae (dunaliella salina) that produces a red pigment able to absorb light. Catch the lake in bright sunshine, as Michael Tippett did in November 1990 •, two months before his 86th birthday, and its waters shine an eerie, dusty pink.

Tippett, by then acclaimed as one of the country’s leading composers and enjoying an Indian summer of astonishing creativity, had promised Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra a piece of some kind for his 90th birthday celebrations.

Standing by Lake Retba, he began to imagine The Rose Lake. ‘A song without words for orchestra’, it would be nothing so crude as a sonic depiction of the lake, but an attempt to capture in music the dappled interplay between water and light and colour, and to chart a progression from dawn to dusk.

Composition did not begin until August 1991. Macular degeneration and cataracts had made Tippett almost blind. The first seven minutes of the work took him around eight months, and he suffered badly from exhaustion and depression. He struggled on, but eventually his loyal assistant and near namesake, Michael Tillett •, was called in to sit by him at the piano and take dictation. Tippett regained enough strength to finish The Rose Lake, in his own hand, on 22 April 1993.

The score is, on any terms, one of fertile imagination and exquisite detail. Knowledge of its compositional circumstances makes it

seem a remarkable, perhaps unprecedented, achievement. Physical difficulties had not hampered Tippett’s creative power, nor his determination to explore new worlds with each passing piece. A 60-year career had seen his music shift from verdant lyricism to fragmented violence and back again.

Listeners cannot help but hear The Rose Lake as a swansong, and Tippett himself knew it would be his last major work. But in many ways the piece is more questing than valedictory, and although it has a rich, twilit beauty, it uses techniques and instruments that added new colours to its composer’s palette. The summation of Tippett’s return in old age to the lyricism of his earlier works, The Rose Lake nevertheless has its own climate.

The piece requires a large orchestra, rarely heard all together, but divided into soloists and chamber ensembles. There is an

— ‘I reached Lake Retba at midday, just in time to see it turn a marvellous transluscent pink. The sight of it triggered a profound disturbance in me:

the sort of disturbance which told me that the new orchestral work had begun.’ —

Michael Tippett on his experiences of Lake Retba in Senegal

5ProgrammeNotes

Retba had merged with the Rhine. Floating at the centre of The Rose Lake comes ‘The Lake in full song’, with flocks of strings ducking and diving in joyous flight, lit by a midday glare of brass.

The five songs are inlaid into a backdrop mosaic of contrasting musical tiles, resulting in patchwork interludes that dart around the orchestra between the five pools of song. Highly contrasted with the songs, the interludes lay out undeveloping blocks of sound in spare and imaginative combinations of instruments, occasionally quoting from Tippett’s earlier pieces, as in a thick swirl of eleven-part strings from his opera King Priam (1958–61). The songs make use of canonic imitation, with one instrument mirroring or echoing the other. The interludes are fascinated with heterophony: two instruments play the same line simultaneously, and while one keeps to the melody, the other washes it in ripples of decoration.

The five songs and five interludes are book-ended by an introduction and a coda. Tippett, in his late music, was eager always to snap listeners out of their reverie. The Rose Lake doesn’t rage against the dying of the light, but nor does it go gently. Its wispy coda, using flotsam from the introduction,

begins with trickles of harp that suddenly dissolve into woodwind chirrup. A final watery hiccup from the brass is marked in the score not with a bang but a ‘plop’.

The premiere of The Rose Lake, on 19 February 1995, was part of an LSO season entitled Tippett: Visions of Paradise. As the applause began, and a frail Tippett, now 90, was helped on to the platform, a band of musicians knows as ‘The Hecklers’, who were at the time protesting against the supposed cacophany of contemporary music, began to shout and catcall: ‘Visions of hell!’ The Hecklers were, claimed their leader, ‘booing for beauty’. With The Rose Lake, the joke was on them. •

Tonight’s performance of The Rose Lake is supported by Resonate, a PRS Foundation initiative in partnership with the Association of British Orchestras, BBC Radio 3 and The Boltini Trust.

• TIPPETT THE TRAVELLER

Tippett’s parents moved to Europe when he was 15, and he and his brother would visit them unaccompanied during the school holidays. These early experiences generated a taste for travel that would remain with Tippett throughout his life, and he frequently embarked on holidays which would influence his compositions. After being asked to serve as composer in residence at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado in 1965, Tippett made regular journeys to the US, which would bring jazz and blues influences into his work. The composer explained how themes in his large-scale choral work The Mask of Time (1980-2) were influenced by ‘places like Chitzen Itza and Uxmal, which I visited in Mexico around the time of composing the work’. He travelled until the very end of his life, visiting Sweden for a festival of his music only two months before his death aged 93.

• MICHAEL TILLETT

After studying at the Royal College of Music, Michael Tillett joined the choir of Morley College in London, of which, during World War II, Michael Tippett had become an enterprising conductor. From the 1940s onwards Tillett became invaluable to Tippett as a proofreader and editor for every one of the composer’s scores. Tippett came to rely on Tillett’s eye for detail and consulted him most days. Tillett was also a teacher of music, holding posts at Rugby and Highgate schools, and was a founder member of Dartington Summer School in Devon.

Interval – 20 minutes There are bars on all levels of the Concert Hall; ice cream can be bought at the stands on Stalls and Circle level. Visit the Barbican Shop on Level -1 to see our new range of GiftsandAccessories.

6 ComposerProfile 22 April 2018

Michael Tippett in Profile 1905–98 / by Oliver Soden

ichael Tippett was born on 2 January 1905 into a precariously wealthy family that was politically aware

(his mother was imprisoned as a suffragette) but relatively unmusical. As a child, and maybe as an adult too, he was something of the perennial outsider, at odds with, even ahead of, the beliefs and taboos of the times.

Tippett was eventually acclaimed as a composer of international stature and importance, but his career was slowburn, and his originality slow to develop. After studies at the Royal College of Music there followed almost a decade of ambitious amateur music-making alongside involvement in left-wing politics.

From 1940 to 1951 he was an enterprising head of music at Morley College, in South London. On the outbreak of war Tippett’s Trotskyist politics gave way to a committed pacifism, and in August 1943, having refused to fulfil the conditions of his exemption from war service as a conscientious objector, he served a three-month sentence in Wormwood Scrubs.

Works such as his String Quartet No 1 (1934–5) and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938–9) displayed for the first time and in all its originality the seductive rhythmic gallop and blues-inflected lyricism of his hard-won compositional maturity. In 1944 Benjamin Britten, who had become a close friend, helped organise the premiere of Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time (1939–41).

The oratorio’s success seemed almost to unravel the following decade when Tippett’s first opera, The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52), was greeted with bafflement and dislike. The breakdown of his Second Symphony’s premiere, in 1958, only added to the suspicion in which his music could be held. A younger generation of performers eventually offered up such pieces new minted to a fresh and devoted audience, and Tippett began to enjoy considerable success. He was knighted in 1966.

After Britten’s death in 1976, Tippett had no real competition for the title of Britain’s ‘greatest living composer’, an accolade to which he lived up for a two-decade Indian summer that saw no decline in energetic output. His was a career of constant self reinvention. The lyricism that book-ended his compositions contained a period of violent and fragmented mosaics, not least his war-blasted Homeric opera King Priam (1958–61). His third opera, The Knot Garden (1966–9), was shot through with jazz and electric guitar, while the Symphony No 3 (1970–72) turned both to Beethoven and to blues for spiritual and emotional solace.

Much of Tippett’s late music has yet to fasten its hold on the repertoire, but Birmingham Opera Company’s revival, in April 2015, of his fourth opera, The Ice Break (1973–6), thrillingly re-imagined the work for the 21st century. A final opera, New Year (1985–8), remains unrecorded and awaits reappraisal. In his 80s, now a member of the Order of Merit, Tippett produced a handful of last, luminous works: a large-scale setting of Yeats’ Byzantium (1989–90); the last of his five string quartets (1990–91); and The Rose Lake (1991–3), which crowned a 60-year career that, as for all innovators, has been greeted alike with consternation and with jubilance. •

— ‘I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music

and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.’

Michael Tippett —

lsolive.co.uk AN IMAGINARY ORCHESTRAL JOURNEY

Join Sir Simon Rattle on a voyage through the music of Haydn.

Available now Hybrid SACD | Digital

8 ProgrammeNotes 22 April 2018

Gustav Mahler comp Cooke Symphony No 10 in F-sharp minor 1910 / note by Stephen Johnson

began to look more closely. He realised that Mahler had come closer than anyone thought to finishing the Symphony. Once Cooke had established the order of the sketches, it could be seen that melodies, harmonies, counterpoints and important orchestral colours were indicated quite clearly for nearly the whole work. Cooke set about producing what he called a ‘Performing Version’ of the sketches – not a ‘completion’ however. Cooke always insisted that he'd meant only to give an idea of the state the Symphony had reached at the time Mahler died, not to speculate as to how it might have been in its final form.

Cooke's ‘Performing Version’ was a revelation. What it showed was that the Tenth was on its way to being one of Mahler’s most audacious, stirring and magnificently structured symphonies. While much of it echoed the death-shadowed utterances of the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, the ending in particular suggested that he’d begun to move into new spiritual territory. Certainly the ghostly, tonally rootless theme for unaccompanied violas that begins the first movement sounds like the voice of a man who has just returned from the abyss.

1 Adagio 2 Scherzo 3 Purgatorio 4 [Scherzo] 5 Finale

ustav Mahler's death in 1911, at the shockingly early age of 50, came as a complete surprise to

many. Only the previous year, the premiere of his colossal, heaven-storming Eighth Symphony had stunned the German-speaking musical world into the realisation that Mahler wasn’t just a great conductor, he was also an outstandingly original composer. Here was the triumph Mahler had longed for all his life, and yet he’d only had a pitiful few months to enjoy it. When Mahler's last two completed works – the Ninth Symphony and the ‘Song-Symphony’ Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) – were heard for the first time, many heard a note of farewell in the music. Added to the news that Mahler’s health had been precarious for some time, it all began to make sense. Mahler had seen his own end coming, and had anticipated it in his last two masterpieces.

In fact it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that. The diagnosis of a heart lesion, made back in 1907, wasn't necessarily a life sentence. As Mahler began to recover,

and at the same time struggled to come to terms with the death of his beloved daughter Maria, he’d thrown himself back into his conducting and composing career as energetically as ever. The killer blow almost certainly came in that summer of 1910, when Mahler discovered that his adored wife and muse Alma, whom he

had hymned in quasi-religious tones in his Eighth Symphony, was having an affair with the handsome, brilliant young architect, Walter Gropius. Although Mahler and Alma were able to patch things up, the shock gradually began to tell physically. Mahler’s heart finally gave way the following May.

Not long after Mahler’s death came the news that during that fateful summer he'd been working on a Tenth Symphony. How far had he got with it? Was any of it performable? The answers were tantalising: the first movement, a substantial Adagio, was more-or-less complete, and one other – a strange, sinister little movement entitled

‘Purgatorio’ – was certainly salvageable. These were presented to the world, and the Adagio made quite an impression, not least because its startlingly dissonant harmonies and near-expressionist intensity brought it closer to the wild imaginings of Viennese radicals like Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg than anything he’d written

before. But as to the other three planned movements, all that apparently remained was a hopeless, tangled mass of sketches. Was this confusion itself a reflection of Mahler’s state of mind at the time? Scrawled across these pages were heart-rending verbal exclamations, to Alma, to God or the Fates: ‘The Devil dances it with me!’ ‘You alone know what it means!’ Over the Symphony's final huge sigh Mahler had inscribed his pet name for Alma, ‘Almschi!’

For years most experts insisted that the second, fourth and fifth movements of the Tenth Symphony were beyond rescue. Then the English musicologist Deryck Cooke •

— Not long after Mahler’s death came the news that during that fateful

summer he’d been working on a Tenth Symphony. How far had he got with it? Was any of it performable? The answers were tantalising.

—

9ProgrammeNotes

Eventually – after much tortured aspiration and sardonic, deflated dance music – there is a cathartic climax, with an immense piled-up dissonance and a painfully sustained high trumpet note. Yet the coda brings consolation, and the warmest, most tonally stable music we've heard so far.

In the Scherzo that follows, the dance music of Mahler’s home city Vienna and of the Austrian countryside is subjected to an exuberant rhythmic ‘deconstruction’ of a kind that might have impressed Stravinsky. The Scherzo ends with a magnificent upsurge, culminating in a great shout of joy. Could this be life returning in triumph? But then comes the haunted Purgatorio, with its unmistakable cries of pain in the central section. After this the second Scherzo takes us back to the nightmarish intoxication of the first movement of Das Lied von der Erde. It is on the sketch pages of this movement that we find many of those agonised exclamations to Alma.

Then, as the Scherzo morphs into the Finale, comes one of Mahler’s most awe-inspiring inspirations: muffled drum strokes separated by long ‘dead’ silences, with eerie, fragmentary deep bass sounds. Apparently this is in part a memory of a

funeral procession for a young fireman Mahler and Alma witnessed in New York. Yet somehow the Symphony survives this vision of abysmal nothingness. A wonderful long flute solo is the first sign of life returning again, then the singing resumes with growing fervour. An agitated middle section, culminating in a memory of the first movement’s climactic dissonance, fails to destroy what Mahler called the Tenth Symphony’s ‘one great song’. An exquisite hymn to love emerges, culminating in that heartfelt final sigh: ‘Almschi’. Love may not be, as the Bible has it, ‘strong as death’, but while it still breathes, Mahler seems to say, there can yet be hope. •

• DERYCK COOKE

Deryck Cooke (1919–76) was a musicologist and writer who specialised in music of the 19th century, particularly Wagner and Mahler. After studying music at Selwyn College, Cambridge, he went on to work for the BBC from 1947 to 1959, and again as Music Presentation Editor from 1965. In addition to creating his ‘Performing Version’ of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, he published a number of essays including The Language of Music (1959) and Wagner’s Musical Language (1979).

• MAHLER SYMPHONIES ON LSO LIVE

Mahler Symphonies Nos 1 to 9

ValeryGergiev conductor London Symphony Orchestra

Available to purchase at lsolive.lso.co.uk and Amazon or to stream on Spotifyand Apple Music

Gustav Mahler in Profile 1860–1911

10 ComposerProfile 22 April 2018

Gustav Mahler’s early experiences of music were influenced by the military bands and folk singers who passed by his father’s inn in the small town of Iglau. Besides learning many of their tunes, he received formal piano lessons from local musicians, gave his first recital in 1870 and, five years later, applied for a place at the Vienna Conservatory.

After graduation, Mahler supported himself by teaching, before accepting a succession of conducting posts in Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest and Hamburg, culminating in the position of Resident Conductor and then Director of the prestigious Vienna Hofoper. The demands of both opera conducting and administration meant that he could only devote the summer months to composition. Working in the Austrian countryside he completed his nine symphonies, and a series of eloquent, often poignant songs.

An anti-Semitic campaign against Mahler in the Viennese press threatened his position at the Hofoper, and in 1907 he accepted an invitation to become Principal Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and later the New York Philharmonic. In 1911 he contracted a bacterial infection and returned to Vienna. When he died a few months before his 51st birthday, Mahler had just completed part of his Tenth Symphony and was still working on sketches for other movements.

Profile by Andrew Stewart

1860 BORN Kalischt, Bohemia (now Czech Republic)

1875–9 STUDIES Vienna Conservatory & Vienna University

1901–02 FIFTH SYMPHONY & MARRIAGE The Fifth’s Adagietto slow movement was dedicated to the composer’s future wife, Alma Schindler (pictured). They married in 1902.

1884–88 FIRST SYMPHONY, ‘TITAN’

Mahler’s original subtitle for the First’s finale

1893–96 THIRD SYMPHONY Written in Mahler’s ‘composing hut’ in Steinbach am Attersee, Austria (pictured).

1880 FIRST MAJOR WORK Das klagende Lied

1888–94 SECOND SYMPHONY, ‘RESURRECTION’

1891–97 HAMBURG Chief Conductor, Hamburg Stadttheater

1899–1900 FOURTH SYMPHONY Mahler’s most intimate symphony, ending with a childlike vision of heaven, sung by a soprano soloist.

1897–1907 VIENNA Director, Vienna Hofoper

‘From Inferno to Paradise’

11ComposerProfile

1907 ILLNESS Mahler’s daughter Maria dies from scarlet fever and diphtheria. Mahler learns of the heart disease that would lead to his death just a few years later.

1911 DIED Vienna, Austria

1903–06 SIXTH SYMPHONY, ‘TRAGIC’ Pictured right: Cover of Die Muskete, January 1907, subtitled ‘Tragic Symphony’. The caption reads: ‘Good gracious! I forgot the motor horn! Ah well, now I have an excuse for writing another symphony.’

1906–07 EIGHTH SYMPHONY ‘SymphonyofaThousand’for orchestra, soloists, children’s chorus and two mixed choirs.

1908–09 DAS LIED VON DER ERDE Mahler’s ‘Song-Symphony’ & NINTH SYMPHONY

‘Perhaps the greatest farewell symphony written by anybody. In each of the four movements he is saying goodbye to something.’

Leonard Bernstein on the Ninth Symphony

1907–11 NEW YORK Conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and, later, Principal Conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

1960s & 1970s TENTH SYMPHONY Deryck Cooke publishes his completed performing versions of the Tenth Symphony, based on Mahler’s sketches.

1904–05 SEVENTH SYMPHONY

1902 MAHLER BY EMIL ORLIK

Images (Page 11) Lebrecht Music & Arts Photo Library

(Page 10, Left) Furukama

SEASON OPENING CONCERT HARRISON BIRTWISTLE, HOLST, MARK-ANTHONY TURNAGE, BRITTEN 16 September 2018

DVOŘÁK, JANÁČEK, BRITTEN18 September 2018

JANÁČEK, SZYMANOWSKI, SIBELIUSwith Janine Jansen violin19 September 2018

HALF SIX FIX: JAZZ ROOTSwith Katia & Marielle Labèque pianos12 December 2018

BARTÓK, SZYMANOWSKI, STRAVINSKY, GOLIJOV, BERNSTEIN with Katia & Marielle Labèque pianos 13 December 2018

Sir Simon Rattle

2018/19 Season

BRAHMS, DEBUSSY, ENESCUwith Leonidas Kavakos violin16 & 18 December 2018

HALF SIX FIX: SIBELIUSwith Barbara Hannigan soprano9 January 2019

SIBELIUS, ABRAHAMSEN, NIELSENwith Barbara Hannigan soprano10 January 2019

BARTÓK, BRUCKNER13 & 20 January 2019

RAMEAU, RAVEL, BETSY JOLAS, POULENCwith Daniil Trifonov piano17 February 2019

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE, JOHN ADAMS1 May 2019

BERLIOZ 1505 May 2019

BRITTEN, MAHLER8 May 2019

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, GRAINGER, BRUCKNERwith Guildhall School musicians20 June 2019Generously supported by Baker McKenzie

JANÁČEK'S THE CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN27 & 29 June 2019Produced by LSO and Barbican Part of LSO 2018/19 Season and Barbican Presents

lso.co.uk/201819season 020 7638 8891

SEASON OPENING CONCERT HARRISON BIRTWISTLE, HOLST, MARK-ANTHONY TURNAGE, BRITTEN 16 September 2018

DVOŘÁK, JANÁČEK, BRITTEN18 September 2018

JANÁČEK, SZYMANOWSKI, SIBELIUSwith Janine Jansen violin19 September 2018

HALF SIX FIX: JAZZ ROOTSwith Katia & Marielle Labèque pianos12 December 2018

BARTÓK, SZYMANOWSKI, STRAVINSKY, GOLIJOV, BERNSTEIN with Katia & Marielle Labèque pianos 13 December 2018

Sir Simon Rattle

2018/19 Season

BRAHMS, DEBUSSY, ENESCUwith Leonidas Kavakos violin16 & 18 December 2018

HALF SIX FIX: SIBELIUSwith Barbara Hannigan soprano9 January 2019

SIBELIUS, ABRAHAMSEN, NIELSENwith Barbara Hannigan soprano10 January 2019

BARTÓK, BRUCKNER13 & 20 January 2019

RAMEAU, RAVEL, BETSY JOLAS, POULENCwith Daniil Trifonov piano17 February 2019

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE, JOHN ADAMS1 May 2019

BERLIOZ 1505 May 2019

BRITTEN, MAHLER8 May 2019

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, GRAINGER, BRUCKNERwith Guildhall School musicians20 June 2019Generously supported by Baker McKenzie

JANÁČEK'S THE CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN27 & 29 June 2019Produced by LSO and Barbican Part of LSO 2018/19 Season and Barbican Presents

lso.co.uk/201819season 020 7638 8891

14 ArtistBiographies 22 April 2018

Sir Simon Rattle conductor

ir Simon Rattle was born in Liverpool and studied at the Royal Academy of Music.

From 1980 to 1998, Sir Simon was Principal Conductor and Artistic Adviser of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and was appointed Music Director in 1990. In 2002 he took up his current position of Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic where he will remain until 2018. In September 2017 he became Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Sir Simon has made over 70 recordings for EMI record label (now Warner Classics), and has received numerous prestigious international awards for his recordings on various labels. Releases on EMI include Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and Mahler’s Symphony No 2. Sir Simon’s most recently released recordings in 2017 (Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Ravel, Dutilleux and Delage on Blu-Ray and DVD) were released on LSO Live.

As well as fulfilling a taxing concert schedule in Berlin, Sir Simon regularly tours within Europe, North America and Asia. His partnership with the Berlin Philharmonic has

also broken new ground with the education programme Zukunft@Bphil, earning the Comenius Prize in 2004, the Schiller Special Prize from the city of Mannheim in May 2005, the Golden Camera and the Urania Medal in Spring 2007. He and the Berlin Philharmonic were also appointed International UNICEF Ambassadors in the same year – the first time this honour has been conferred on an artistic ensemble.

In 2013, Sir Simon and the Berlin Philharmonic took up a residency at the Baden-Baden Osterfestspiele performing Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Past seasons have included Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and Peter Sellars’ ritualisation of Bach’s St John Passion, Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. For the Salzburg Osterfestspiele Rattle conducted staged productions of Beethoven’s Fidelio, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Britten’s Peter Grimes and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. He also conducted Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle with the Berlin Philharmonic for the Aix-en-Provence Festival and Salzburg Osterfestspiele and most recently at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin and the Wiener Staatsoper.

Sir Simon has strong, long-standing relationships with the leading orchestras in

London, Europe and the US, initially working closely with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestras, and more recently with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He regularly conducts the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he has recorded the complete Beethoven symphonies and piano concertos (with Alfred Brendel) and is also a Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Founding Patron of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

In September 2017, Sir Simon opened his first season as Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra with a programme of British music, a concert performance of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, and the Stravinsky ballets. In November, he toured Asia with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, with soloists Yuja Wang and Seong-Jin Cho. The rest of the 2017/18 season will take Sir Simon on a European and US tour with the LSO and to Munich with the Bayerische Rundfunk Orchestra. This season he returned to Baden-Baden with the Berlin Philharmonic for a production of Wagner’s Parsifal.

Sir Simon Rattle was knighted in 1994 and in the 2014 New Year’s Honours he received the Order of Merit from Her Majesty the Queen. •

15The Orchestra

London Symphony Orchestra on stage tonight

Timpani Nigel Thomas

Percussion Neil Percy David Jackson Sam Walton Nigel Bates Tom Edwards Peter Fry Karen Hutt Paul Stoneman

Harps Bryn Lewis Manon Morris

Leader Roman Simovic

First Violins Lennox Mackenzie Clare Duckworth Ginette Decuyper Gerald Gregory Maxine Kwok-Adams Claire Parfitt Elizabeth Pigram Laurent Quenelle Harriet Rayfield Colin Renwick Sylvain Vasseur Rhys Watkins Julian Azkoul Shlomy Dobrinsky Laura Dixon Hazel Mulligan

Second Violins David Alberman Thomas Norris Sarah Quinn Miya Väisänen David Ballesteros Matthew Gardner Julian Gil Rodriguez Naoko Keatley Belinda McFarlane William Melvin Iwona Muszynska Paul Robson Siobhan Doyle Alix Lagasse

Violas Edward Vanderspar Gillianne Haddow Malcolm Johnston German Clavijo Anna Bastow Lander Echevarria Stephen Doman Carol Ella Julia O’Riordan Robert Turner Heather Wallington Cynthia Perrin

Cellos Tim Hugh Alastair Blayden Jennifer Brown Noel Bradshaw Eve-Marie Caravassilis Daniel Gardner Hilary Jones Amanda Truelove Miwa Rosso Deborah Tolksdorf

Double Basses Colin Paris Patrick Laurence Matthew Gibson Thomas Goodman Joe Melvin Jani Pensola Simon Oliver Simo Väisänen

Flutes Gareth Davies Adam Walker Alex Jakeman

Piccolo Patricia Moynihan

Oboes Olivier Stankiewicz Juliana Koch Rosie Jenkins

CorAnglais Christine Pendrill

Clarinets Andrew Marriner Chris Richards Sonia Sielaff

E-flatClarinet Chi-Yu Mo

Bass Clarinet Laurent Ben Slimane

Bassoons Daniel Jemison Joost Bosdijk

Contra Bassoons Dominic Morgan Fraser Gordon

Horns Timothy Jones Phillip Eastop Angela Barnes Alexander Edmundson Jonathan Lipton James Pillai

Trumpets Philip Cobb Gerald Ruddock Niall Keatley David Elton

Trombones Dudley Bright Peter Moore James Maynard

Bass Trombone Paul Milner

Tuba Ben Thomson

LSOStringExperienceScheme Since 1992, the LSO String Experience Scheme has enabled young string players from the London music conservatoires at the start of their professional careers to gain work experience by playing in rehearsals and concerts with the LSO. The musicians are treated as professional ‘extra’ players (additional to LSO members) and receive fees for their work in line with LSO section players. Performing in tonight’s concert are Elizaveta Tyun (Second Violin), Joel Siepman (Cello) and Owen Nicolaou (Double Bass).

The Scheme is supported by The Polonsky Foundation, Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust, Derek Hill Foundation, The Thistle Trust, Idlewild Trust and Angus Allnatt Charitable Foundation.

Editor Edward Appleyard | edward.appleyard@lso.co.uk Fiona Dinsdale | fiona.dinsdale@lso.co.uk EditorialPhotography Ranald Mackechnie, Oliver Helbig, Lebrecht Photo Library Print Cantate 020 3651 1690 Advertising Cabbells Ltd 020 3603 7937

Details in this publication were correct at time of going to press.

BBC RADIO 3 LUNCHTIME CONCERTS ACADEMY OF ANCIENT MUSIC

The Academy of Ancient Music takes us back in time and on a tour of the Baroque in their first ever residency at LSO St Luke’s.

Friday 18 May 1pm; Friday 25 May 1pm Friday 8 June 1pm; Friday 15 June 1pm

ECHO RISING STAR RECITALS

ECHO Rising Stars gives Europe’s most brilliant young musicians an international platform – three stars of the future showcase their individual artistry.

Tamás Pálfalvi trumpet Friday 4 May 1pm

Emmanuel Tjeknavorian violin Friday 6 July 1pm

Nora Fischer soprano Daniël Kool piano Friday 20 July 1pm

AT LSO ST LUKE’S