London Symphony OrchestraLiving Music

London’s Symphony Orchestra

Thursday 19 May 2016 7.30pm Barbican Hall

MAHLER SYMPHONY NO 6

Shostakovich Violin Concerto No 1 INTERVAL Mahler Symphony No 6

Sir Antonio Pappano conductor Viktoria Mullova violin

Concert finishes approx 10.10pm

Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3

2 Welcome 19 May 2016

Welcome Kathryn McDowell

Living Music In Brief

Welcome to this evening’s LSO concert, where we are delighted to be joined by Sir Antonio Pappano, a long-standing friend of the Orchestra. This month he conducts two programmes at the Barbican and a tour of Eastern Europe.

The concert opens with Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, for which the LSO is delighted to welcome soloist Viktoria Mullova, marking her first performance with us since 2010. This is followed in the second half by Mahler’s mighty Sixth Symphony, sometimes referred to as the ‘Tragic’.

I would like to thank our media partners, BBC Radio 3, who will be broadcasting the concert live.

I hope you enjoy the performance and can join us again on 29 May, when Sir Antonio Pappano returns to conduct Elgar’s Second Symphony and Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, with Nikolaj Znaider as the soloist.

Kathryn McDowell CBE DL Managing Director

BMW LSO OPEN AIR CLASSICS

Join us at this year’s BMW LSO Open Air Classics concert, which takes place in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 22 May at 6.30pm. Valery Gergiev will once again be at the helm, conducting works by Tchaikovsky. Remember to arrive early to secure your place in the Square.

lso.co.uk/openair

LSO ON TOUR

Next week the LSO embarks on a short tour to Wrocław, Vilnius and Riga with Sir Antonio Pappano and Nikolaj Znaider. You can follow our journey with regular updates on our social media platforms.

facebook.com/londonsymphonyorchestra twitter.com/londonsymphony instagram.com/londonsymphonyorchestra

A WARM WELCOME TO TONIGHT’S GROUPS

The LSO offers great benefits to groups of 10+, including 20% discount on standard tickets. At this concert we are delighted to welcome: Coe College

lso.co.uk/groups

London Symphony Orchestra

See the full listings, now on sale, at lso.co.uk/201617season

Gianandrea Noseda opens the season with the Verdi Requiem, his first concerts as LSO Principal Guest Conductor

Sir John Eliot Gardiner concludes his Mendelssohn symphonies cycle

Two new commissions from Mark-Anthony Turnage receive their world and UK premieres

Janine Jansen performs in three concerts as part of her LSO Artist Portrait

François-Xavier Roth continues his After Romanticism series

Bernard Haitink performs Bruckner, Mahler and Beethoven with Mitsuko Uchida

Lang Lang returns to close the season with Bartók’s Piano Concerto No 2

Living Music

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER

ANDREW HUTH is a musician,

writer and translator who writes

extensively on French, Russian

and Eastern European music.

4 Programme Notes 19 May 2016

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75) Violin Concerto No 1 in A minor Op 77/99 (1948, rev 1955)

NOCTURNE: MODERATO

SCHERZO: ALLEGRO

PASSACAGLIA: ANDANTE

BURLESQUE: ALLEGRO CON BRIO – PRESTO

VIKTORIA MULLOVA VIOLIN

By his early 40s, Shostakovich had produced a huge amount of music in almost every form: operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber music, and several scores for the theatre and cinema. His only concerto, however, was the light (though wonderful and funny) Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings of 1933. Wasn’t it now time to follow his distinguished colleagues Prokofiev, Myaskovsky and Khachaturian with a violin concerto? Some prompting may have come from the great violinist David Oistrakh, whom he had known as a friend and chamber music partner for over a decade.

The Violin Concerto was completed in March 1948, but had to wait seven and a half years before it was performed. The reason, as so often with Shostakovich, was closely bound up with Soviet musical politics. While he was in the middle of composing the finale, there came the infamous resolution from the Central Committee of the Communist Party censoring a number of composers, Shostakovich chief among them, for such crimes as ‘formalist perversions’ and ‘anti-democratic tendencies’. These accusations were nonsense, but it was Stalin’s nonsense and the composers in question had no choice but to bow their heads and do as they were told.

Shostakovich was dismissed from his teaching posts at the Leningrad and Moscow Conservatoires, and for the next five years presented himself in public as the author of much bland and politically acceptable music. But at the same time he also wrote more

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personal and challenging works, putting them aside for better times. As well as the Violin Concerto, they included the Fourth and Fifth String Quartets, the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry and the Tenth Symphony.

These works became known to the public only after Stalin’s death in 1953, the Violin Concerto last of all. Already familiar to friends and fellow musicians from the composer’s run-throughs at the piano, it was premiered in Leningrad in October 1955 and then four months later in Moscow, conducted by Evgeny Mravinsky and played by Oistrakh, its dedicatee. Shostakovich was delighted by the performances, and later dedicated to Oistrakh both his Second Violin Concerto (1967) and Violin Sonata (1968). The movement titles might at first suggest something like a series of loosely-connected character pieces, but in fact this is one of Shostakovich’s most tightly and symphonically organised scores.

NOCTURNE The Nocturne gives the impression of being the most free of the four movements, a long and eloquent meditation for the violin, rising and falling in great arches of melody. The orchestra functions as accompaniment to the soloist, providing a background of brooding anxiety. Much of this movement’s power derives from its measured pace and rhythm, the overall restraint producing an effect of great intensity.

SCHERZO & PASSACAGLIA Restraint is thrown aside in the following Scherzo, a remorseless nightmare of activity that hurtles onwards in a wild, frantic dance. One of the many ideas that appear in its course is the four-note DSCH motive (D, E-flat, C, B-natural in German musical notation) that the composer used as his own musical

DAVID OISTRAKH (1908–74)

was one of the foremost violinists

and violists of his generation. He

worked with many of the leading

orchestras in the Soviet Union,

Europe and America and was the

dedicatee of a number of the most

important additions to the violin

repertoire of the 20th century.

Within the Soviet Union he was

awarded many prizes and awards

including the Stalin Prize in 1943,

the title of People’s Artist of the USSR

in 1953 and the Lenin Prize in 1960.

lso.co.uk Programme Notes 5

signature; another provides the basis of the third movement, a 17-bar theme given out initially by cellos and basses, and then repeated a further eight times. This Passacaglia recalls something of the brooding intensity of the first movement, though it is more sectional in construction and therefore offers a greater variety of expression and gesture.

BURLESQUE A solo cadenza, of mounting tension and fearsome technical difficulty, spills into the finale, which Shostakovich originally intended to be launched by the soloist. He changed his mind, scoring it instead for the full orchestra, when Oistrakh begged for a moment of respite ‘so at least I can wipe the sweat off my brow’. This finale, recalling the wild energy of the Scherzo, makes no concessions to Soviet orthodoxy or to the demands for optimism at all costs, and puts the seal on one of Shostakovich’s most powerful and personal works.

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.

The Barbican shop will also be open.

Why not tweet us your thoughts on the first half of the

performance @londonsymphony, or come and talk to

LSO staff at the Information Point on the Circle level?

Dmitri Shostakovich Composer Profile

After early piano lessons with his mother, Shostakovich enrolled at the Petrograd Conservatory in 1919. He supplemented his family’s meagre income from his earnings as a cinema pianist, but progressed to become a composer and concert pianist following the critical success of his First Symphony in 1926 and an ‘honourable mention’ in the 1927 Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw.

Shostakovich announced his Fifth Symphony of 1937 as ‘a Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to just criticism’. A year before its premiere he had drawn a stinging attack from the official Soviet mouthpiece Pravda, in an article headed ‘Muddle instead of music’. When the Fifth Symphony was premiered in Leningrad, the composer’s reputation and career were rescued. Acclaim came not only from the Russian audience, who gave the work a 40-minute ovation, but also from musicians and critics overseas. In July 1941 he began work on the first three movements of his Seventh Symphony, completing the defiant finale after his evacuation in October and dedicating the score to the city.

In 1948 Shostakovich and other leading composers, were forced by the Soviet cultural commissar, Andrey Zhdanov, to concede that their work represented ‘the formalistic perversions and anti-democratic tendencies in music’, a crippling blow to Shostakovich’s artistic freedom that was healed only after the death of Stalin in 1953. Shostakovich answered his critics later that year with the powerful Tenth Symphony, in which he portrays ‘human emotions and passions’, rather than the collective dogma of Communism. A few years before the completion of his final and bleak Fifteenth String Quartet, Shostakovich suffered his second heart attack and the onset of severe arthritis. Many of his final works are preoccupied with the subject of death.

SHOSTAKOVICH on LSO LIVE

Schubert &

Shostakovich

LSO String

Ensemble

£7.99

The LSO String Ensemble, led by

LSO Leader Roman Simovic,

gives magnificent performances of

Schubert’s (arr Mahler) String Quartet

No 14 ‘Death and the Maiden’

and Shostakovich’s (orch Barshai)

Chamber Symphony in C minor.

lsolive.lso.co.uk

COMPOSER PROFILE WRITER

ANDREW STEWART

London Symphony Orchestra

JUNE 2016 with the LSO

Thu 9 Jun 7.30pm Dvorák Overture: Othello Bartók Violin Concerto No 1 Dvorák Symphony No 8 Daniel Harding conductor Lisa Batiashvili violin Recommended by Classic FM

Thu 16 Jun 7.30pm LSO DISCOVERY SHOWCASE: PEACEMAKERS Elim Chan and Howard Moody conductors Francesca Chiejina, Bianca Andrew, Eduard Mas Bacardit, Joan Miquel Muñoz Socias LSO On Track Next Generation LSO Community Choir Orchestral Artistry students from the Guildhall School LSO Community Choir is generously supported by the Rothschild

Charities Committee. LSO On Track Next Generation is generously

supported by Mizuho, The Clore Duffield Foundation, The Hedley

Foundation and LSO Friends.

Sun 26 Jun 2016 7pm Maxwell Davies The Hogboon (world premiere, LSO co-commission) Berlioz Symphonie fantastique (LSO and Guildhall musicians side by side) Sir Simon Rattle conductor Guildhall School Musicians LSO Discovery Choirs London Symphony Chorus Simon Halsey chorus director In memory of the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies CBE CH (1934–2016).

Generously supported by David HS Hobbs.

LSO Discovery Choirs are generously supported by Slaughter and

May, The Rothschild Charities Committee, The Barnett and Sylvia

Shine No 2 Charitable Trust, and LSO Patrons.

LSO SIng is generously supported by Sir Siegmund Warburg’s

Voluntary Settlement.

lso.co.uk | 020 7638 8891

lso.co.uk Composer Profile 7

Mahler the Man by Stephen Johnson

Mahler’s sense of being an outsider, coupled with a penetrating, restless intelligence, made him an acutely self-conscious searcher after truth. For Mahler the purpose of art was, in Shakespeare’s famous phrase, to ‘hold the mirror up to nature’ in all its bewildering richness. The symphony, he told Jean Sibelius, ‘must be like the world. It must embrace everything’. Mahler’s symphonies can seem almost over-full with intense emotions and ideas: love and

hate, joy in life and terror of death, the beauty of nature, innocence and bitter experience. Similar themes can also be found in his marvellous songs and song-cycles, though there the intensity is,

if anything, still more sharply focused.

Gustav Mahler was born the second of 14 children. His parents were apparently ill-matched (Mahler remembered violent scenes), and young Gustav grew dreamy and introspective, seeking comfort in nature rather than human company. Death was a presence from early on: six of Mahler’s siblings died in infancy. This no doubt partly explains the

obsession with mortality in Mahler’s music. Few of his major works do not feature a funeral march: in fact Mahler’s first composition (at age ten) was a Funeral March with Polka – exactly the kind of extreme juxtaposition one finds in his mature works.

For most of his life Mahler supported himself by conducting, but this was no mere means to an end. Indeed his evident talent and energetic, disciplined commitment led to successive appointments at Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg and climactically, in 1897, the Vienna Court Opera. In the midst of this hugely demanding schedule, Mahler composed whenever he could, usually during his summer holidays. The rate at which he composed during these brief periods is astonishing. The workload in no way decreased after his marriage to the charismatic and highly intelligent Alma Schindler in 1902. Alma’s infidelity – which almost certainly accelerated the final decline in Mahler’s health in 1910/11 – has earned her black marks from some biographers; but it is hard not to feel some sympathy for her position as a ‘work widow’.

Nevertheless, many today have good cause to be grateful to Mahler for his single-minded devotion to his art. T S Eliot – another artist caught between the search for faith and the horror of meaninglessness – wrote that ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’. But Mahler’s music suggests another possibility. With his ability to confront the terrifying possibility of a purposeless universe and the empty finality of death, Mahler can help us confront and endure stark reality. He can take us to the edge of the abyss, then sing us the sweetest songs of consolation. If we allow ourselves to make this journey with him, we may find that we too are the better for it.

I am …

three times homelessa native of Bohemia in Austria

an Austrian among Germans

a Jew throughout the world.

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITER

STEPHEN JOHNSON is the author

of Bruckner Remembered (Faber).

He contributes regularly to BBC

Music Magazine and The Guardian,

and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3

(BBC Legends and Discovering

Music), Radio 4 and World Service.

8 Programme Notes 19 May 2016

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) Symphony No 6 in A minor (1903–06)

ALLEGRO ENERGICO, MA NON TROPPO:

HEFTIG, ABER MARKIG (INTENSE, BUT PITHY)

SCHERZO: WUCHTIG (POWERFUL)

ANDANTE MODERATO

SOSTENUTO – ALLEGRO ENERGICO

When Mahler began work on his Sixth Symphony in 1903, he thought about giving it a title: ‘The Tragic’. But he had already begun to lose faith in titles, programmes and other literary props, and by the time the symphony was finished, two years later, the name had been dropped for good. But ‘tragic’ remains most commentators’ verdict on the emotional content of this work, however much the shading of that interpretation may vary. For the great Mahlerian conductor Bruno Walter, the Sixth was ‘bleakly pessimistic … the work ends in hopelessness and the dark night of the soul’. But Mahler’s biographer, Michael Kennedy, sees something more positive in the symphony’s message: ‘It is a tragic work, but it is tragedy on a high plane, classical in conception and execution.’

For Mahler there was clearly a dark saying at the heart of the Sixth Symphony, especially in the huge finale. His wife Alma reports him as saying that this movement tells of ‘the hero, on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him like a tree.’ Before long these words were to acquire an added eerie significance. In 1907, the year after the symphony’s far from successful premiere, ‘three blows of fate’ fell on Mahler himself: he was forced to resign as conductor of the Vienna Opera; his four-year-old daughter Maria died of scarlet fever; and he was diagnosed as having a potentially fatal lesion of the heart – the condition that was to kill him four years later, at the age of 50. To the myth-makers it was a gift.

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Deep in his prophetic soul Mahler had sensed his own fate and spelled it out in music. Some went even further: Mahler hadn’t just foretold his own grim future; he had looked into the abyss of the coming century and portrayed its horror with exceptional power. Where else could those violent march rhythms, those vivid depictions of vanquished hopes and crushed innocence have come from?

But there is another possibility. As a young man, Mahler had been deeply impressed by the writings of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. For a while he thought of calling his Third Symphony Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) – the title of one of Nietzsche’s most celebrated works. The idea of tragedy was central to Nietzsche’s world- view. Nietzsche felt that the tragedies of the Ancient Greeks represented some of the sanest – or as he put it ‘healthiest’ – achievements of mankind, created ‘out of the most profound need’. In tragic art, the Greeks had been able to look ‘with bold eyes into the dreadful destructive turmoil of so-called world history as well as into the cruelty of nature’, and thereby create an art that was ‘uniquely capable of the tenderest and deepest suffering’. By experiencing this through the medium of tragedy, the spectator could acquire the strength and courage to face the horror and meaningless cruelty of existence – or as Nietzsche put it, ‘say ‘Yes’ to life.’

Mahler’s attitude to Nietzsche fluctuated widely in later life. In 1901 he told Alma, on finding that her library contained a complete Nietzsche, that the books ‘should be cast then and there into the fire’. But according to the conductor Otto Klemperer, who worked with Mahler from 1905, the composer was ‘an adherent of Nietzsche’. This apparent contradiction isn’t really surprising. Mahler was subject to violent swings – of belief as well as mood.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–

1900) was a German philosopher,

whose works included texts on art,

theatre and music. A one-time friend

(and later critic) of Richard Wagner,

his writings influenced a generation

of composers, including Mahler,

Frederick Delius and Richard Strauss,

whose tone poem Also Sprach

Zarathustra is based on Nietzsche’s

text of the same title.

lso.co.uk Programme Notes 9

But it’s easy to see how Nietzsche’s idea of the tragic would have appealed to an artist who throughout his life was obsessed with death, suffering and the apparently arbitrary cruelty of life, and who strove continually to make sense of them. Perhaps this ‘tragic’ symphony can be seen as a sustained attempt to do just that in music.

If so, that might account for a paradoxical aspect of the Sixth Symphony. However violent, pained or ultimately bleak the emotions it expresses, there is also – for many listeners – something exciting, exhilarating, even uplifting about much of it. It is as though Mahler were at the same time exulting in his mastery, his ability to express what Nietzsche called ‘the artistic conquest of the terrible’ with such power and virtuosity. After all, the Sixth is also one of those works in which Mahler’s command of the orchestra is at its most dazzling. In his handling of the huge forces – including instruments never before used in a symphony (celesta, cowbells, whip and a hammer to represent the blows of fate), as well as one of the largest woodwind and brass sections in the standard repertory – Mahler reveals himself as a brilliant magician as well as a tragic poet.

Detailed analysis of a 90-minute symphony, packed with incident from start to finish, is impossible in a short programme note, but a few pointers may be helpful. The first movement follows the outlines of classical sonata form. Two main themes – in this case an intense, driven march tune and an impassioned major key melody (apparently identified with Alma Mahler) are juxtaposed, developed at length, then brought back in something like their original form, leading to a triumphant, major key conclusion. At the heart of the movement, however, in the midst of all the violence and passion, is a passage of magical stillness, with atmospheric

contributions from celesta and cowbells – in Mahler’s words ‘the last terrestrial sounds penetrating into the remote solitude of mountain peaks’.

More pounding march figures begin the Scherzo, the return to the minor mode negating the major key ‘triumph’ of the first movement’s ending. (Abrupt major-minor juxtapositions occur throughout the first, second and fourth movements – a clear ‘tragic’ motto.) Now the violence has a grotesque edge. Even the seemingly innocent Trio theme (introduced on the oboe) has a strange, limping four-plus-three rhythm. This time the ending is hollow, desolate, with fragments of motifs on double basses, contra-bassoon and timpani. The Andante moderato is like a haven of peace: meditative, songful, an exploration out of the Alpine solitude glimpsed at the heart of the first movement. But there is bitterness mixed with the sweetness.

After this, the finale is like a vast summing up of all that has been heard before, fused into a compelling musical narrative, by turns weird, desolate, heroically determined, joyous and catastrophically thwarted. The first two of Mahler’s ‘three blows of fate’ are underlined by the hammer; but Mahler removed the third hammer blow – whether for superstitious or more practical reasons is hard to guess. In any case the most devastating stroke is left to the end. Tuba, trombones and low horns develop a grim threnody, then a full orchestra chord of A minor falls like an iron curtain, leaving the march rhythms to tail off into nothing.

MAHLER on LSO LIVE

Explore the LSO’s recordings of

Mahler’s 9 symphonies on LSO Live,

conducted by Valery Gergiev.

Available as downloads, individual

discs or as a 10-SACD box set.

Available at

lsolive.lso.co.uk,

in the Barbican

Shop or online at

iTunes & Amazon

10 Artist Biographies 19 May 2016

Music Director

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Music Director

Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia

One of today’s most sought-after conductors, acclaimed for his charismatic leadership and inspirational performances in both symphonic and operatic repertoire, Sir Antonio Pappano has been Music Director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden since 2002, and Music Director of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome since 2007. Nurtured as a pianist, repetiteur and assistant conductor at many of the most important opera houses of Europe and North America, including at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and several seasons at the Bayreuth Festival as musical assistant to Daniel Barenboim, Pappano was appointed Music Director of Oslo’s Den Norske Opera in 1990, and from 1992–2002 served as Music Director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. From 1997–99 he was Principal Guest Conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Pappano made his debut at the Vienna Staatsoper in 1993, replacing Christoph von Dohnànyi at the last minute in a new production of Wagner’s Siegfried, his debut at the Metropolitan Opera New York in 1997 with a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and in 1999 he conducted a new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Bayreuth Festival. Highlights of recent seasons include his operatic debut at the Salzburg Festival (Verdi’s Don Carlo) and the Teatro alla Scala (Berlioz’s The Trojans). At the Royal Opera the 2014/15 season saw him leading new productions of Rossini’s William Tell, Giordano’s Andrea Chénier and Szymanowski’s Król Roger, and productions in the 2015/16 season and beyond include new stagings of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci and Bellini’s Norma, and revivals of Massenet’s Werther, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Sir Antonio Pappano Conductor

Pappano has appeared as a guest conductor with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras, including the Berlin, Vienna, New York and Munich Philharmonic orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Chicago and Boston symphonies, the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras, and the Orchestre de Paris. Recent highlights include his debut with the London Philharmonic at the Aldeburgh Festival, and performances at the BBC Proms and Bucharest Festival with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Future appearances include his debuts with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Verbier Festival Orchestra and the Staatskapelle Dresden, return visits to the Cleveland Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Staatskapelle Berlin, and tours of Europe, Asia and South America with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

Antonio Pappano was born in London to Italian parents, and moved with his family to the United States at the age of 13. His awards and honours include Gramophone’s ‘Artist of the Year’ in 2000, the 2003 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera, the 2004 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award, and the Bruno Walter prize from the Académie du Disque Lyrique in Paris. In 2012 he was named a Cavaliere di Gran Croce of the Republic of Italy, and a Knight of the British Empire for his services to music, and in 2015 he was the 100th recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal, the body’s highest honour. He has also developed a notable career as a speaker and presenter, and has fronted several critically acclaimed BBC Television documentaries including Opera Italia, Pappano’s Essential Ring Cycle and Pappano’s Classical Voices.

SIR ANTONIO PAPPANO IN

2016/17: ON SALE NOW

Thu 24 Nov 2016 7.30pm

Rossini Overture: William Tell

Bruch Violin Concerto

Strauss Alpine Symphony

with Roman Simovic violin

Sun 5 Feb 2017 7pm

Sibelius The Oceanides

Bernstein Serenade

Nielsen Symphony No 4

(‘The Inextinguishable’)

with Janine Jansen violin

lso.co.uk/201617season

lso.co.uk Artist Biographies 11

Viktoria Mullova Violin

Viktoria Mullova studied at the Central Music School of Moscow and the Moscow Conservatoire. Her extraordinary talent captured international attention when she won first prize at the 1980 Sibelius Competition in Helsinki and the Gold Medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1982 which was followed, in 1983, by her dramatic and much-publicised defection to the West. She has since appeared with most of the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors and at the major international festivals. She is now known the world over as a violinist of exceptional versatility and musical integrity. Her curiosity spans the breadth of musical development from Baroque and Classical right up to the most contemporary influences from the world of fusion and experimental music.

Her interest in the authentic approach has led to collaborations with period instrument bands such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Il Giardino Armonico, Venice Baroque and Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique. Viktoria has a great affinity with Bach and his work makes up a large part of her recording catalogue. Her interpretations of Bach have been acclaimed worldwide. Her most recent disc of Bach Concertos with the Accademia Bizantina and Ottavio Dantone has been highly praised, and her recording of Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas represents a significant milestone in Viktoria’s personal journey into this music. The recording received five-star reviews from all over the world, and she has embarked on an international several season-long series of solo Bach recitals.

Her ventures into creative contemporary music started in 2000 with her album Through the Looking Glass, in which she played world, jazz and pop music arranged for her by Matthew Barley. This exploration continued with her second album The Peasant Girl, which she has toured around the world with the Matthew Barley Ensemble. This project shows a different side to Viktoria, as she looks to her peasant roots in the Ukraine and explores the influence of gypsy music on the classical and jazz genres in the 20th century. Her most recent project, Stradivarius in Rio, is inspired by her love of Brazilian songs by composers such as Antônio Carlos Jobim, Caetano Veloso and Cláudio Nucci. As well as her own projects, she has also commissioned works from young composers such as Fraser Trainer, Thomas Larcher and Dai Fujikura. This rich musical diversity has been celebrated in several high-profile residencies, including London’s Southbank, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, the Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, Musikfest Bremen, Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and Helsinki Music Festival.

Highlights of her 2015/16 season include a tour of Asia with the BBC Philharmonic and appearances with the Orchestre de Paris, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Geneva Chamber Orchestra and the Bergen Philharmonic amongst others. Viktoria will also give duo recitals with Katia Labèque throughout Europe and South America.

Viktoria either plays on her ‘Jules Falk’ 1723 Stradivarius or a Guadagnini violin.

12 The Orchestra 19 May 2016

London Symphony Orchestra On stage

Your views Inbox

FIRST VIOLINS Roman Simovic Leader Carmine LauriLennox MackenzieClare Duckworth Nigel Broadbent Gerald Gregory Jörg Hammann Maxine Kwok-Adams Claire Parfitt Elizabeth Pigram Laurent Quenelle Harriet Rayfield Colin Renwick Ian Rhodes Sylvain Vasseur Rhys Watkins

SECOND VIOLINS David AlbermanThomas NorrisSarah QuinnMiya Väisänen David Ballesteros Matthew Gardner Julian Gil Rodriguez Naoko Keatley Belinda McFarlane William Melvin Iwona Muszynska Philip Nolte Andrew Pollock Paul Robson

VIOLAS Edward VandersparGillianne HaddowMalcolm JohnstonGerman Clavijo Anna Bastow Julia O’Riordan Robert Turner Heather Wallington Jonathan Welch Elizabeth ButlerCarol Ella Caroline O’Neill

CELLOS Tim HughJennifer Brown Noel Bradshaw Eve-Marie Caravassilis Daniel Gardner Hilary Jones Amanda Truelove Steffan MorrisHester Snell Deborah Tolksdorf

DOUBLE BASSES Edicson RuizColin ParisPatrick Laurence Matthew Gibson Thomas Goodman Joe Melvin Jani Pensola Simo Väisänen

FLUTESGareth DaviesAlex Jakeman Sarah Bennett

PICCOLOS Sharon Williams Patricia Moynihan

OBOES Christopher Cowie Rosie Jenkins Ruth Contractor

CORS ANGLAISChristine Pendrill Maxwell Spiers

CLARINETS Andrew Marriner Chi-Yu Mo Thomas Lessels Andrew Harper

BASS CLARINET Duncan Gould

E-FLAT CLARINETChi-Yu Mo

BASSOONS Daniel Jemison Dominic Tyler Fraser Gordon Lois Au

CONTRA BASSOONDominic Morgan

HORNS Timothy Jones Angela Barnes Alexander Edmundson Jonathan Lipton Sarah Willis Jonathan Barrett Michael Kidd Bertrand Chatenet Alex Wide

TRUMPETS Philip Cobb Michael Møller Gerald Ruddock Daniel Newell Robin Totterdell Simon Cox Simon Munday

TROMBONES Dudley Bright Peter Moore James Maynard

BASS TROMBONE Paul Milner

TUBA Patrick Harrild

LSO STRING EXPERIENCE SCHEME

Established in 1992, the LSO String Experience Scheme enables young string players at the start of their professional careers to gain work experience by playing in rehearsals and concerts with the LSO. The scheme auditions students from the London music conservatoires, and 15 students per year are selected to participate. The musicians are treated as professional ’extra’ players (additional to LSO members) and receive fees for their work in line with LSO section players.

London Symphony Orchestra Barbican Silk Street London EC2Y 8DS

Registered charity in England No 232391

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

Print Cantate 020 3651 1690

The Scheme is supported by Help Musicians UK The Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust The Idlewild Trust The Lefever Award The Polonsky Foundation

For this performance, Eleanor Corr (first violin) took part in the rehearsals and will play in the concert.

Editor Edward Appleyard edward.appleyard@lso.co.uk

Photography Igor Emmerich, Kevin Leighton, Ranald Mackechnie, Clive Totman, Mark Allan, Musacchio & Ianniello, Henry Fair, Max Pucciariello

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Michael McManus Great first half from @londonsymphony and @LeifOveAndsnes – real drama and Sturm und Drang there and fabulous playing all round – bravi!

David Oldroyd-Bolt Absolutely stupendous Bruckner 3 from Claus Peter Flor & @londonsymphony Utterly blown away.

Charles Grant Fine performance of #Bruckner 3 @BarbicanCentre. Stand-in Claus Peter Flor conducted @londonsymphony well. Raw, unvarnished powerful music.

8 MAY: LEIF OVE ANDSNES & CLAUS PETER FLOR

Ben Palmer Fab Beethoven 9 @londonsymphony. Best bit? Watching the soloists grinning at the trumpets throughout!

Jonathan Douglas @LSChorus @londonsymphony What an amazing choir. Brilliant performance. I was pinned to the seat from the first Freude to the last MIllionen.

12 MAY: MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS & LEIF OVE ANDSNES

TIMPANI Nigel Thomas Sam Walton

PERCUSSION Neil Percy David Jackson Paul Stoneman Tom Edwards Oliver Yates Karen Hutt Mick Doran

HARPS Bryn Lewis Manon Morris

CELESTE John Alley