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French Connections

The London Symphony Orchestra is deeply saddened by the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Her Majesty had been the LSO’s Patron since her accession to the throne in 1952. 

The Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle will retain the programme for the concert in its original form, with the addition of the National Anthem.

Read our full tribute from the Orchestra further below in the programme

Spring and summer 1844 were busy periods for Hector Berlioz. In March he published his groundbreaking Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration, which would have a major influence on later composers including Richard Strauss and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. And in August he organised and conducted a massive concert as part of Paris’ Festival of Industry. By September he needed a holiday, and went to spend a month in Nice. He had loved this city since he’d written his King Lear overture there in 1831. His 1844 visit proved equally fruitful, resulting in a new concert overture, La tour de Nice (The Tower of Nice).

La tour de Nice’s premiere was not successful: one critic felt it filled the ‘imagination with strange and terrible images’. Undaunted, Berlioz set about revising the piece – and finding a more arresting title. Why he eventually settled on Le corsaire (The Corsair) is not known. He may have been inspired by stories of Nice’s historic corsairs: legalised pirates employed to attack the ships of France’s enemies. Or, as a bibliophile, he may have wanted to pay homage to Lord Byron’s poem The Corsair, which he had loved for over a decade. Either way, the work in its final form of 1852 brilliantly evokes the sea and a life of buccaneering adventure. It has become one of Berlioz’s most popular compositions.

Le corsaire is particularly notable for its imaginative orchestration, which ranges from delicate woodwind solos to forceful brass-dominated episodes. There are good tunes too, not least the gorgeous slow string melody that follows the attention-grabbing opening bars. A version of this lyrical theme also features in the overture’s exuberant, fast-paced main section, along with catchy new melodic material. Racing strings and sonorous brass end the piece in a mood of breathless excitement.

Theatre was a lifelong passion for Claude Debussy. He followed contemporary developments with interest, befriended many writers and wrote the libretto for his own unfinished opera La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher). He also attempted collaborations with several playwrights and actors, but only one project came to full fruition – incidental music for Le martyre de Saint Sébastien by the eccentric Italian dramatist Gabriele d’Annunzio.

His incidental music for King Lear was intended to consist of seven musical interludes accompanying a new production of Shakespeare’s play in Paris. It was commissioned in 1904 by the actor-impresario André Antoine. The composer, who had toyed with writing operas based on the Bard’s Hamlet and As You Like it, was initially enthusiastic. However, his passionate love affair with the singer Emma Bardac distracted him from his work, and he found Antoine increasingly difficult to deal with. Things came to a head when the impresario refused to provide him with the ensemble of 30 musicians he had demanded. Declaring that a smaller group would only make ‘a pathetic little sound like fleas rubbing their legs together’, Debussy quit.

The two numbers that he did complete reveal that the King Lear project as a whole might have been extremely powerful. The opening ‘Fanfare’ is scored for brass, timpani and harp, and contrasts assertive and regal outer sections with a more meditative central episode. The music has a cinematic grandeur that anticipates William Walton’s film scores for Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and Richard III. The very different ‘Le sommeil de Lear’ (The Sleep of Lear) was intended to precede Lear’s reunion with Cordelia in Act IV. Hushed dynamics, shifting harmonies, muted strings and falling phrases in horns and woodwind vividly depict Lear’s uneasy slumber in a sombre twilit landscape.

From the 1970s onwards, Tōru Takemitsu became increasingly fascinated by traditional Japanese gardens. He perceived similarities between their construction and that of his compositions, writing ‘my music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture’. Fantasma/Cantos II (1994) is the last in a series of horticultural orchestral works that also include In an Autumn Garden (1973), A Flock Descends Into the Pentagonal Garden (1977), Spirit Garden (1994) and Fantasma/Cantos for clarinet and orchestra (1991).

Fantasma/Cantos II is scored for solo trombone and orchestra. Takemitsu achieves a remarkable range of orchestral colours through a generous percussion section – including vibraphone, glockenspiel, celeste and tubular bells – and a woodwind section that features alto flute, bass clarinet and cor anglais. The absence of brass instruments gives the orchestral writing an especial delicacy, while the song-like trombone part reveals that this forceful instrument can also sound tender and lyrical. The subtle orchestral writing and rich harmonies recall Debussy and Ravel – but there is also a playful hint of jazz in the trombone part, not least in the massive glissando that marks the piece’s halfway point.

However, the piece’s greatest inspiration are the Japanese gardens of the Edo period (1603–1867): large strolling gardens containing ponds, islands and artificial hills, which can be enjoyed from various viewpoints along a circular trail. Takemitsu captures their effect through a simple musical idea which is repeated many times, gradually changing and evolving with each statement. In the composer’s own words: ‘You walk along the path, stopping here and there to contemplate, and eventually find yourself back where you started from. Yet it is no longer the same starting point.’

Dance was one of Maurice Ravel’s great inspirations. In 1906 he wrote to his friend Jean Marnold of his especial affinity with the Viennese waltz, its ‘wonderful rhythms’ and ‘joie de vivre’. To both Marnold and another friend he declared his intention to write an orchestral homage to Vienna’s ‘waltz-king’ Johann Strauss II, entitled Wien (Vienna). However, he soon became distracted by other projects. Then came World War I, during which his duties as an ambulance driver and subsequent illness left him little time for composition. It was only in 1919 that a commission from Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes led him to return to his 1906 project, now re-named La valse.

By this time, Vienna’s waltzes were no longer associated with liberated joie de vivre, but with decadence, inflated national pride and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Ravel claimed in 1922 that La valse merely depicted the waltz’s potential for ‘hallucinatory ecstasy’ and that it had nothing to do with the ‘present situation in Vienna’. However, the piece’s increasingly uneasy air and the frequent appearance of the tritone – a musical interval known as ‘the devil in music’ – may suggest otherwise.

La valse’s mysterious opening depicts dancing couples dimly glimpsed through clouds. A melodious series of waltz themes follow. These feature a remarkable variety of orchestral colours and textures, and include quotations from Ravel’s own Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911). In the piece’s later stages, the waltz themes gradually fragment and disintegrate, and the music grows increasingly loud and wild, eventually building to a cataclysmic conclusion.

Diaghilev admired Ravel’s score but rejected it as unsuitable for dancing. La valse was first heard in concert form in Paris on 12 December 1920. Although it has been staged by famous choreographers including George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, it remains best known as a concert work.