Sunday 26 April

Anton Webern
Six Pieces for Orchestra Op 6b
^{1909–10, rev 1927–28}

1. Etwas bewegte Achtel
2. Bewegt
3. Zart bewegt
4. Langsam – marcia funebre
5. Sehr langsam
6. Zart bewegt

Composed in 1909, these six orchestral snapshots are landmarks in Webern’s musical evolution. Compare them with his effusive 1904 tone poem Im Sommerwind and you might think they were written by a totally different person; in many ways they were.
The year he completed that early ‘idyll for large orchestra’, Webern became Arnold Schoenberg’s pupil. His discipleship of the great musical innovator was absolute and, along with fellow followers, such as Alban Berg, Webern subsequently pursued a very different musical path.

Schoenberg’s influence endured long after Webern’s formal pupillage ended in 1908, though Webern was very much his own man in fashioning a distinctly aphoristic musical language. That is clearly evinced by his Six Pieces, written in memory of his mother who had died in 1906, and dedicated to Schoenberg, who conducted the premiere at the beginning of the notorious 1913 ‘Skandalkonzert’ at the Musikverein in Vienna.

Skandalkonzert (31 March 1913)
In a concert conducted by Schoenberg, the audience – shocked by expressionism and experimentalism – started rioting. One punch thrown by the concert's organiser resulted in a lawsuit. A witness testified that the punch had been the most harmonious sound of the evening.

Acknowledging his grief over his mother’s death, Webern includes a Funeral March at the work’s core, recalling the second movement of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony as well as Mahler’s more recent funeral processions. Unlike those models, however, Webern reduces the threnody – by far the longest ‘piece’ in the work – to a series of low percussive murmurings, which eventually build to a hellish climax. The subsequent feeling of emotional distillation is indicative of the brute concentration of sound and gesture that was to become Webern’s hallmark.

Such concision of thought is further underlined by the use of Webern’s reduced orchestration of 1928, by which time he, once more following Schoenberg’s lead, had embarked on serial composition.

<sub>Note by Gavin Plumley

Gavin Plumley is a writer, broadcaster and musicologist. He has written for The Guardian and The Independent on Sunday and appeared on BBC Radio. Gavin commissions and edits the English-language programme notes for the Salzburg Festival.</sub>

_{Image: Parto da viola Bom Ménage by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, 1916}

György Ligeti
Mysteries of the Macabre
¹⁹⁷⁷

Barbara Hannigan soprano

Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre was premiered in
Stockholm in 1978. All too rare in the history of contemporary opera, that initial production was soon followed by others in Hamburg (1978), Saarbrucken (1979), Bologna (1979), Nuremberg (1980), Paris (1981) and London (1982). But then Le Grand Macabre is an opera like no other, based on a play by the avant-garde Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode. It portrays the threat of the end of time in exaggerated, artificial and farcical terms. And yet, despite its anarchic qualities, it is an opera that draws directly on the traditions of the art form as a whole, from Monteverdi to the present day, offering a post-modern palimpsest of references, including, Ligeti confessed, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Verdi’s Falstaff.

Among its extraordinary cast of characters, such as the deus ex machina, Nekrotzar, a host of peasants, monsters and lovers, a boy prince and sniping politicians, is Gepopo, a coloratura soprano Chief of Secret Police. Her arias form the Mysteries of the Macabre, arranged by Elgar Howarth, who conducted the opera’s premiere. This wild eight-minute window into the world of ‘Breughelland’, where Le Grand Macabre is set, offers a destabilising, fractious and, often, downright funny experience, as well as simultaneously confirming the enduring power of opera to dazzle and delight. That, in itself, was a courageous claim when Ligeti wrote the piece, kicking against the belligerent iconoclasm of figures such as Pierre Boulez, who had said that ‘the most elegant solution for the problem of opera is to blow up the opera houses’. Ligeti, notwithstanding his own unmistakable sense of tongue-in-cheek, dares to trust the genre, with all its absurd possibilities, crazy inconsistencies and virtuoso bursts of colour.

_{Note by Gavin Plumley}

_{Image: Dynamic Decomposition by Umberto Boccioni, 1913}

Igor Stravinsky
The Rite of Spring
¹⁹¹³

Part One: The Adoration of the Earth
1. Introduction
2. The Augurs of Spring
3. Dances of the Adolescents
4. Game of Abduction
5. Spring Rounds
6. Procession of the Sage
7. The Sage

Part Two: The Sacrifice
1. Introduction
2. Mystical Circles of the Young Girls
3. Glorification of the Chosen One
4. Evocation of the Ancestors
5. Ritual of the Ancestors
6. Sacrificial Dance

The origin of The Rite of Spring is almost as famous as the riot which, just over three years later, greeted its first performance. Stravinsky relates in his autobiography how, while working on the final pages of The Firebird in the spring of 1910, he had a ‘fleeting vision’ …

The vision seems not to have been accompanied by musical ideas, but if it had been, they would hardly have been much like the music as we know it. In fact, the change in style over these three years probably took the composer as much by surprise as anyone. After all, the first sketches already date from September 1911, less than 18 months after the completion of his first ballet, and the following March he wrote to his teacher’s son Andrey that ‘it’s as if 20 years, not two, have passed since the composition of Firebird’.

After the ballet’s noisy premiere, by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, Stravinsky spent much of the rest of his life denying the reality and creating a mythology around the work. He denied the presence in the music of authentic Russian folk materials; he even tried to disclaim the actual scenario, asserting in a Paris newspaper interview in 1920 that the ‘scenic realisation’ (by the Russian painter and ethnographer Nicholas Roerich) had been a mere convenience for a work ‘of purely musical construction’. Finally he denounced Nijinsky’s choreography, for which at the time he had expressed huge admiration. None of these disavowals hold much water.

That the score is based on folk music was conclusively proved by the publication of the sketchbook (1969), which includes specific notations of such material. The music itself rapidly became world-famous for two things: crashing dissonance and violent rhythm. At its heart, though, lies simple folksong, but layered in complex ways. This can immediately be heard at the very start, where the plangent high bassoon melody is contradicted by a still simpler tune on cor anglais, but set on C-sharp against the bassoon’s C naturals an octave above. Stravinsky found these colours at the piano (right hand white notes, left hand black).

But the rhythms also descend from folksong and specifically from a Russian tradition of word-setting. The principle is cellular. You think of a tune as a compilation of tiny phrases, then build them up additively – the reverse of a classical composer with his four-beat bars and four-bar phrases. Stravinsky later explored these techniques in a refined, intricate way. But whatever he subsequently wrote, he never shook off the image of the wild man of modern music. And listening to The Rite of Spring, it is not hard to hear why.

_{Note by Stephen Walsh
Stephen Walsh is a well-known writer on music, the author of a major two-volume biography of Stravinsky and also a book on his music. He holds a Personal Chair at Cardiff University.}

_{Image: Study of scene decoration for The Rite of Spring, 1944, by Nicholas Roerich}

The LSO was established in 1904 and has a unique ethos. As a musical collective, it is built on artistic ownership and partnership. With an inimitable signature sound, the LSO’s mission is to bring the greatest music to the greatest number of people.

The LSO has been the only Resident Orchestra at the Barbican Centre in the City of London since it opened in 1982, giving 70 symphonic concerts there every year. The Orchestra works with a family of artists that includes some of the world’s greatest conductors – Sir Simon Rattle as Music Director, Principal Guest Conductors Gianandrea Noseda and François-Xavier Roth, and Michael Tilson Thomas as Conductor Laureate.

Through LSO Discovery, it is a pioneer of music education, offering musical experiences to 60,000 people every year at its music education centre LSO St Luke’s on Old Street, across East London and further afield.

The LSO strives to embrace new digital technologies in order to broaden its reach, and with the formation of its own record label LSO Live in 1999 it pioneered a revolution in recording live orchestral music. With a discography spanning many genres and including some of the most iconic recordings ever made the LSO is now the most recorded and listened to orchestra in the world, regularly reaching over 3,500,000 people worldwide each month on Spotify and beyond. The Orchestra continues to innovate through partnerships with market-leading tech companies, as well as initiatives such as LSO Play. The LSO is a highly successful creative enterprise, with 80% of all funding self-generated.

_{Image: Ranald Mackechnie}