Sunday 17 April programme - London Symphony Orchestra

Classic Tales
Music-making meets story-telling this spring and summer at the LSO
Music is generally considered to be a more abstract art than painting
or sculpture. But the earliest Western music was originally allied to
words, and once composers discovered how the expressive and
affective qualities of music could enhance and reflect the meaning of
words, it was a short step to realising that purely instrumental music
could evoke images from the real world, such as the sounds of battle
or the hunt, the cries of birds and animals, the rippling of water, the
slithering of skaters on a frozen pond.
By the early 19th century, with a greatly expanded instrumental
palette at their disposal, composers became more innovative in their
alliance of music to story-telling. Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony
and Berlioz’s extraordinary Symphonie fantastique paved the way for
the tone-poem and other 19th- and 20th-century orchestral genres
which portrayed legendary or historical people and events, as well
as natural phenomena. Tonight’s concert, and three others coming
up, all show how music can illustrate narrative, whether romanticised
versions of the life-stories of real people (Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, the
Wild Western outlaw Billy the Kid, the Mexican artists Diego Rivera
and Frida Kahlo), folk or fairy tales (Aladdin, Peer Gynt, Mother Goose,
The Firebird), or stories concerning ritual and magic (El amor brujo,
Fire and Blood, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
lso.co.uk/classictales
10 Classic Tales
Prokofiev’s score for Eisenstein’s epic 1940s film Ivan the Terrible
brings to life scenes from the reign of the 16th-century Russian
autocrat who created a vast empire out of disparate multi-ethnic
Asiatic regions, and became the first Tsar of all the Russias. Prokofiev’s
music evokes the grandeur and terror attending the birth of a nation,
with brutal battle scenes, liturgical processions, drinking and wedding
songs rubbing shoulders with broad folksong-based melodies
representing the endless steppes of the emergent Motherland.
Sun 3 Apr
Prokofiev Violin Concerto & Ivan the Terrible – oratorio
Xian Zhang conductor | Leila Josefowicz violin | LSC
Processions, dances and celebrations also feature in two Nordic
suites drawn from theatrical music (7 April) – one, tinged with
sensuous Oriental exoticism, that the Danish composer Carl Nielsen
made from his 1919 stage music to Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp
(the well-known story taken from the 1001 Nights), and another from
Grieg’s earthy music for Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (1874–75), the tale
of an amoral peasant who rampages around Norway, forsaking his
sweetheart and his old mother, abducting other men’s brides, getting
chased by mountain trolls, shipwrecked in the Mediterranean and
seduced by a sultry North African beauty, and finally, as an old man,
coming home after years of weary wandering to find his faithful first
love still waiting for him.
Thu 7 Apr
Nielsen Aladdin – Suite | Sibelius Violin Concerto
Grieg Peer Gynt – Suite
Kristjan Järvi conductor | Julia Fischer violin