Tagged with 'London'

The Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle will give two national premieres of Julian Anderson's new orchestral work Incantesimi this week at the Lucerne Festival on Wednesday 31 August and at the BBC Proms on Saturday 3 September.



Written with this orchestra's particular colour in mind, Incantesimi is an 8-minute glittering exploration of orbiting musical ideas. Following its world premiere in Berlin in June, the Berlin Philharmonic have taken the piece on tour to Rotterdam, Lucerne, and culminating with the UK premiere at the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Incantesimi (meaning ‘spells’ or ‘enchantments’ in Italian) is based on five musical ideas which circle around each other, sometimes accompanying in the background, sometimes rising to the foreground. The work is characterised by a recurring Cor Anglais solo, a long arching string figure, low chords, and bell chords in the middle and high registers. The piece unfolds slowly in what the composer describes as an “almost hypnotic state”, which lends the work its title. Toward the end of the work, the tempo dramatically shifts, bringing about an eruption of sound. This subsides and the music continues its orbit to close the piece.

When Sir Simon Rattle asked me to compose a work for the Berlin Philharmonic, I decided to write a piece which focused upon line and timbre unfolding at a slow rate. I have always admired the ability of Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic to play long, flowing musical lines with exceptional beauty of tone. – Julian Anderson

A co-commission between the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation, the Royal Philharmonic Society and Boston Symphony Orchestra, Incantesimi will be given its US premiere by the BSO on 26 January 2017 followed by performances on 27 and 28 January at Symphony Hall, Boston, Massachusetts.

• Julian Anderson - profile


• Incantesimi - workdetails

On 28 August, Thomas Larcher’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Kenotaph’ will receive its UK premiere at the BBC Proms in London, played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Semyon Bychkov. Bychkov, to whom the symphony is dedicated, conducted the world premiere with the Vienna Philharmonic earlier this year on 3 June in Vienna.



While his earlier compositions primarily extended from his wealth of experience as a chamber musician, Larcher has progressively ventured into larger orchestral writing, beginning with Red and Green (2010). This later became the creative groundwork to his first symphony Alle Tage for baritone and orchestra (2015) following the success of A Padmore Cycle (2014) for tenor and orchestra.

Thomas Larcher’s Symphony No. 2 - “a grave for lost and forgotten souls”

Symphony No. 2 is a 35-minute long, four-movement symphony that still maintains in passages the more intimate sounds of how it was originally envisioned - as a concerto for orchestra. Written for a large orchestra with prominent percussion, Larcher’s composition traverses diverse levels of musical energy, seeking ways to find tonality and structure that is at once exploratory yet aware of classical tradition and form. The symphony’s subtitle ‘Kenotaph’ (cenotaph) refers to monuments erected to commemorate those killed in war, or in the composer’s own words, “graves for lost and forgotten souls”. Feeling anguish over the continuing European immigrant crisis in particular, Larcher poured his feeling into this work.

Thousands upon thousands of people drowned in the Mediterranean while all of Europe stood on the sidelines idly observing this tragedy or even looking away. [The symphony] is a symbol for what has been going on and is still going on in the middle of Europe. – Thomas Larcher

Performances of Larcher’s works in the next few months include Ouroboros for cello and chamber orchestra by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra on 13 September with cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras and conductor Per Kristian Skalstad, and by the BBC Philharmonic on 13 October with cellist Matthew Barley and Ben Gernon conducting. On 6 October, Edward Gardner will conduct A Padmore Cycle with tenor Mark Padmore and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. The Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich conducted by Yutaka Sado will perform Red and Green in Austria from 7-10 October.

• Thomas Larcher - profile


• Symphony No. 2 - workdetails

This year's BBC Proms will include a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) on 8 August. Simon Russell Beale will narrate, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices.



In 1933, Schoenberg, the son of a Jewish merchant, fled the Nazi party’s rise to power and emigrated to the USA. The Nazi dictatorship and subsequent Holocaust clearly impacted Schoenberg deeply, driving and intensifying the representation of human suffering and torment in his compositions, as evident in A Survivor from Warsaw .

A Survivor from Warsaw - A groundbreaking exploration of twelve-tone technique

In just 8 minutes, Schoenberg expresses musically the suffering and persecution of an entire population. The cantata text, written by Schoenberg himself, portrays a scene in the Warsaw Ghetto to illustrate experiencing the Nazi reign of terror. The cantata is in three different languages: The narrator speaks English, but quotes the commanding shouts of a soldier in German, and finally in a devastating emotional climax to the work, the narrator cries out in Hebrew ‘Shema Yisroel’, a Jewish declaration of faith.

Now, what the text of the Survivor means to me: it means at first a warning never to forget what has been done to us, never to forget that even people who did not do it themselves, agreed and found it necessary to treat us this way. We should never forget this, even if such things have not been done in the manner in which I describe in the ‘Survivor’. This does not matter. The main thing is that I saw it in my imagination. – Arnold Schönberg

Other Schott works at the BBC Proms include Henri Dutilleux’s The Shadows of Time (1997) on 8 August in the same programme as A Survivor from Warsaw, Sir Charles his Pavan (1992) by the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies performed by Juanjo Mena and the BBC Philharmonic on 9 August and a new Cello Concerto by Huw Watkins will receive its world premiere with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Thomas Søndergård and with the composer’s brother Paul Watkins as soloist on 12 August.

• Arnold Schönberg - profile


• A Survivor from Warsaw - workdetails

On 26 June, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ last large-scale work, The Hogboon, will be premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle, joined by the London Symphony Chorus, LSO Discovery Chorus and Guildhall School Musicians at the Barbican Hall, London. The work was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and Philharmonie Luxembourg.



The Hogboon is a children’s opera which tells the story of Magnus, a young Orkney Islander who, with the help of a friendly Hogboon (a household troll), sets out to defend the village from the feared sea monster, Nuckleavee.

Completed shortly before his death in March,The Hogboon was particularly close to Maxwell Davies' heart as an Orkney resident and a passionate advocate for music education. The composer wrote the libretto himself, based on an Orkney folk tale. He took great pleasure in creating a work for combined professional and student forces, assigning the children’s choir the roles of the angry sea monster and the witch’s kittens. The opera also bears an ecological moral: we must take care of nature if we wish to live alongside it.

Bearing in mind the involvement of children and students, I have not written down to them with any condescension – rather – I have written up, knowing, from long experience, that, taken absolutely seriously, children and students are wickedly perceptive, and not to be taken for granted. I have attempted to make the masque work on several levels, of interest to adults, students and children, with weavings into the work’s verbal and musical textures diverse layers of meaning not least to do with our accommodations with Nature, and our present ecological problems.– Maxwell Davies

The Hogboon can next be seen in Luxembourg with the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2017. Following the premiere of The Hogboon in London, a free memorial event in Maxwell Davies' honour will take place at St John's Smith Square on 27 June. Included in the programme are two of his last works, The Golden Solstice (2016) for choir and organ and String Quartet Movement 2016, receiving its premiere performance. For more information and booking go to: https://www.sjss.org.uk/events/max-celebration.

• Sir Peter Maxwell Davies - profile


• The Hogboon - workdetails


• Barbican Hall - information on the premiere The Hogboon


• St. John's Smith Square - information on the memorial event