For four decades until 2005, the Lindsay String Quartet (affectionately known as “The Lindsays”) was at the heart of chamber music life in Great Britain, touring globally and building a unique relationship with Sir Michael Tippett – who coached the ensemble in his music. Tippett’s powerful postwar Third Quartet is the centrepiece of this live recording from London’s flagship chamber music venue, the Wigmore Hall. In classic Lindsays style, it’s framed with a late Haydn quartet – “The Rider” – and another British classic: the troubled, poetic Quartet in E Minor by Sir Edward Elgar. At the time of this recording, the Lindsay String Quartet was probably its pre-eminent interpreter.
LSO Opening Night 2021: Rattle conducts 100 years of British music
Tradition is about the present – and the future – as well as the past. Sir Simon Rattle opens the new season with a concert that spans 100 years of British music. When Ralph Vaughan Williams conceived his Pastoral Symphony, it wasn’t the misty fields of an imaginary England that inspired him. He was in France, on the Western Front – where the sound of a distant trumpet unlocked a vision vast enough to transcend the noise (if not the anguish) of the First World War. But then, British music has never conformed to easy stereotypes. In this opening concert of the new season, Judith Weir reads ancient Taoist poetry, and finds ideas of radical simplicity. Peter Maxwell Davies attends an all-night party (and finds a bracing hangover cure) on his adopted home of Orkney. And because music never stands still, Sir Simon Rattle introduces the world premiere of two movements from a new choral work by Julian Anderson, inspired by the poetry of exile. Not what you might expect … PROGRAM Purcell: Remember not, Lord, our offences; Tippett: Praeludium; Julian Anderson: Two movements from ‘Exiles’ (world premiere); Judith Weir: Natural History; Vaughan Williams: A Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No 3); Maxwell Davies: An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise
LSO: Rattle conducts Mahler and Tippett
From blissful radiances to a last lament, Sir Simon Rattle conducts the final works of Sir Michael Tippett and Gustav Mahler. Tippett never shied away from breaking new musical ground, and his last major work, ‘a song without words for orchestra’, was no exception. Inspired by journeys to Senegal, The Rose Lake is the imaginary chant of the breathtaking, rose-hued Lake Retba. Each section of the orchestra is illuminated, with driving percussive forces and soaring melodies portraying a euphoric awakening of the landscape. The Rose Lake is a hymn of nature; but Mahler’s final work, left unfinished and restored after years of collaboration, is the cry of a desperate man. Condemned to life with a fatal heart condition and a failing marriage, his Tenth Symphony is a heartrending goodbye – as the composer himself inscribed on the manuscript, ‘farewell, farewell’. PROGRAM Tippett: The Rose Lake; Mahler: comp COOKE Symphony No 10