Tarmo Peltokoski, a favourite of audiences and musicians alike, is at the conductor’s podium to begin his final season as the LNSO’s Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. The accordion part of “Tango” by Arturas Maskats is played by the widely acclaimed bandoneonist Arturs Noviks. Gustav Holst is celebrating his 150th birthday in 2024, and therefore his most famous work, the symphonic suite “The Planets” is part of the program. Each movement of the seven-movement suite is dedicated to a different planet in the solar system and its astrological characteristics. In its final movement, “Neptune, The Magician”, the orchestra is joined by the singers of the Riga Project Choir, directed by Christopher Walsh-Sink. Their voices can also be heard in the performance of Ralph Vaughan-Williams’ Seventh or “Antarctic Symphony”, which has its roots in the music for the 1948 film “Scott of the Antarctic”. PROGRAM Holst: Planets; Vaughan Williams: Antarctic Symphony; Maskats: Tango
LSO: Pappano conducts Tchaikovsky and Vaughan Williams
Led by its superb chief conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, the London Symphony Orchestra invites a trio of soloists – violist Antoine Tamestit, soprano Julia Sitkovetsky, and bass-baritone Ashley Riches – to join them in an emotional and original program that pairs Tchaikovsky’s sweeping Romanticism with Vaughan Williams’s pastoral grandeur. Opening the program is the Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Two unjustly lesser-heard works by Vaughan Williams follow: first, Tamestit takes the solo role in Flos Campi, inspired by the Song of Solomon and written for the unusual combination of viola, small orchestra, and wordless chorus. Finally, Sitkovetsky, Riches, and the London Symphony Chorus perform the impassioned Dona nobis pacem, a fervent call for peace by a composer who had witnessed the senselessness of violence firsthand as a stretcher bearer in World War I and despaired to see the clouds of war gather anew in 1936. PROGRAM Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 4; Vaughan Williams: Flos Campi, Dona nobis pacem
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