Roots give trees a foundation, grounding them firmly, providing the stability for them to grow tall and strong. Roots are important for people too: appreciating your heritage and understanding where you come from can give you a sense of perspective. Musical roots are at the basis of the London Symphony Orchestra’s 2019-20 season, which examines relationships between key works, or explores the origins of national schools, particularly Czech, Russian and British music.
Since taking over as Music Director, Sir Simon Rattle opens each season with a programme of British music. Appropriately, the new season is heralded by a new work by Emily Howard, which acts as a curtain-raiser to Colin Matthews’ Violin Concerto, played by Leila Josefowicz, a great ambassador for new music, who performed the 2009 world premiere in Birmingham. Walton’s First Symphony completes the programme, a work that acknowledges the composer’s debt to Sibelius but which is performed far too rarely. One of Rattle’s most intriguing programmes in the season is a concert devoted to the works of Percy Grainger, the Australian composer who did much to revive interest in British folk music.
In October, Sir John Eliot Gardiner digs around Czech Roots. Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass – a monster of a choral work sung in Old Church Slavonic – is partnered with Dvořák’s symphonic poem, The Golden Spinning Wheel. Grisly deeds are committed by a jealous stepmother and stepsister who murder and dismember Dornička only for their crime to be exposed by a magical singing spinning wheel… it’s darker than Grimm. Dvořák’s is programmed with Josef Suk in Gardiner’s second concert, a natural pairing as Dvořák was Suk’s father-in-law. Truls Mørk plays Dvořák’s melodic Cello Concerto, full of wistful Czech melodies, while Suk’s Asrael Symphony makes up the rarer half of the concert. The work is titled after Asrael, the Old Testament angel of death: Suk was in the middle of composing it when his wife, Otilie (Dvořák’s daughter) died.
Gianandrea Noseda was Principal Guest Conductor at the Mariinsky for a decade, where he learnt much Russian repertoire, so is the perfect guide through Russian Roots. Noseda continues his Shostakovich symphony cycle with the Sixth, Seventh and Ninth next season. The Seventh is the massive “Leningrad” Symphony, composed during the Second World War and dedicated to the besieged city. It came to symbolise Leningrad’s stoic resistance to German invasion, although Shostakovich was later reported as saying that he depicted the Leningrad “that Stalin destroyed and Hitler merely finished off”. The Ninth confounded expectations: originally intended as a celebration of the Soviet victory over the Nazis, the authorities expected a grand work in the tradition of Beethoven’s Ninth. Instead, Shostakovich delivered a pithy work which oftens seems to playing musical games, poking fun. Prokofiev piano concertos – the Second and Third – feature, along with the suite from Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, a deeply spiritual opera often called the “Russian Parsifal”. The Russian Roots thread also contains a number of chamber recitals at LSO St Lukes, including the Gringolts Quartet.