Contents

• Welcome
• Become a Friend
• Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat, K. 595 (32 minutes)
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 (37 minutes)
• Meet Paul Lewis
• Ryan Bancroft: biography
• Paul Lewis: biography
• The Orchestra

Welcome

Tonight’s soloist, pianist Paul Lewis, perhaps summed it up best: “Mozart’s music keeps us in touch with optimism” (The Arts Desk). Opening the programme, the Piano Concerto No. 27 – Mozart’s last as it turned out – feels particularly appropriate to the present times: a relatively pared-down, melancholy piece, where nevertheless effortless beauty and charm prevail. It’s a piece that can only pull us up and turn our gaze to all that’s hopeful – Spring just around the corner, the promise of sunshine and a sense that things are about to get better.

Then, to truly chase lockdown torpor away, on to another life-affirming vision of humanity, in Beethoven’s triumphantly joyful Fifth Symphony, a piece with endless potential for renewal. We have a deep bond with this piece (a Philharmonia recording of it currently travels in the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977) and look forward to a fresh vision from conductor Ryan Bancroft, who joins us on the podium for the first time.

Thank you for joining us as we gather once more to make music. And a special thank you to our family of Friends and supporters whose donations and kindness have sustained the Orchestra during the pandemic; we could not be more grateful.

Please share your thoughts on the performance on social media, using the hashtag #PhilharmoniaLive.

Header image: Paul Lewis © Kaupo Kikkas

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791): Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K. 595 (1791)

1. Allegro
2. Larghetto
3. Allegro

“Mozart’s music keeps us in touch with optimism...” Paul Lewis

Over the course of his short life, Mozart composed 23 original piano concertos, of which this Concerto in B flat major is the last. (It’s called ‘No. 27’ because the numbering also includes four arrangements Mozart made of works by other composers for keyboard and orchestra.) As a virtuoso keyboard player, Mozart wrote his concertos to perform himself, and we can usually connect the composition of a given piece with a particular concert date in his diary. Indeed, he worked on some of these pieces so close to the performance date, that the keyboard part was sometimes left missing from the manuscript score: the orchestral parts would be sent off for copying, but Mozart would simply fill in the piano part from memory in performance, and then squeeze the passagework into the gaps he’d left in the manuscript after the concert!

This final concerto is somewhat mysterious since it’s not entirely clear why Mozart began to work on it. It seems that he first drafted the piece in 1788 (the year in which he also wrote his last three symphonies); but it wasn’t completed until early 1791. The concert at which it probably received its premiere wasn’t one of Mozart’s own, but a benefit concert for a clarinettist named Joseph Bähr, in March 1791. It may also have been performed earlier in the year by Mozart’s pupil, Barbara von Ployer, at a private concert for the King of Naples. But we have no idea how, in either case, the piece was received by its audience.

"Here and there only connoisseurs can derive satisfaction – but in such a way that the non-connoisseur will be pleased without knowing why..." Mozart on the concerto form

The graceful first movement is particularly striking for its placid pacing. It begins without fanfare or rhetorical gesture; there are no sudden dramatic extremes or obviously knotty changes of key. Instead, melodious writing for the orchestra and soloist are sometimes clouded by subtle chromatic twists, strikingly beautiful in the middle of so much gentleness, and quickly soothed away by witty, major-key ripostes. As with a seemingly motionless swan gliding across a lake, there is much going on below the surface here: in fact this movement does contain unusual harmonic shifts, and is carefully woven together from a tiny amount of thematic material. But Mozart doesn’t really draw attention to any of these things – as he had written to his father of the concerto form some years earlier, “Here and there only connoisseurs can derive satisfaction – but in such a way that the non-connoisseur will be pleased without knowing why.”

The dreamy slow movement appears similarly calm and limpid, the surface of the music only temporarily ruffled by moments of chromatic writing. Most strikingly of all, towards the end of the movement, the pianist restates the opening melody with only a flute and the first violins doubling the tune – not a hint of further accompaniment. The music floats for bars and bars before the gravitational pull of a bassline returns. The finale is a merry dance, leaping and twirling, and the main theme of the slow movement makes a brief reappearance before the work trips to its conclusion.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827): Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 (1808)

1. Allegro con brio
2. Andante
3. Scherzo: Allegro
4. Allegro – Presto

There are few musical themes as famous, and as endlessly reproduced – from disco tracks to doorbells – as the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Those four notes, the idea of ‘fate knocking at the door’, even became a symbol of solidarity and hope during the Second World War, since the short–short–short–long rhythm matched the Morse code letter ‘V’ for Victory. (And the French artist and broadcaster Maurice Van Moppès wrote a song, La chanson des V, that began with the Beethoven theme, as a signature tune for a BBC programme for French-speaking listeners.)

One of the curious upshots of just how famous the opening of this symphony has become is that it’s incredibly difficult for us, as listeners in 2021, to detect the big problem that listeners in 1808 – the year of the premiere – would have had with those striking opening bars. Four notes (without chords), a rest and a pause… four notes (without chords), a rest and a pause… What key is it in? And how many beats are there in the bar? Beethoven leaves us hanging, without any sense of where the ground might be. We all know now that this piece is in C minor, but the opening notes don’t actually make that explicit. You can just as easily play an E flat major chord underneath them. And watch the conductor when the piece begins: the first thing written on the score is a rest, a silence. To show the orchestra when they are going to play, you have to begin by marking a beat on which they aren’t.

It’s not as if the picture becomes much clearer once we get further into the movement. The four-note motif is everywhere, permeating the orchestral texture and stacked endlessly on top of itself. The horns call out a variation of the same idea a bit later on, which is used to prompt a key change into the major – but which, since it once again has nothing accompanying it, could just have easily led us into another key instead. In other words, this is a movement all about confounding expectations, disrupting what we anticipate might happen next. And it’s for this reason that the finale, when it comes, is so insistent in its long conclusion of C major chords, forceful and repetitive. Here is home, here is a sense of having resolved and reached the key we’re meant to be in. It serves as a balance to that alarmingly unstable first movement.

Between these two outer movements come an elegant Andante, with a prominent role for the woodwinds, and a sombre Scherzo. In both we find moments of extreme dynamics (including some surprisingly forceful passages in the otherwise quiet Andante); and the Scherzo also places the horns firmly in the spotlight, rapping out the rhythm of the piece’s opening gesture, now on a single note. Indeed, that little motif is with us throughout the piece, binding it together – to the extent that we move seamlessly, and without a break, from the Scherzo into the finale.

Beethoven’s first sketches for the Fifth Symphony date from 1804, though he didn’t get seriously to work on it until 1807. It was largely complete by the Spring of 1808 and was premiered in a huge concert later that year that also featured the premieres of the Fourth Piano Concerto (with Beethoven as the soloist), the Choral Fantasy (an important precursor to the Ninth Symphony), and the Sixth Symphony. No wonder the critics found it hard to know what to write, after such a long evening of new and surprising music!

"The heart of every sensitive listener, however, is certain to be deeply stirred and held until the very last chord by one lasting emotion, that of nameless, haunted yearning.” ETA Hoffmann on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

In fact the most famous review of this particular symphony was only published two years later, by the writer and musician ETA Hoffmann. In his lengthy, thoughtful article, Hoffmann pointed to the “purely romantic” nature of music and above all, of Beethoven’s instrumental music – a very early example of this adjective being applied to music at all. He goes on to write that the movements of the Fifth Symphony seem to follow “a continuous fantastic sequence, and the whole work will sweep past many like an inspired rhapsody. The heart of every sensitive listener, however, is certain to be deeply stirred and held until the very last chord by one lasting emotion, that of nameless, haunted yearning.”

Notes by Katy Hamilton © Philharmonia Orchestra/Katy Hamilton

Meet Paul Lewis

You have performed with the Philharmonia many times in the past, and we are very happy to welcome you back. What are you looking forward to?

The Philharmonia is a fantastic orchestra, with the most friendly players. It was the first London orchestra that I played with back in 1994 – still a student. It was the final of the World Piano Competition, and I was playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3. (It seems like a completely different life – I guess it was really.)

What has it been like making music in the pandemic?

A bit solitary really. Lots of practice, lots of ups and downs. When the pandemic started, I really hit the ground running and tried to learn as much repertoire as I could. There were a lot of Mozart concertos that I hadn’t learned and wanted to. But also, a lot of things that I wouldn’t normally play – like the Copland Piano Concerto. The pandemic has presented an opportunity to get your fingers and your head around a lot of stuff that you wouldn’t otherwise have had the time to do.

In what ways are you optimistic about the future of classical music?

Music needs an audience, needs people, and I think people need music. I’m optimistic about the future of classical music because we need these experiences: once we’re able to be 2000 people in a concert hall again, we will be so hungry for it. Nothing replaces the experience of live music, of having someone create it, in front of you. I think we are desperate for that right now. And that’s what will keep it alive, the need for that personal experience.

"The Philharmonia is a fantastic orchestra, with the most friendly players. It was the first London orchestra that I played with back in 1994 – still a student."

You work to bring classical music to younger audiences, something we endeavour to do at the Philharmonia as well. What can we do to make concerts attractive to younger audiences? What do you learn from playing for children?

My wife and I run the Midsummer Chamber Music Festival and in the second year we gave a school concert for a class of seven and eight-year-olds. I played the last movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in A minor, D. 784, which is one of the most distressed and austere pieces of music, and the response to this incredibly grown-up music was absolutely staggering. I realised that you can just give children great music and there’s no barrier at that age. We should challenge children and not be guided by preconceptions about what they may or may not like.

What makes a good online concert?

A good online concert has to be prerecorded. When the audience is physically there, the little things that might go astray, the odd split note or something that’s slightly mistimed or out of place, those things just don’t matter – you don’t even hear them, because you’re in the experience. Whereas on a screen, you have to consider how it comes across without that physical experience, you need the opportunity to review, maybe do a few patches. And good camera work, with a variety of camera angles that takes into consideration what’s going on in the music, really helps.

"Nothing replaces the experience of live music, of having someone create it, in front of you. I think we are desperate for that right now. And that's what will keep it alive, the need for that personal experience."

Ryan Bancroft

"An energetic yet graceful conductor ..." The Guardian

Ryan Bancroft grew up in Los Angeles and first came to international attention in April 2018 when he won both First Prize and Audience Prize at the prestigious Malko Competition for Young Conductors in Copenhagen. In September 2019 it was announced that Bancroft had been appointed Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. This role began in the 20/21 season. Following his first visit to work with the Tapiola Sinfonietta in Finland Bancroft was invited to become their Artist in Association from the 21/22 season.

Since winning the Malko Competition Bancroft has made debuts with a number of international orchestras including the BBC Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Rai Torino and Norwegian National Opera Orchestras. In North America he has been invited by the Toronto Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Seattle Symphony and Cincinnati Symphony, among others. Forthcoming debuts include those with the City of Birmingham Symphony, Gothenburg Symphony, Baltimore Symphony and Iceland Symphony.

Bancroft has a passion for contemporary music and has performed with Amsterdam’s acclaimed Nieuw Ensemble, assisted Pierre Boulez in a performance of his Sur Incises in Los Angeles, premiered works by Sofia Gubaidulina, John Cage, James Tenney, Anne LeBaron, and has worked closely with improvisers such as Wadada Leo Smith and Charlie Haden. In June 2021 he will make his debut with the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris.

Bancroft studied trumpet at the California Institute of the Arts, alongside additional studies in harp, flute, cello, and Ghanaian music and dance. He then went on to receive an MMus in orchestral conducting from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. While studying in Scotland he played trumpet with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on many occasions. He continued his conducting studies in the Netherlands and is a graduate of the prestigious Nationale Master Orkestdirectie run jointly by the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague. As a student, his main mentors were Edward Carroll, Kenneth Montgomery, Ed Spanjaard and Jac van Steen.

Paul Lewis

"Lewis brought his customary intelligence and intensity … with endless shifts in colour and weight. The fearsome technical demands … were met with unshowy dexterity." The Guardian

Paul Lewis is one of the foremost interpreters of the Central European piano repertoire, his performances and recordings of Beethoven and Schubert receiving universal critical acclaim. He was awarded CBE for his services to music, and the sincerity and depth of his musical approach have won him fans around the world.

This global popularity is reflected in the world-class orchestras with whom he works, including the Philharmonia, Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, London Symphony, Bavarian Radio Symphony, NHK Symphony, New York Philharmonic, LA Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestras. His close relationship with Boston Symphony Orchestra led to his selection as 2020 Koussevitzky Artist at Tanglewood.

With a natural affinity for Beethoven and relentless pursuit of understanding his works, Lewis has been central to celebrations of the composer’s 250th anniversary year around the world. He took part in the BBC’s three-part documentary Being Beethoven and was due to perform concerto cycles at Tanglewood, Tiroler Festspiele Erl, Palau de la Música Catalana and Palermo’s Teatro Massimo. He has performed the cycle all over the world, including with the Melbourne Symphony, São Paulo State Symphony and Royal Flemish Philharmonic Orchestras, and was the first pianist to play the complete cycle in a single season at the BBC Proms in 2010.

Beyond many award-winning Beethoven recordings, his discography with Harmonia Mundi also demonstrates his characteristic depth of approach in Romantic repertoire such as Schumann, Mussorgsky, Brahms and Liszt.

In chamber music, he is a regular at Wigmore Hall, having played there more than 100 times, and was one of the artists selected to play at the hall’s Lunchtime Series at the start of the coronavirus crisis. He works closely with tenor Mark Padmore in Lied recitals around the world – they have recorded three Schubert song cycles together.

Lewis is co-Artistic Director of Midsummer Music, an annual chamber music festival held in Buckinghamshire, UK. He is a passionate advocate for music education and the festival offers free tickets to local schoolchildren. He also gives masterclasses around the world alongside his concert performances. He himself studied with Joan Havill at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London before going on to study privately with Alfred Brendel.

Awards include the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist of the Year; two Edison awards; three Gramophone awards; Diapason d’Or de l’Année; South Bank Show Classical Music Award; honorary degrees from Liverpool, Edge Hill and Southampton universities; appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Recital venues have included the Royal Festival Hall, Alice Tully, Carnegie Hall, Musikverein, Konzerthaus, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Concertgebouw, Berlin Philharmonie and Berlin Konzerthaus, with festival performances including Tanglewood, Ravinia, Schubertiade, Edinburgh, Salzburg and Lucerne.

The Orchestra

FIRST VIOLINS

• Benjamin Marquise Gilmore
• Rebecca Chan
• Eugene Lee
• Adrián Varela
• Victoria Irish
• Eleanor Wilkinson
• Eunsley Park – Chair endowed by Saul Nathan
• Soong Choo

SECOND VIOLINS

• Annabelle Meare
• Emily Davis – No. 2 Second Violin Chair is endowed by Nick and Camilla Bishop
• Fiona Cornall – No. 3 Second Violin Chair is endowed anonymously
• Sophie Cameron
• Julian Milone – Chair endowed by Julia Zilberman
• Paula Clifton-Everest

VIOLAS

• Yukiko Ogura – The Principal Viola Chair is endowed by The Tertis Foundation
• Sylvain Séailles – No. 4 Viola Chair is endowed by Ruth and Henry Amar
• Cheremie Hamilton-Miller – The Philharmonia Orchestra Deputy President’s Chair is endowed by The Fernside Trust
• Michael Turner – Chair endowed by Naomi and Christophe Kasolowsky
• Stephanie Edmundson
• Joseph Fisher

CELLOS

• Timothy Walden – The Principal Cello Chair is endowed in memory of Amaryllis Fleming (1925-1999) by the Amaryllis Fleming Foundation and Fleming Family and Partners Ltd
• Karen Stephenson – No. 2 Cello Chair is endowed by Jane and Julian Langer
• Richard Birchall
• Alexander Rolton – Chair endowed by Saul Nathan
• Anne Baker

DOUBLE BASSES

• Tim Gibbs – The Principal Double Bass Chair is endowed by Sir Sydney and Lady Lipworth in memory of Bertrand Lipworth
• Gareth Sheppard
• Michael Fuller – Chair endowed anonymously
• Simon Oliver – Chair endowed by Saul Nathan

FLUTES

• Charlotte Ashton – The Principal Flute Chair is endowed by Norbert and Sabine Reis
• June Scott

PICCOLO

• Daniel Shao

OBOES

• Timothy Rundle – The Principal Oboe Chair is endowed by Elizabeth Aitken
• James Hulme

CLARINETS

• Mark van de Wiel
• Jordan Black

BASSOONS

• Robin O’Neill – The Principal Bassoon Chair is endowed by Penny and Nigel Turnbull
• Shelly Organ – No. 2 Bassoon Chair is endowed by John Abramson

CONTRABASSOON

• Luke Whitehead – The Principal Contrabassoon Chair is endowed by David and Penny Stern

HORNS

• Nigel Black – The Principal Horn Chair is endowed by John and Carol Wates in memory of Dennis Brain
• Kira Doherty – The President’s Chair is endowed by Esa-Pekka Salonen in honour of Sir Sydney Lipworth QC and Lady Lipworth CBE
• Daniel Curzon
• Carsten Williams

TRUMPETS

• Jason Evans – The Principal Trumpet Chair is endowed by Daan and Maggie Knottenbelt
• Robin Totterdell
• Robert Farley

TROMBONES

• Byron Fulcher – The Principal Trombone Chair is endowed by the National Friends Council
• Rory Cartmell

BASS TROMBONE

• Barry Clements

TIMPANI

• Antoine Siguré