Article: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
On Sunday 26 January we opened our flagship 2025 season with Music Director Vasily Petrenko, Lights in the Dark, to a packed Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre. Featuring Stravisnky’s The Rite of Spring, Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5, the theme of the evening was music that pushed at the boundries of established conventions, hailing new and rapidly-changing eras in both music and society. Lights in the Dark at Southbank Centre and the Royal Albert Hall highlights music composed during dark times, be it turbulent historical events or personal struggles suffered by composers.
We were grateful to Boris Giltburg for stepping in to replace Paul Lewis and perform Beethoven with very short notice.
Read on to view more photos and reactions from the day.
All photos © Frances Marshall
The concert opened with Vasily introducing the series and the afternoon’s programme, providing context to the composition of each piece – the development of ballet as an art form under Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the Napoleonic wars that deafened Beethoven’s already-failing ears, and the powder keg of a politically volatile and industrialised society that preceded the First World War.
Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra opened the performance. Having suffered audience jeers and savage reviews for the premiere of his previous Altenberg Lieder in Vienna in 1913, Berg had a crisis of confidence and radically altered his style of composition. The result was the Three Pieces for Orchestra, a piece split into a Präludium, Reigen and Marsch which demanded enormous symphonic forces, including a percussive hammer reminiscent of the one deployed in Mahler’s Symphony No.6. Dedicated to his mentor Arnold Schonberg and written in the same style of his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Berg sought redemption and a new path for his music. Berg’s gifts for drama and textual complexity would continue to shine through in his next work, the opera Wozzeck.
Living in a bombarded Vienna in 1809, Beethoven would write to his publisher “We have suffered a great deal… I have produced hardly any unified work, just a fragment here and there. The whole course of events has profoundly affected me, nor can I have the enjoyment of country life, so indispensable to me… What a dreadful, messy life around me, nothing but drums, cannon, men, all kinds of misery.” It was in these circumstances he wrote his Fifth Piano Concerto, a concerto that innovated the form by opening with a single heroic chord from the orchestra, answered by a cadenza-like passage from the soloist. The epithet ‘Emperor’ was not an attribution by Beethoven – the composer himself had much disapproved of Napoleon’s ascent to total power.
In 1913 another premiere caused an uproar, this time in Paris. Following the success of Petrushka and The Firebird, Diaghilev and Stravinsky’s third ballet produced together would be choreographed by Michel Fokine. From the beginning of its premiere, The Rite of Spring prompted shouting matches between its detractors and the more radical-leaning supporters of this bold new work and its dance style, disconcerting rhythms and harmonic dissonances, a rebuttal of the Debussian dreamlike impressionism popular in France at the time. Stravinsky had a startlingly clear vision: a pagan girl dancing herself to death, an offering to the old gods of the earth. This drive to reach back into human history perhaps explains the proliferation of traditional folk tunes within the piece. In the end, Stravinsky’s conjuration of primal forces would leave music itself changed forever.
Photo: © Frances Marshall