Programme Notes · London Symphony Orchestra · 8 February 2026
Elim Chan: Bartók, a New Oboe Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances
v3 · updated 30 September 2026 · 11 sources
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v3 · 30 September 2026 · Further reading added
- Added three recommended books: Rachmaninoff: Life, Works, Recordings, Bartók, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music
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v2 · 30 September 2026 · Sources added; house-style edit
- Added 8 sources
- Removed em dashes
- Stankiewicz bio: removed unsourced birthplace, Paris Conservatoire, competition year, ADAMI award and Toulouse post; added LSO-sourced YCAT selection, solo appearances and premieres
- Colin Matthews bio: Mahler Tenth collaboration dated 1964-1975; replaced unsourced 'assisted Britten and Imogen Holst' with his roles at the Britten Estate and Holst Foundation; removed unsourced Rostropovich Cello Concerto; added Hallé post; professorship title and NMC role corrected
- Oboe Concerto: duration given as 'around twenty minutes' (publisher lists 17, LSO 20)
- Symphonic Dances: summer home specified as the Centerport estate; removed unsourced 'I thank Thee, Lord' inscription and the claim that the First Symphony was unpublished and unperformed
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v1 · 22 June 2026 · First published
Béla Bartók (1881–1945)
Dance Suite, BB 8617 min
About the Work
Bartók’s Dance Suite is one of his most accessible and joyful orchestral works, a six-movement celebration of folk music written for a grand civic occasion. In 1923 the Hungarian capital marked the fiftieth anniversary of the union of the three towns of Buda, Pest and Óbuda into a single city, Budapest, and the municipal authorities commissioned festive works from the country’s three leading composers: Ernő (Ernst von) Dohnányi, Zoltán Kodály and Bartók. The result was a memorable gala concert on 19 November 1923, at which Dohnányi conducted his Festival Overture, Kodály unveiled his great Psalmus Hungaricus, and Bartók contributed this Dance Suite. Of the three it was Bartók’s piece that travelled fastest and furthest, quickly establishing itself across Europe and becoming one of his most-performed scores.
By 1923 Bartók had spent nearly two decades as a pioneering collector of folk music, travelling with a wax-cylinder phonograph through the villages of Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and even North Africa, recording and transcribing thousands of peasant melodies. The Dance Suite distils that lifelong research, but in a special way: rather than quoting actual folk tunes, Bartók invented his own melodies in the spirit of the various traditions he had studied: Hungarian, Romanian, Arab and a kind of imaginary ‘universal’ peasant idiom. He described the work simply as ‘the result of my researches and love for folk music.’ The suite’s six short movements run together without a break, linked by a gentle, songful ritornello, a recurring ‘Hungarian’ refrain that returns between the dances and finally helps gather everything into a triumphant close.
The writing is vivid, earthy and superbly orchestrated, ranging from heavy, stamping dances to delicate, exotic woodwind arabesques. It is Bartók at his most outgoing and colourful (rhythmically driving, harmonically pungent, but always rooted in the dance) and makes a brilliant, high-energy opening to the concert.
What to Listen For
Listen for the way the six movements flow into one another as a continuous span, and for the gentle, lyrical ritornello, a relaxed, slightly nostalgic ‘Hungarian’ tune that keeps returning between the dances like a familiar face in a crowd. It is the thread that binds the whole suite together and brings it home at the end.
Within that frame, savour the contrast of the dances themselves: the heavy, lurching, almost primitive stamp of the opening; the swirling, exotic woodwind writing with its sinuous, ‘Arab’-flavoured arabesques and snapping percussion; quicker, scurrying folk-dance episodes; and a broad, warm slow section before the finale. Listen for Bartók’s brilliant orchestral colour (earthy low brass and bassoons, chattering clarinets, glinting percussion) and for the relentless rhythmic energy that drives the music. The suite gathers all its ideas into a jubilant final movement that recalls earlier themes and ends in a blaze: a concise, exhilarating tour of Bartók’s folk-inspired imagination.
Colin Matthews (1946–)
Oboe Concerto (world premiere, LSO commission)20 min
About the Work
This concert gives the world premiere of a brand-new Oboe Concerto by Colin Matthews, written specially for the London Symphony Orchestra’s own Principal Oboe, Olivier Stankiewicz, and commissioned by the orchestra. As a first performance it comes without the cushion of familiarity that surrounds the Bartók and Rachmaninoff on either side of it: there are no famous recordings to recall, no received wisdom about how it ‘should’ sound. That is part of the occasion: an audience hearing a major new work for the first time, brought to life by the very player for whom it was conceived.
Matthews is among the most experienced and respected orchestral composers in Britain, and he knows the LSO intimately; he was its Associate Composer through the 1990s. He also knows the solo concerto as a form, having written concertos and concertante works across his career. The oboe is a particularly characterful solo instrument: penetrating yet plaintive, capable of both pastoral lyricism and quick, agile brilliance, with a singing tone that can cut through a full orchestra or melt into the softest woodwind blend. Writing a concerto for a player of Stankiewicz’s calibre, a prize-winning virtuoso admired for both his beauty of tone and his technical command, gives a composer the freedom to explore the full expressive and athletic range of the instrument.
Because the piece is new, the most honest thing to say about its detail is that the score will speak for itself on the night. What can be said is that Matthews’s orchestral music typically combines clarity and craftsmanship with a strong sense of drama, line and instrumental colour, and that a concerto for principal oboe written for one’s own orchestra is, in effect, a portrait of a player and a partnership. It sits at the heart of the programme as its point of discovery, framed by two twentieth-century masterpieces.
What to Listen For
Approach this one with open, curious ears: you are among the first people ever to hear it. Without recordings to anticipate, simply follow the soloist: listen for how Matthews uses the oboe’s distinctive voice, by turns singing and plangent, nimble and brilliant, and for the conversation between the solo line and the orchestra around it.
Listen for the things a composer can do with a concerto: passages where the oboe sings long, expressive melodies above the orchestra; quicker, more virtuosic writing that shows off the soloist’s agility; moments where the solo instrument is set against, echoed by or absorbed into the orchestral woodwind; and the overall shape of the piece: how it builds, contrasts and resolves across its span of around twenty minutes. Above all, listen to Olivier Stankiewicz, the player for whom every note was written, and to the sense of occasion in hearing a new work step into the world for the first time.
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943)
Symphonic Dances, Op. 4536 min
About the Work
The Symphonic Dances are Rachmaninoff’s last completed work, a glorious valediction from the great Russian Romantic, written in 1940 when he was sixty-seven and living in exile in the United States. It is the only major piece he composed entirely in America, sketched on Long Island, at an estate in Centerport where he spent the summer, and dedicated to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who gave the premiere in January 1941. Though cast as a set of three ‘dances,’ it is in effect a late symphony: large in scale, symphonic in argument, and shot through with the autumnal melancholy, the long-breathed melody and the obsession with death and remembrance that mark Rachmaninoff’s final years.
The work is haunted by self-quotation and by the plainchant Dies irae (‘Day of Wrath’), the medieval chant of the dead that recurs across Rachmaninoff’s output like a signature. Most movingly, in the first movement he quotes (quietly, in the strings near the close) the main theme of his own First Symphony, the work whose catastrophic 1897 premiere had nearly destroyed him as a young man. Few listeners in 1940 could have recognised the reference, so this is a private act of memory, a man making peace with his own past. The finale stages a titanic struggle between the Dies irae (death) and a quotation from his own All-Night Vigil (resurrection); at the point where the Vigil theme finally triumphs, Rachmaninoff wrote the word ‘Alliluya’ in the score. It is a profound and personal farewell.
The orchestration is the most brilliant and original of his career, including a famous, unexpected alto saxophone solo in the first movement, a smoky, nostalgic voice unlike anything else in his music. The work crowns the all-orchestral programme with Rachmaninoff at his most masterly: richly Romantic, rhythmically incisive, and emotionally searching.
What to Listen For
The first dance (Non allegro) drives forward on a terse, march-like rhythm, but at its heart is one of Rachmaninoff’s most beautiful inspirations: a long, yearning melody given to a solo alto saxophone over gentle woodwinds; listen for that unmistakable, melancholy voice. Then, in the hushed coda, listen for the serene string melody that glows briefly before the end: that is the self-quotation from his First Symphony, his secret backward glance.
The second dance is a waltz, but an uneasy, shadowy one: an elegant, swaying triple-time dance repeatedly disturbed by ominous brass fanfares and a sense of menace beneath the glamour, like a ball haunted by ghosts. The finale is the dramatic core: listen for the grim, chant-like Dies irae motif stalking through the music, set against the surging, life-affirming theme drawn from his All-Night Vigil. The two ideas battle across the movement until the ‘resurrection’ theme breaks through in blazing triumph, driving to a tremendous, bell-clanging close, the final affirmation of a composer signing off his life’s work with thanks. Listen, too, throughout, for the dazzling orchestration: the biting rhythms, the glittering percussion, the rich strings and the inventive, surprising instrumental colours of Rachmaninoff’s last and in some ways most modern masterpiece.
Tonight's Artists
Olivier Stankiewiczoboe
Colin Matthews’s Oboe Concerto was written for Olivier Stankiewicz, the LSO’s own Principal Oboe, and he gives its world premiere here: a piece conceived from the first note for his sound and his artistry. Celebrated for the beauty and refinement of his tone and for a technique honed in international competition, Stankiewicz is not merely the soloist but the work’s originating voice, stepping out from the section he leads to introduce a new concerto written for him.
Olivier Stankiewicz has been Principal Oboe of the London Symphony Orchestra since 2015 and is a professor at the Royal College of Music. He won First Prize at the International Oboe Competition in Japan and was selected by the Young Classical Artists Trust in 2016. He has appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the Orchestre de Lille and the Tokyo Sinfonietta, and has commissioned and premiered works by Benjamin Attahir, Tonia Ko and Laurent Durupt. Admired for the refinement and beauty of his tone and for his technical command, he is active as a soloist, chamber musician and recording artist as well as orchestral principal, and the natural dedicatee of Colin Matthews’s new concerto, written expressly for him.
Further reading
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Accessible Rachmaninoff: Life, Works, Recordings
Max Harrison, Continuum 2006
Max Harrison’s life of Rachmaninoff covers the American years in which he wrote the Symphonic Dances, his last completed work.
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Accessible Bartók
Paul Griffiths, Oxford University Press 1988
Paul Griffiths’s concise study of Bartók’s life and music, including the Dance Suite he wrote for the 1923 anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest.
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Deeper Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music
Sergei Bertensson, Jay Leyda, Indiana University Press 2001
A documentary biography built from Rachmaninoff’s letters and memories of those who knew him, with material on the Symphonic Dances.