Pappano’s Tchaikovsky Fifth, with a Kendall Premiere

About the Work

The Enchanted Lake is Liadov’s most beloved orchestral miniature: a few minutes of pure atmosphere, subtitled a ‘fairy-tale scene’. First performed in St Petersburg in 1909, it is unusual among Russian fairy-tale pieces in having no story and no real melody. There is no Baba-Yaga flying past, no hero, no narrative event. Instead Liadov paints a kind of musical still life: a mysterious, motionless lake in an enchanted forest, its surface shimmering, stars reflected in the water. “How beautiful the lake is,” he wrote, “how pure and with stars and mysteries in its depths!” What mattered most to him was the absence of people and their joys and sorrows.

The whole effect comes not from theme and development but from orchestral colour and texture alone: divided, quivering strings for the rippling water; flute, celesta and harp for the glints of starlight; soft, slowly shifting harmonies that never quite settle. It sits on the border of symbolism and impressionism, a Russian cousin of Debussy’s sound-world, and it makes a magical, hushed opening to the concert before the world premiere and the high drama of Tchaikovsky.

What to Listen For

Don’t wait for a tune. There isn’t really one, and that’s the point. Instead, listen for texture and colour: the shimmering, undulating strings that suggest the surface of the water, and the delicate touches of flute, harp and celesta that sparkle like starlight or moonlight on the lake. Listen for the slowly changing harmonies that drift and shift without ever arriving anywhere definite, sustaining a mood of stillness and enchantment.

The piece is quiet almost throughout, building only to a gentle swell before subsiding again into mystery. Let it cast its spell: it is a few minutes of orchestral magic, a window onto a silent, bewitched landscape, and a reminder of what a master of orchestration can conjure from the gentlest means.

About the Work

This concert includes a world premiere: a new work for mezzo-soprano and orchestra by Hannah Kendall, commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra and given here for the very first time with Fleur Barron as soloist. Its arresting title, ‘I have discovered the secret of death’, signals the kind of poetic, history-haunted subject matter that runs through Kendall’s work, which often meditates on memory, identity and the legacies of the past.

Kendall is celebrated for music of great delicacy and originality: intricate, layered textures, surprising sonorities, and a quality of allusion and resonance rather than blunt statement. As a brand-new piece, it comes to its first audience without preconceptions. On the evidence of her other work, we can expect music that rewards close attention, that engages the voice in a searching, text-driven way, and that uses the orchestra with subtlety and imagination. The score even adds a toy piano and small auxiliary instruments to the full orchestra. Placed between Liadov’s enchanted stillness and Tchaikovsky’s fateful drama, it represents the living art of the symphony orchestra, with the LSO bringing a significant new voice to the stage.

What to Listen For

Come to this premiere with open ears: there is no recording, no familiar shape to anticipate. Listen for how Kendall sets the solo mezzo-soprano voice against the orchestra, the relationship between words and instruments, and the way the text (and that haunting title) shapes the music’s mood and pacing. Kendall’s textures tend to be finely layered and atmospheric rather than grand and declamatory, so listen for detail and colour, for unexpected sonorities and the play of light and shadow in the orchestration. Above all, let Fleur Barron’s voice be your guide through the new terrain, and listen as a distinctive composer adds a new piece to the repertoire before your ears.

About the Work

Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, composed in the summer of 1888, is one of his greatest and best-loved works: a gripping drama of Fate that travels from brooding darkness to blazing triumph. The Fourth had its Fate fanfare too, but here Tchaikovsky goes further. A recurring ‘motto’ theme returns in all four movements, transformed each time, binding the whole work into a single psychological narrative. In a notebook jotting he described the symphony’s subject as ‘total submission before Fate, or, what is the same thing, the inscrutable designs of Providence.’

The journey is from minor to major, from foreboding to victory. The motto theme is first heard, grave and funereal, in the clarinets at the very opening; by the finale it has become a triumphant major-key march. Tchaikovsky, ever his own harshest critic, came to doubt the symphony. He feared it was too colourful, too massive and insincere, and wrote of ‘something so repellent’ in its excess, though after conducting it on tour in 1889 he grew fond of it again. Audiences have never shared his doubts. The Fifth is one of the most thrilling and emotionally direct of all symphonies, and its big tunes (above all the great horn solo of the slow movement) are among the most beloved in the repertoire.

What to Listen For

Fix the Fate motto in your ear at the very start: a solemn, dark melody low in the clarinets over funereal strings. This theme is the key to the whole symphony, so listen for its return, transformed, in every movement.

The second movement (Andante cantabile) contains one of the most famous melodies Tchaikovsky ever wrote: a long, yearning solo for the horn, of heart-melting beauty, which grows into an impassioned love song until, twice, the Fate motto bursts in violently to shatter the mood. The third movement is not a scherzo but an elegant, slightly melancholy waltz (Tchaikovsky the ballet composer at work), with the Fate theme stealing in quietly at the very end as a reminder. Then the finale: the motto returns, now grand and in the major, in a slow introduction, before a tempestuous Allegro breaks out. Listen for how the music battles through to a blazing restatement of the Fate theme as a victorious march, Fate not defeated but embraced and transformed. Whether you find that ending overwhelming or, as Tchaikovsky feared, a touch excessive, it is unfailingly exciting in performance.