Programme Notes · London Symphony Orchestra · 8 November 2026
Adès Conducts Sibelius, Saariaho and His Own ‘America’
v3 · updated 30 September 2026 · 16 sources
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v3 · 30 September 2026 · Further reading added
- Added three recommended books: The Rest Is Noise, Moisala's Kaija Saariaho, The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius
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v2 · 30 September 2026 · Sources added; house-style edit
- Added 13 sources
- Removed em dashes
- Adès bio: 'especially associated with the music of Sibelius, of his Finnish forebears' replaced with his documented Sibelius homage (Air); added Grawemeyer Award for Asyla
- The Oceanides: 'widely considered one of the finest evocations of the ocean' now attributed to Olin Downes; removed unsupported 'lived by the water and loved it'
- Sibelius 7: premiere title placed at its Stockholm premiere; 'most remarkable compositional achievement' attributed to James Hepokoski
- Oltra mar: title meaning corrected from 'beyond the sea, in an old Occitan phrase' to 'across the sea', in old French; dates 1998–99; subtitle added; death-song identified as a traditional Pygmy song; Maalouf novel named (Samarcande); section order corrected (love, time, death)
- America: A Prophecy: noted that tonight's performance uses the 2024 version for soprano, orchestra and chorus (LSO listing)
- Anna Dennis bio: removed unverified premiere of music by Jonathan Dove; added Tom Coult's Violet, Tansy Davies, and her earlier performance of America with the New York Philharmonic under Adès
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v1 · 22 June 2026 · First published
Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)
The Oceanides, Op. 7310 min
About the Work
The Oceanides is Sibelius’s great seascape, which the American critic Olin Downes called the finest evocation of the sea ever produced in music. He wrote it in 1913–14 on a commission from an American music festival, and conducted the premiere himself at the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut in June 1914, during a triumphant visit to the United States on which Yale awarded him an honorary doctorate. The title refers to the Oceanides, the sea nymphs of Greek mythology, daughters of the ocean, but the real subject is the sea itself, in all its moods.
Sibelius captures the play of light on the waves, the swell and surge of the open ocean and, at the climax, the overwhelming power of a great wave before the waters settle again. It is a masterpiece of orchestral colour and atmosphere, its shimmering textures looking toward the Impressionists while remaining unmistakably Sibelian in their cold northern light. It makes a luminous opening to a programme exploring the sea, time and prophecy.
What to Listen For
Listen for the two contrasting ideas Sibelius wove together: a playful, rippling figure (the dancing sea nymphs, in shimmering woodwinds and strings) and a broader, more majestic theme (the power of the ocean itself). The piece is built less on melody than on atmosphere and the gradual building of waves of sound.
Follow the great arc of the music as it swells. Sibelius builds, with tremendous cumulative power, toward a shattering climax, the crash of an enormous wave, crowned by timpani and full orchestra. Then listen for the calm that follows, the waters subsiding into a few quiet, mysterious final chords. In barely ten minutes he conjures the whole living presence of the sea, from glinting surface to crushing depth.
Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)
Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 10522 min
About the Work
Sibelius’s Seventh is his last symphony and the culmination of his lifelong rethinking of symphonic form: one of the most original and concentrated symphonies ever written. Completed in 1924, it compresses what might have been a symphony in several movements into a single continuous span of around twenty minutes, in which slow and fast music, different tempos and moods flow into one another without a break, the whole growing organically from its opening bars. At its premiere in Stockholm Sibelius called it ‘Fantasia sinfonica’, as if unsure whether so unusual a structure was a symphony at all.
The result is a miracle of organic growth: themes emerge, transform and recur, the music constantly evolving yet feeling utterly inevitable. Its emotional and structural anchor is a great, noble theme for solo trombone, which rises three times out of the orchestral texture like a beacon, with a sense of hard-won grandeur and serenity. After this symphony and a few more works, Sibelius fell silent for thirty years. The Seventh stands as a kind of summit and farewell, and the Sibelius scholar James Hepokoski has called it his ‘most remarkable compositional achievement’.
What to Listen For
The key is to follow the music as a single, unbroken, ever-changing stream. There are no movement breaks, so let it carry you. Listen, near the start, for a rising scale in the strings that leads into the work’s first great moment: the entrance of the solo trombone with a broad, noble, hymn-like theme in C major that emerges majestically from the orchestra. This trombone theme is the symphony’s lodestar. Listen for its two further returns, each at a crucial structural point, the last bringing the work to its powerful close.
Between these pillars, notice how Sibelius moves seamlessly between slow, sustained music and faster, scherzo-like or agitated passages, the tempo subtly shifting, themes constantly being reshaped. There is a remarkable sense of everything being connected, growing from the same source. Listen for the cold, clear orchestral colours and the feeling of vast space, and for the hard-won arrival of the final C major cadence, a resolution that feels both triumphant and valedictory.
Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023)
Oltra mar22 min
About the Work
Oltra mar (‘across the sea’, in old French) is a large work for chorus and orchestra that Kaija Saariaho wrote in 1998–99 on a commission from the New York Philharmonic, which premiered it under Kurt Masur in November 1999. Subtitled ‘seven preludes to the new millennium’, it is a meditation on the great universal themes (love, death, time and the sea) and draws its texts from strikingly varied sources: a love poem by the Arab poet Abu Sa’id, a traditional Pygmy death song, and a passage on time from Samarcande, a novel by the Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf.
The sea is the work’s unifying image and metaphor: for crossing, for the passage of time, for the boundary between life and death. Saariaho’s characteristic sound-world suits it perfectly, with shimmering, wave-like orchestral textures, the chorus deployed for colour and atmosphere as much as for words, and the music rising and falling in great slow swells. It connects naturally to the Sibelius seascape that opens the concert and to the prophetic, apocalyptic tone of the Adès that follows: three very different visions of water, time and fate.
What to Listen For
Approach Oltra mar as an immersive soundscape rather than a narrative. Listen for Saariaho’s extraordinary orchestral and choral colours: shimmering, watery textures, with the chorus often used as a sustained, luminous wash of sound rather than for crisp word-setting. The music moves in slow waves, swelling and subsiding like the sea that is its central image.
Follow the contrasts between the seven sections as the music turns from love to time to death, with the sea returning between them, and listen for how Saariaho conjures vast spaces and a sense of the eternal through layered, gradually shifting sonorities. This is contemporary music of great sensuous beauty. Give yourself over to its atmosphere, its play of light and shadow, and the slow tidal motion that carries it from beginning to end.
Thomas Adès (1971–)
America: A Prophecy22 min
About the Work
America: A Prophecy is one of Thomas Adès’s most powerful and unsettling works. Like the Saariaho, it was written for the New York Philharmonic and premiered there under Kurt Masur in November 1999, as part of a series of pieces marking the new millennium. Tonight it is heard in the composer’s 2024 version for soprano, orchestra and chorus. Adès delivered not a celebration but a ‘prophecy’ of doom. He set ancient Mayan texts from the books of Chilam Balam, prophecies of the destruction of the Mayan world by foreign invaders, for a solo voice, while the chorus sings 15th- and 16th-century Spanish and Latin texts of war and conquest. The result is a searing meditation on the collision of civilisations, on conquest and apocalypse, with obvious and deliberate resonance for the Americas and for any culture facing its own end.
The music is correspondingly stark and visionary: the lone voice of the doomed culture lamenting and prophesying, set against the relentless, militaristic weight of the conquerors. It is taut, dramatic and harmonically arresting, with Adès’s characteristic brilliance of orchestration turned to dark, ominous ends. Hearing the composer himself conduct it, at the end of a programme threading sea, time and fate, gives the evening a stark and prophetic conclusion.
What to Listen For
Listen for the central opposition that drives the piece: the solo soprano, the voice of the Mayan prophecy lamenting the foretold destruction, set against the chorus, which delivers the harsh, militaristic texts of the European conquerors. The two forces inhabit different sound-worlds, and their collision is the work’s subject.
Adès is a master orchestrator, so listen for the vivid, often menacing colours: ominous low sonorities, sharp percussion, music that conveys foreboding and catastrophe. The vocal writing for the soprano is intense and exposed, by turns keening and incantatory. This is not comfortable music. It is a ‘prophecy’ of doom, deliberately disquieting, building a sense of inexorable fate. Let its starkness land, and notice how, after the shimmering seas of Sibelius and Saariaho, the concert ends not in consolation but in dark, prophetic warning.
Tonight's Artists
Anna Dennissoprano
The solo part in Adès’s America: A Prophecy, the voice of a doomed civilisation lamenting and foretelling its own destruction, is intense, exposed and dramatically demanding. Anna Dennis, a soprano celebrated for her command of contemporary music and her vivid stage presence, brings the keening, prophetic vocal line the conviction and clarity it needs.
Anna Dennis is a British soprano admired for the beauty and intelligence of her singing across a wide range, from Baroque opera to the cutting edge of contemporary music. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music and won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Singer Award in 2023. She is a noted creator of roles in new works: she sang the title role in Tom Coult’s opera Violet at the Aldeburgh Festival, and has premiered music by composers including Francisco Coll and Tansy Davies. She has already sung America: A Prophecy with the New York Philharmonic under Adès, and her keen musicianship and fearlessness in modern repertoire make her an ideal soloist for its exposed, incantatory vocal writing.
London Symphony Choruschoir
Two of tonight’s works call on the chorus in very different ways: as a shimmering, atmospheric wash of sound in Saariaho’s Oltra mar, and as the harsh, militaristic voice of the conquerors in Adès’s America. The London Symphony Chorus, the orchestra’s own chorus, supplies both: luminous colour for the Saariaho, stark power for the Adès.
The London Symphony Chorus was founded in 1966 as the chorus of the London Symphony Orchestra. Now an independent, self-governing choir, it keeps a close association with the LSO, performing and recording the great choral-orchestral repertoire with the orchestra at the Barbican and elsewhere, and also working with other orchestras.
Further reading
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Accessible The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Alex Ross, Picador 2008
Ross’s history of twentieth-century music includes a chapter on Sibelius and his late works, among them the Seventh Symphony heard tonight.
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Accessible Kaija Saariaho
Pirkko Moisala, University of Illinois Press 2009
A short study of Kaija Saariaho’s life and music, a good introduction to the composer of Oltra mar.
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Deeper The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius
Daniel M. Grimley (ed.), Cambridge University Press 2004
Essays by Sibelius specialists on his symphonies and tone poems, including the Seventh Symphony and The Oceanides.