Jansen’s Dubugnon Premiere, and Vaughan Williams’s Antartica

About the Work

The Swan of Tuonela is the most famous of the four tone poems that make up Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite (1893–95), drawn from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala. In the myth, the hero Lemminkäinen is sent to kill the sacred swan that glides on the black river encircling Tuonela, the land of the dead; instead he is struck down by a poisoned arrow and dies. But the music is not about the hero. It is a hushed, transfixing portrait of the swan itself, floating serenely on the dark waters of the underworld.

Sibelius casts the swan’s song as a long, melancholy solo for the cor anglais (English horn), one of the most celebrated and evocative solos in the entire orchestral repertoire. Around it he weaves a gossamer texture of muted, divided strings, conjuring the cold, still, mysterious river of death. It is a miniature masterpiece of atmosphere, and a perfect, contemplative opening to a programme that ends amid the frozen wastes of the Antarctic.

What to Listen For

Listen, above all, for the cor anglais: its long, plaintive, song-like melody is the voice of the swan, and it threads through almost the entire piece. Around it, listen for the dark, muted strings that create the still, glassy surface of the river of the dead, for the soft tolling of harp and timpani, and for a brief swell of more impassioned feeling at the centre before the swan glides on. The whole piece moves slowly, in a hushed 9/4, conjuring an atmosphere of solemn, otherworldly calm. It is a few minutes of pure, dark enchantment.

About the Work

This concert features a world premiere: Sonnenring, a new work for violin and orchestra by Richard Dubugnon, co-commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra and given here for the first time, with Janine Jansen as soloist. The pairing is significant. Dubugnon and Jansen have a long creative partnership, and he has written several works for her, including his Violin Concerto, so this new piece comes from a composer writing intimately for a soloist he knows well.

The German title ‘Sonnenring’ means ‘sun ring’, which suggests a halo or corona, a ring of light around the sun. The LSO calls Dubugnon a master of orchestral colour, and a title like this hints at a work concerned with radiance and light, perhaps the play of brilliance around the singing line of the solo violin. At around half an hour it is a substantial piece. As a brand-new work it comes without preconceptions; what we can expect, on the evidence of Dubugnon’s other music and his rapport with Jansen, is a vivid, communicative showcase for one of the world’s great violinists. It sits intriguingly between the icy myth of Sibelius’s swan and the frozen grandeur of Vaughan Williams’s Antarctic symphony.

What to Listen For

Come to this premiere with open ears: there is no recording to anticipate. Listen for the relationship between the solo violin and the orchestra, how Jansen’s line sings, soars and is coloured by the instrumental halo around it (the ‘sun ring’ of the title may well be reflected in shimmering, radiant orchestral textures). Dubugnon is a colourful, dramatic orchestrator, so listen for vivid instrumental effects and a strong sense of atmosphere and momentum. Above all, let Janine Jansen, one of the most charismatic and intense violinists before the public, guide you through this new music written to display exactly her kind of artistry.

About the Work

Vaughan Williams’s Seventh Symphony, the Sinfonia antartica, grew out of one of the most evocative film scores ever written. In 1947–48 the composer, then in his mid-seventies, wrote the music for the Ealing Studios film Scott of the Antarctic, about Captain Scott’s doomed 1912 expedition to the South Pole. He was so gripped by the subject (the vast, indifferent grandeur of the ice, and the human courage and tragedy played out against it) that he reworked the material into a full symphony, completed in 1952 and premiered by Barbirolli and the Hallé in 1953.

The result is a remarkable, atmospheric work in five movements, each prefaced in the score by a literary epigraph (from Shelley, the Psalms, Coleridge, John Donne and Scott’s own final journal). It is a symphony of landscape and of human struggle: shimmering, glacial soundscapes; the relentless trudge of the explorers; moments of beauty, terror and desolation. To conjure the polar world, Vaughan Williams deploys a huge orchestra with a large percussion section, organ and, most famously, a wind machine, alongside a wordless soprano and women’s chorus whose eerie, textless voices float over the ice like the wind itself or the siren call of the unforgiving landscape. It is a unique and haunting addition to the symphonic repertoire, and a powerful close to a programme of cold, mythic and elemental music.

What to Listen For

Listen, from the very opening, for the great striding theme that represents heroic human endeavour, and then for the chilling sounds of the Antarctic itself: the wordless soprano and women’s chorus (here the women of the London Symphony Chorus) keening over the orchestra, the eerie whistle of the wind machine, the glitter of celesta, harp, piano and tuned percussion evoking ice and snow. This blend of the human and the elemental is the symphony’s whole world.

Follow the five movements as a journey: a grand, struggling Prelude; a Scherzo evoking the wildlife and the floes (listen for suggestions of penguins and whales); a vast, bleak central Landscape, its climax crowned by a terrifying organ entry depicting the immensity and menace of the ice; an Intermezzo of tenderness and human warmth; and a final Epilogue, in which the heroic theme returns and the explorers march bravely on. At the very end the music dissolves into the wind machine and the wordless voices alone, the indifferent landscape outlasting the men who dared it. It is one of the most atmospheric and moving of all twentieth-century symphonies.