Amber Alchemy (UK premiere)

Program notes

About the Work

Amber Alchemy is a brand-new piece, and tonight is its first performance in the city that inspired it. Dai Fujikura wrote it for the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano on a commission from Nomura, the Japanese financial group, to mark the company’s centenary. The orchestra gave the world premiere at Suntory Hall in Tokyo on 28 September 2026, played it again in Osaka two days later, and now brings it home to open the 2026/27 Barbican season. Strangely, for a composer who has been going back and forth between Japan and Britain for more than thirty years, it is the first time Fujikura has been asked to write for the LSO.

The idea came from an unlikely place: the roof of Nomura’s London office, where the company keeps beehives. On a visit there Fujikura met a member of staff who had moved from finance into beekeeping with the firm’s support, and he found himself going back to the roof and reading about bees. What caught him was not the buzzing but the hive as a society. In his words it is “incredibly organised and at the same time completely organic”: thousands of tiny individual actions somehow add up to something far bigger than any single bee, a living architecture of labour, communication and care.

The title carries that idea in two directions. “Amber” is the colour of honey, with its warmth and glow. “Alchemy” is transformation, which Fujikura calls the heart of the piece: inside a hive nectar becomes honey, wax becomes architecture, and individual movement becomes collective meaning. There is a quieter second layer, too, fitting for a financial commission. Money also moves and is transformed through exchange, trust, risk and time, though Fujikura is careful to say the music is not literally about finance.

The music evokes these processes rather than illustrating them, so don’t expect a musical bee. His orchestral writing has long been full of shimmering, fluttering and trembling sounds, but here they are not imitations of insects. The piece is, by his own account, melodic and lyrical at root: many separate lines, each with its own shape and direction, that weave around one another, cluster together, pull apart and then suddenly line up, so that the whole orchestra seems to become a single organism. At around ten minutes for full orchestra, it is a compact curtain-raiser. It also makes a thoughtful partner for Mahler’s Second, another work about what emerges when countless small lives are gathered into one.

What to Listen For

Listen for lines rather than for one big tune. Fujikura’s material is melodic, but no single melody is in charge. Try following one strand, a violin figure or a woodwind line, and notice how it gets drawn into a thicket of other voices moving in their own directions. That busy, many-voiced texture is the hive.

Then listen for the moments when everything comes together. Fujikura describes separate lines that sometimes suddenly coordinate, so that the whole orchestra seems to become a single organism. He hopes listeners will carry away the feeling of “a complicated world somehow becoming harmonious without losing all its individual life”. These moments of alignment are the payoff of the piece. They are the musical equivalent of thousands of individual actions adding up to something larger.

Listen too for colour: the shimmer, flutter and tremble that run through Fujikura’s orchestral writing, and the warm, glowing sound the title’s “amber” suggests. Because the piece is so new, nobody in the hall has a settled idea of how it goes. That is part of the pleasure. You are hearing it at the very start of its life, played by the orchestra it was written for.