Apparition from a World Grown Alien

Program notes

About the Work

Apparition from a World Grown Alien is the second of the evening’s commissions from the LSO Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers’ Scheme, and at about ten minutes the larger of the two. Its composer, Yunho Jeong, took part in the scheme in 2024/25 alongside Laila Arafah. At the end of that year the orchestra chose the two of them to write new works, a five-minute piece from Arafah and a ten-minute piece from Jeong, to be rehearsed in workshop with the LSO and then given at the Barbican in the 2026/27 season.

Jeong was born in South Korea, moved to London in 2015 and is based in Britain. He is a pianist as well as a composer and often plays his own music. The LSO’s announcement of the commission describes his writing as shaped by ‘poetic dramaturgy’ and ‘lyrical intensity’, and says that it draws on his interest in painting, literature and psychology as well as on his experience at the keyboard.

He has written for a London orchestra before. In July 2022 his Clarinet Concerto was played at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Debut Sounds concert, the annual showcase for that orchestra’s young composers, which Brett Dean conducted.

What to Listen For

The orchestra has not yet said anything about how the piece goes. The title is the only clue, and it suggests a scene more than an abstract design: something seen, or half seen, in surroundings that have become strange. That would fit what Jeong has said about earlier music. Of the Clarinet Concerto he explained that the soloist stood for the ego and the orchestra for ‘another unconscious world’, an idea he took from psychology. Whether this piece works in a similar way remains to be heard. With no soloist this time, any such drama has to be played out inside the orchestra itself, and ten minutes gives it room for more than one change of scene.