London Symphony Orchestra • Antonio Pappano
For the first time, the Czech Philharmonic is opening the doors of its own subscription series to the London Symphony Orchestra symbolically on the 50th anniversary of the death of Benjamin Britten. His Sinfonia da Requiem will be heard alongside Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a work that the conductor Antonio Pappano calls a celebration of the beauty of life.
Programme
Benjamin Britten
Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20 (21')
— Intermission —
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor (68')
Performers
Antonio Pappano conductor
London Symphony Orchestra
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“Besides being a purely religious music of a Christian nature, it has a melancholy tone both in its melodic pattern and rhythm, making it unsuitable for performance on such an occasion as our national ceremony.” – Fuminaro Konoe, chairman of the committee organising celebrations of the anniversary of Japan’s imperial dynasty in a letter to Benjamin Britten
It is no wonder that having been commissioned as a piece to celebrate the ruling dynasty of Japan, the Sinfonia da Requiem was rejected as an insult. When the work was finally premiered on 29 March 1941, its dedication was solely to the memory of the composer’s parents.
“I'm making it just as anti-war as possible”, said Britten in an interview for the New York Sun in April 1940. Increasingly militant Japan had already invaded China, and its official entry into World War II was drawing near. In December 1941, Japan carried out a brutal attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor.
In February 1901, the angel of death also hovered over 41-year-old Gustav Mahler, who suffered sudden internal haemorrhaging and barely escaped a fatal outcome. He began composing his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1901 at his residence in Carinthia, where he had gone to recuperate. He then wrote the last two movements the following summer, again near the village Maiernigg, but this time in the company of his new bride Alma, who was pregnant.
According to the London Symphony Orchestra’s conductor Antonio Pappano, the tone of Mahler’s symphonies is optimistic: “All of that talk about death has a clear message, namely his love of life, not of death. Death is a part of life, but life is present as something beautiful. All of that is in the music.”
Performers
London Symphony Orchestra
The London Symphony Orchestra, based at London’s Barbican Centre, is the oldest of London’s symphony orchestras and one of the world’s leading orchestras. It is founded on the belief that exceptional music should be accessible to everyone, everywhere, which is why it reaches its fans not only in concert halls across Britain and on concert tours around the world, but also through streaming, radio, and television.
The orchestra was founded in 1904 as one of the first orchestras formed by musicians—originally members of Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra—who were dissatisfied with the working conditions there. Their historic first concert was conducted by the world-renowned conductor Hans Richter, who went on to collaborate closely with the orchestra. Over the years, the orchestra has been led by a number of prominent conductors, including Sir Edward Elgar, André Prévin, Claudio Abbado, Michael Tilson Thomas, and, in recent decades, Sir Colin Davies and Sir Simon Rattle. Starting with the 2024/2025 season, Sir Antonio Pappano has served as chief conductor, joined on numerous projects by conductor emeritus Sir Simon Rattle, principal guest conductors Gianandrea Noseda and François-Xavier Roth, conductor laureate Michael Tilson Thomas, and other artists. In addition to its home season, where it performs around 70 concerts a year, the orchestra maintains artistic residencies in Paris, Tokyo, and at the festival in Aix-en-Provence; it also has an ever-growing presence in Australia. In addition to its traditional repertoire, the orchestra has long been involved in premiering new works, and throughout its history has premiered compositions by famous composers such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Edward Elgar, Anton Webern, Aaron Copland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sofia Gubaidulina, Thomas Adès, and others.
Outside of concert halls, the London Symphony Orchestra can be heard on a number of albums. Since 2000, their own label, LSO Live, has been recording and releasing their live performances—the total catalogue now includes over 200 acclaimed titles, the most significant and popular of which is the recording of Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová with Sir Simon Rattle, Vaughan Williams’ symphonies with Sir Antonio Pappano, and Verdi’s Requiem with Gianandrea Noseda. The orchestra’s interpretive qualities are also captured on numerous film soundtracks, such as Star Wars (Grammy Award) and the Harry Potter series.
An important part of the orchestra’s activities is the educational and community project LSO Discovery, whose ambition is to bring together artists and creators with audiences of all ages. At the heart of the project are orchestra members who lead workshops, mentor young talents, collaborate with emerging composers, visit children’s hospitals, perform at free concerts for the local community, and use music to support neurodiverse adults. Concerts for schools and families introduce children to music and instruments, while the orchestra supports teachers through digital resources and educational programs.
Antonio Pappano conductor
The standing of Sir Antonio Pappano, a conductor adorned by multiple honours and awards, including the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the Order of the British Empire and the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society, is perhaps best illustrated by his current situation. In the 2023–2024 season, after more than two decades, he left the post of music director of the world-renowned Royal Opera House in London (a position subsequently taken over by Jakub Hrůša) and assume the role of chief conductor of the prestigious London Symphony Orchestra.
One of the presently most sought-after opera and concert conductors, Sir Antonio Pappano was born in 1959 in Epping, Essex, into a family who had moved to England from Italy. When he was 13 years of age, they relocated to Connecticut. The son of a distinguished voice teacher, he did not attend any music school, taking private lessons instead. After completing his training in piano (with Norma Verrilli), composition (with Arnold Franchetti) and conducting (with Gustav Meier), Sir Antonio worked as a pianist and rehearsal accompanist at opera houses in Europe and the USA. While at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, he attracted the attention of maestro Daniel Barenboim, who would name the gifted young artist his assistant. Following his first conducting experience, in Oslo, at the age of 31 Sir Antonio was appointed music director of Den Norske Opera. He served as music director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, principal guest conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and music director of the Orchestra dellʼAccademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. In 2019, he and this orchestra appeared to great acclaim at the Prague Spring festival.
He has already established a collaboration with the Czech Philharmonic in the Czech capital—he made his debut at the Rudolfinum in November 2023 as part of the Velvet Revolution Concert, alongside violinist Janine Jansen and the Prague Philharmonic Choir. Two years later, he conducted three concerts there, featuring the Czech premiere of Luigi Dallapiccola’s opera The Prisoner in a concert performance and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5. In addition to the Czech Philharmonic, during the 2025/2026 season he will collaborate with, among others, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and will make guest appearances with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Royal Danish Opera.
Sir Antonio Pappano’s wide-ranging discography primarily includes opera albums, yet he has also made numerous recordings of symphonic music, mostly by Romantic composers, as well as other works, with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Berliner Philharmoniker and other feted orchestras. Since 1995, Sir Antonio has extensively recorded for Warner Classics. Besides the Royal Opera House in London, where he has conducted productions of operas ranging from Baroque to contemporary, Sir Antonio Pappano has recently appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Staatsoper Berlin and Milan’s La Scala, as well as at the Bayreuther Festspiele.
Compositions
Benjamin Britten
Sinfonia da Requiem, op. 20
Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) was confronted with death at an early age. His father died in April 1934, and he lost his mother as well less than three years later, in January 1937. In their memory, he began composing a large-scale Requiem. In the early autumn of 1939, however, while staying in the United States, he was approached through the British consulate and asked to compose a work for the anniversary celebrations of an unspecified great power. The deadline was dauntingly short, but the young composer, living abroad during the period of the “Phoney War”, was in need of the commission fee. He therefore drew upon a Requiem he had already begun, and before long completed the Sinfonia da Requiem, the largest of Brittenʼs purely orchestral works, which (unlike most of his early compositions) remains firmly in the repertoire today.
The mysterious patron behind the commission was the Empire of Japan, which in 1940 marked the 2,600th anniversary of its founding. To celebrate the occasion, it commissioned works from several European composers, including Richard Strauss and Jacques Ibert, in addition to Britten. At first, Britten was unaware of the nature of the celebrations. Even after learning the true purpose of the commission, however, the only work he could complete in time was the Requiem he had already begun. Owing to its obvious association with Christian liturgy and its sombre overall character, the Japanese authorities regarded the piece as an insult and rejected it. As a result, the successful premiere of the Sinfonia da Requiem took place at Carnegie Hall in New York on 29 March 1941, three-quarters of a year before Japanʼs attack on Pearl Harbor. Its belated Japanese premiere followed only long after the war on 18 February 1956, with the composer himself conducting the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo.
The Sinfonia da Requiem is a memorial to Britten’s parents, but it is also a response to the ominous political developments leading to the horrors of the Second World War and an expression of the composer’s lifelong pacifism. In an article published on 27 April 1940, he told the New York Sun, “I’m making it just as anti-war as possible […] I donʼt believe you can express social or political or economic theories in music […] all Iʼm sure of is my own anti-war conviction as I write it.” The Sinfonia consists of three movements played without interruption. Scored for a large orchestra, the work traces a monumental arc: from the dark, slow lament of the opening Lacrymosa in D and 6/8 time, through the turbulent Dies irae, filled with military fanfares and driven forward with relentless momentum until it reaches the point of exhaustion, and finally to the cathartic melody of the woodwinds and strings in the concluding Requiem aeternam. With this music, we leave behind the bustle of the earthly world and touch eternity.
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5 in C Sharp Minor
Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) began writing his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1901, after a close brush with death: in February he had nearly succumbed to a severe haemorrhage and was saved only by a timely surgical intervention. “As I wavered at the boundary between life and death, I was wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to be done with it right away because everyone ends up there eventually”, he wrote later on. By then, Mahler was already well acquainted with death—seven of his twelve younger siblings did not live to the age of two, his brother Ernst died at age 13, and in 1895 Otto committed suicide at the age of 21. Four years later, the composer buried both of his parents and his younger sister Poldi. This may be why Mahler’s works are unusually full of funeral marches, one of which actually begins his Fifth Symphony.
Mahler greeted the dawn of the twentieth century in a sombre mood. Almost simultaneously, he was composing two cycles on poems by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866): the Rückert-Lieder and Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), undoubtedly two of the most beautiful song cycles in world literature. (In the Kindertotenlieder, Rückert vented his grief over the loss of both his children, who died of scarlet fever within a mere three weeks at the turn of 1834. Rückert poured out his deep sorrow in a collection of more than 400 poems, only published posthumously, in 1872). At the same time as the songs, Mahler was composing his Symphony No. 5, which opens with unmistakable “fate” fanfares, already anticipated in the first movement of his Fourth Symphony (after which a dance of death is played on the fiddle by the skeleton Freund Hein in the second movement). The first two movements of the new symphony continue in the same vein: “Their content is terribly sad, and I suffered greatly having to write them; I also suffer at the thought that the world shall have to listen to them one day”, he told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner (1858–1921). About his symphony, he further noted that it would be “in accordance with all rules, in four movements, each being independent and self-contained, held together only by a similar mood.” It is hard to say how the work might have turned out had Mahler’s life not taken an unexpected turn on 7 November 1901 with the appearance of the young Alma Schindler (1879–1964), who immediately captivated Gustav with her spontaneity. As she later wrote in her diary: “That fellow is made of pure oxygen. Whoever gets close to him will burn up.” They were betrothed in December, Alma became pregnant in January, and the wedding took place on 9 March 1902 at Vienna’s Karlskirche.
The Fifth Symphony is yet another example of Mahler’s innovative approach to form. It consists of five movements grouped into three parts. Part I comprises the opening two movements, which are thematically linked; the first may be understood as an introduction to the symphony as a whole, while the second functions as the first movement proper. The symphony’s central weight is carried by the monumental Scherzo (Part II). The transparently orchestrated Adagietto serves as a kind of intermezzo before the finale, with which it forms Part III of the work. Scored only for strings and harp, the Adagietto has become the most popular movement of the symphony and is often regarded as a declaration of love to Alma. In contrast to the oppressive funerary atmosphere of the opening two movements, it has sometimes been interpreted as a triumph of love over death; however, this view is contradicted by its later use in Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice…
The composer conducted the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in Cologne on 18 October 1904. The performance was met with whistles of disapproval, while critics dismissed the work as an “appalling cacophony” marked by “perpetual confusion”. After the premiere, Mahler commented laconically: “No one understood it. I wish I could conduct the premiere 50 years after my death.” Who knows—perhaps Mahler from the perspective of eternity may rejoice in the continuing success of his Fifth Symphony and his other works, still performed on concert stages more than a century after their creation. Yet it is now a mortal conductor who must carry the music forward, along the river of time…