London Philharmonic Orchestra Premieres New Works in their 2011-12 Season

This season features several new works by leading contemporary composers Alexander Raskatov, Matthias Pintscher, Kalevi Aho and our own Composer in Residence Julian Anderson.

On 21 September the premieres begin with Alexander Raskatov's homage to Mussorgsky A White Night's Dream, a world premiere.  Modest Mussorgsky created some of the most novel music of the nineteenth century. No painstaking craftsman, Mussorgsky wrote in fitful episodes of white-hot inspiration, exemplified by the hair-raising audio-cinematography of hisNight on a Bare Mountain. Here his works are placed alongside twentieth and twenty-first century creations that will reveal just how forward-looking Mussorgsky’s music was. To end there’s the chillingly vivid realm of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death – a series of narrative songs shot through with deception and darkness, the composer’s myriad textures and creeping lines portraying a humanity confronted with the pitiful inevitability of life’s end.

Matthias Pintscher's Ma'reh for Violin and Orchestra was written for violinist Julia Fischer. She joins the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the UK premiere on 24 September. Legendary egomaniacs Liszt and Scriabin viewed themselves in as heroic a vein as Prometheus himself – bringers of light and truth to a darkened world. Beethoven’s early ballet score based on Prometheus’s moulding of mankind contains so much urgency and character; he used parts of it in the finale of his Eroica Symphony. Scriabin’s indescribable audiovisual experiment Prometheus, Poem of Fire set out to drench the audience in sound and light – ‘an orgasmic blaze of sonic and visual colours’. Many scoff at Scriabin’s ambition. But here it lives: Vladimir Jurowski conducts as award-winning lighting designer Lucy Carter re-interprets Scriabin’s world of light and colour to match the extraordinary sonic breadth of Scriabin’s music.

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