London Calling: Three Shows in a Row

The London Symphony Orchestra’s four-year partnership with the Music Academy of the West, which came on the heels of a similar groundbreaking deal with the New York Philharmonic from 2014-17, officially began last year. But this summer is when the entire LSO – one of the world’s great orchestras that is also well known for its travel commitments and educational endeavors – is coming to town to teach, connect and, most impressively, perform three different programs on three successive nights, July 12-14.

Former LSO music director Michael Tilson Thomas was also to make his
MAW debut for the final two performances, conducting Saturday night at the Granada and Sunday afternoon at the Santa Barbara Bowl, where the LSO shares the stage with MAW’s Academy Festival Orchestra. He had to withdraw due to health concerns, but the programmers were able to tap Daniel Harding, the LSO’s former principal guest conductor, to take his place.

We caught up with Kathryn McDowell, the LSO’s managing director since 2005 who was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2011, to talk all things LSO-MAW via email last weekend. 

Q. Why did the LSO want to enter this partnership with the Music Academy of the West? How does the arrangement benefit the orchestra’s mission?

A. The LSO’s mission is to bring great music to the greatest number of people. In order to achieve our mission we tour internationally, through LSOLive, our own in-house recording label and facility, we record and stream much of our output, and through LSO Discovery, the Orchestra’s world-leading music education and community programme, we establish partnerships with educational institutions at all levels. Music Academy of the West is our first major US LSO Discovery partnership. The LSO also works with partners in Aix-en-Provence and with the British Council on projects overseas currently including working with musicians in Japan working towards Tokyo’s Olympic Games in 2020. Each project or partnership we have is tailored to the specific needs of our partners, this can be coaching young musicians, but it can also be working with music teachers on developing their skills. This special partnership with MAW is the first time we have brought young people from an international project to our London home, giving them extraordinary access to the LSO and Sir Simon Rattle. 

How did it go with the first group of Keston MAX fellows last winter? How is it for the LSO musicians to work with the fellows from MAW back in London? Why is providing these sorts of opportunities for young musicians important to the orchestra?

It all went very well to the extent that the LSO musicians were so impressed by the MAW students that they invited them to play alongside at the concert on 10 January, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. That was thrilling to see. What a great way to end their weeklong stay with us, when the fellows received coaching, and audition training, and an opportunity to perform chamber music at LSO St Luke’s, our centre for learning, and smaller scale performance. The LSO musicians love to mentor and teach, the LSO runs a range of programmes for different ages and abilities through our LSO Discovery programme.

Education and outreach is now an inextricable part of the LSO’s DNA. LSO Discovery exists to offer inspiring musical experiences to people of all ages and backgrounds who have not necessarily had much contact with classical music and musicians.

It also provides support and training for emerging young instrumentalists, composers and conductors, and gives insight into music for members of the public who would like to learn more. LSO Discovery work is captured and disseminated digitally, for individual enthusiasts, learners and teachers in the UK and worldwide. LSO Discovery brings LSO Members into contact with a wider public, as well as developing their interests and skills.

What was the impetus behind developing the Voyager program, which has proven quite popular? Also, while it’s about space exploration in general, I imagine there’s extra resonance with the 50th anniversary of the moon landing later this month. Is that able to be incorporated into the piece?

Three times a year, the LSO presents a Family Concert in the Barbican Hall featuring the full London Symphony Orchestra. Presented in a fun and informative way, the concerts feature music based on a theme and offer the chance for everyone to get involved by playing or singing along with the audience participation piece. The LSO is proud of its association with the Star Wars movies so it’s logical that we would be keen to explore a concert that takes space and the cosmos as a theme.

The impetus for the Voyager programme came from Gareth Davies, our Principal flute, who devised and scripted the piece working with designer Victor Craven. Not surprisingly, many members of the Orchestra have other strings to their bow! 

Elim Chan, who started her LSO association by winning the fellowship a few years ago, reprises as conductor. What does she bring to the podium?

It’s great that we have Elim Chan conducting the Family Concert in Santa Barbara. Elim was the first female winner of our international Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition in 2014, and subsequently held the position of Assistant Conductor of the LSO in 2015-16. Now Elim has flown the LSO nest but we love to have her back with us every season. She is a huge talent – one of the most exciting conductors of her generation and already widely admired for her unique combination of drama and tenderness, power and delicacy.

With John Williams’ piece part of Voyager, I’m reminded how the LSO marked a milestone in recording his score for the first of the Star Wars films, as well as Superman: The Movie and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which launched an era of soundtrack recording for the orchestra. Why is this area important to the orchestra? How is that legacy still showing up for the LSO, in terms of programming, audience, direction, and how has that experience impacted other programs and programming?

As Sir Simon Rattle recently said in an interview, the LSO players made it very clear when he took up the post of Music Director “that we did not just want to go on, along the same path, they made it very clear that we want to explore more. We want to play early music; we want to play music written yesterday. We want to work in the theatre. We want to go across arts. We want to tackle the incredible masterpieces that were written after the Second World War, and we want to carry on bringing music to everybody.” The desire to investigate new types of music, to explore different environments where music can be presented or make music for film is at the heart of what the LSO stands for.

Turning to next week other two concerts, Daniel Harding was able to step in very quickly to replace Michael Tilson Thomas for the other two concerts here. Would you talk about his relationship with the LSO and why he was the right choice for the events?

Daniel Harding s among the many leading conductors who have strong and often long partnerships with the LSO. Indeed he was a Principal Guest Conductor for a number of years. I am thrilled that he had a gap in his busy schedule and he was able to stand in for Michael Tilson Thomas. He is one of the LSO special family of conductors.

Would you please provide some background on the programs, why they were chosen, how the pieces fit together, etc. – starting with The Granada concert of MTT’s Agnegram, plus Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with James Ehnes, and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.

LSO Music Director Sir Simon Rattle has been exploring the theme of roots and origins during the last two seasons of concerts. As he said recently, “It’s a journey we began together in 2018, exploring everything for the influence of European to jazz in American Music. Bartok, one of the great collectors of folk music, is such a central composer to this theme, and the LSO plays his music wonderfully.” Beethoven 250 is also one of the big projects of the next year, celebrating 250 years since his birth; this is a taster of his genius. Obviously this programme consists of works that MTT was keen to conduct, and we are all thinking of him on his road to recovery from heart surgery earlier this summer, what better way to than to hear again Agnegram, one of his great compositions.

Also with Sunday’s community concert with the LSO and MAW Academy Festival Orchestra together: Berlioz, Stravinksy and Tchaikovsky – 3 concerts with different programs in 3 days.

This is how we work all the time. We perform around 70 concerts each year at the Barbican Centre in the City of London where we have been resident Orchestra since 1982 when it first opened, and a further some 60 concerts across the world. So planning complex but balanced repertory is a key part of our planning. For example, we play three concerts in Hong Kong in September over four nights, each with a different programme and lead soloists. By presenting this kind of mix hopefully we are providing our audiences with a series of memorable musical encounters during our brief visit.

The LSO was one of the first self-governing, self-determining orchestras. How does that entrepreneurial spirit show up today?

Probably with the constant searching for and exploration of new and different ways to create, play, present, create and share great music today. That means wrestling with and embracing new technologies, which is why LSO live is such an important part of our operation.

This Week at the Music Academy of the West

Thursday, July 11: Fourteen years ago, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard honed her opera and art song skills right here at MAW’s Miraflores campus, and left as the winner of the annual Marilyn Horne Foundation Vocal Competition. Just two years later, she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Roméo et Juliette, and has performed frequently with the prestigious company ever since, including singing the role of Dorabella in a Met: Live in HD program that screened here at Hahn Hall. Her masterclass back at the venue yesterday was a special offering for the fellows prepping to offer the West Coast premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain in August in that Leonard created the role of Ada in the world premiere of the work at Santa Fe Opera in 2015. Tonight, the marvelous mezzo will wind up the public portion of her Mosher Guest Artist residency with a recital, accompanied by MAW Vocal Institute’s director of music, John Churchwell, on piano. (7:30; Hahn Hall; $55[sold out]). (Churchwell, by the way, leads the vocal masterclass at 3:15 pm on Monday, July 15 (Hahn Hall; $10.) 

Friday, July 12: Pre-events leading up to the Cold Mountain performances continue with a screening of O, Brother Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers crime comedy related to the opera in that each is influenced by Homer’s The Odyssey. (1 pm; Central Library Faulkner Gallery; free). Next up: a Social Justice Book Club discussion of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo,” a tale of one of the West African men to be captured and sold into slavery prior to the Civil War. (6 pm Tuesday, July 16; Faulkner; free.) 

Friday-Sunday, July 12-14: Blimey, it’s LSO weekend at MAW! See the interview above for more about the Voyager family program at the Granada on July 12, a “regular” program by the London Symphony Orchestra at the same jewel of a hall on July 13, and the Community Concert in which the LSO shares the stage with the fellows-powered Academy Festival Orchestra at the al fresco Santa Barbara Bowl on July 14. 

Tuesday, July 16: MAW’s Faculty Artists Series offers another veritable variety pack of chamber music mixing up the pros with the “students” via Dahl’s Music for Brass (with Paul Merkelo trumpet; Mark H. Lawrence and fellow Kevin Carlson trombone; and fellow Colin Benton tuba), Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C Minor, Op. 1, No. 3 (Martin Beaver violin; fellow Kelcey Howell cello; and Natasha Kislenko piano), and Mozart’s String Quintet in C Major, K. 515, played by violinists Martin Beaver and (fellow) Amy Semes, violists Karen Dreyfus and Richard O’Neill, and cello fellow Soyoon Park. When the music steps, everybody gets to mix it up via the complimentary reception with the artists outdoors in the courtyard. (7:30 pm; Lobero Theatre; $46.) 

Wednesday, July 17: In addition to the concert performances, Michael Tilson Thomas’ withdrawal for health reasons created an opening for leading a vocal masterclass that has been impressively filled by Gerald Martin Moore, an internationally renowned singing teacher and a vocal consultant who has worked closely with Renée Fleming for many years as well as Natalie Dessay, Marie McLaughlin, Sabine Devielhe, Erin Morley, Elīna Garanča, and Sarah Connolly. A member of the teaching faculty of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann program and adjunct faculty at Curtis Institute of Music, a frequent judge for prestigious vocal competitions, and the regular host of the Metropolitan Opera Quiz, Moore is perfectly positioned to put MAW’s vocal fellows through their paces. (3:15 pm; Hahn; $10.)