Details
Royal Academy of Music
Marylebone Road
Marylebone
London
NW1 5HT
England
Programme
György Ligeti – Lontano
Sergey Prokofiev – Symphony no.6 in E flat minor, Op.111
Performers
Jac van Steen – Conductor
Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra
Programme Note
Acclaimed Dutch conductor Jac van Steen returns to the Academy for a Friday Series concert opening with Ligeti’s Lontano. Meaning ‘far away’ or ‘distant’, the title describes the piece’s style, where an eerie atmosphere is created by layers of varying musical lines, which move in different tempos and rhythms, resulting in a haze of unresolved tension. Written in 1967, the work has been used in many film soundtracks, including Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Composed 20 years earlier, Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony of 1947 is an elegy to the tragedies of the First World War. Condemned by the Soviet government for not adhering to party requirements, the work is often considered to be the ‘darker’ twin of the composer’s victorious Fifth Symphony.