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Details
Smith Square Hall
Sinfonia Smith Square
Smith Square
City of Westminster
London
SW1P 3HA
England
Tickets
Prices: 25, 222(Concessions)
Booking line: 0207 222 1061
Book Tickets
Programme
Benjamin Britten – An American Overture, Op.27
Samuel Barber – Violin Concerto, Op.14
~ Interval ~
John Adams – Harmonielehre
Performers
Charlie Lovell-Jones – violin
Chris Stark – Conductor
Programme Note
America runs through this programme not just as geography but as a state of mind: a place of possibility, of unease, of radical reinvention.
Britten: An American Overture (1941)
An American Overture was written in 1941 at the request of conductor Artur Rodziński, who wanted something for the Cleveland Orchestra — and it bears the fingerprints of Britten's American surroundings. Listeners familiar with Aaron Copland will hear a kinship in the music's wide-open orchestral spaces, its habit of placing sounds at opposite extremes of the register, leaving a vast, prairie-like emptiness in between. The piano adds a percussive, urban bite; a central section crackles with New York syncopation. It is outdoor music, expansive and optimistic.
Barber: Violin Concerto (1939)
The concerto is a work of beautiful contradictions. Its first two movements are among the most purely songful things Barber ever wrote — long, arching melodies of genuine tenderness. Then the finale arrives like a different composer entirely: a moto perpetuo of ferocious, breathless energy that never once pauses for air.
Adams: Harmonielehre (1985)
If Britten's overture is America seen through English eyes, and Barber's concerto is America in its most romantic self-image, then John Adams' Harmonielehre is America in its full, churning, late-twentieth-century complexity and one of the great orchestral showpieces of the 20th century.
Adams wrote it after eighteen months of creative paralysis, broken by a fantastical dream, and the result is music of colossal momentum and moments of profound tenderness. He deliberately reengages with tonality and large-scale symphonic architecture at a time when both were deeply unfashionable. The work takes its title from Schoenberg's 1911 treatise on theory, which ultimately led him to atonality. Adams uses the reference as a springboard to reassert the emotional power and structural possibilities of tonal harmony.
In three movements, the Harmonielehre combines the rhythmic repetition associated with minimalism with Mahlerian scale and expressive ambition, where Adams confidently reclaims tonality, building from thunderous, hammering chords to moments of breathtaking lyricism.
