London Symphony Orchestra: Online Concert Programme | Fri 29 May 2026

Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970): Symphony No. 3 ‘Collages’

1. Allegro moderato
2. Lento
3. Allegro con brio
4. Moderato
5. Vivace
6. Allegretto
7. Calmo

‘I believe in the machine,’ said Roberto Gerhard, ‘but only if imagination at all times has the upper hand,’ thus capturing the essence of his Third Symphony, with its part-mechanical, part-spiritual inspiration. The impulse for the work came – so the story goes – during a trans-Atlantic flight, as a heavenly sunrise broke over clouds high above the Irish coast. ‘Like the blast of 10,000 trumpets,’ is how Gerhard later described it. Beginning with this image, the symphony charts a journey from dawn to night in response to a line from Psalm 113: ‘From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the Lord’s name is to be praised.’ Each of the seven continuous movements loosely evokes a time of day and corresponding abstractions or images. The restless Allegro con brio, for example, summons ‘the world of man, with the darkness at noon, with his despair, his rage, his pity, his defeat’, while the Allegretto sees lights turning on in distant cities as the day winds to a close.

A student of Schoenberg, Gerhard displays here the influence of Serialism and other modernist trappings – but also the invention and musicality required to make atonal music engaging. Spare harmonics and percussive string techniques such as col legno (‘with the wood’ of the bow) are artfully dotted throughout the texture of the Lento in the manner of another Schoenberg disciple, Anton Webern. He uses a huge percussion section to ratchet up tension but balances sudden outbursts and shattering climaxes with moments of tenderness and mystery. The central Moderato, for example, which is built from widely spaced notes continuously passed between instruments, producing a kaleidoscopic, three-dimensional quality that nods to Schonberg’s ‘sound-color melody’ principal. In a gleeful violation of modernist principles, Gerhard also harks back to his Catalan roots in the tipsy Vivace, haunting it with castanets and Latin rhythms.

The subtitle, ‘Collages’, refers to the integration of a pre-recorded tape. These sputtering, indeterminate noises – built by Gerhard in his studio from found sounds and old recordings, then mixed in the BBC Radiophonic workshop – were inspired (unconsciously, he said) by the jet engines that enabled his sunrise vista. Though Gerhard had already begun to experiment with electronics, this was the first time he had combined them with a live orchestra. It was, in his words, ‘A gamble, a real adventure into the unknown’, but one which offered him a useful metaphor for the symphony’s central paradoxes: nature vs man, imagination vs machine, the meeting of spiritual and physical planes.

© Timothy Fisher

Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Four Last Songs

1. Frühling (Spring)
2. September
3. Beim Schlafengehen (Going to Sleep)
4. Im Abendrot (At Dusk)

For anyone who believes in historical ‘progress’ in music, Strauss’s Four Last Songs is a breathtaking anachronism. In 1947-48, when Strauss composed these exquisite, at times almost painfully tender songs, many continental composers were struggling to forget the past and rise to the challenge of Schoenbergian Serialism – a means of organising music without tonality, perhaps even (as the young Pierre Boulez put it) of ‘annihilating the will of the composer’. For them, Strauss’s ripe, very late romanticism was the sound of the Old World, and thus symptomatic of the very culture that had made Hitler’s rise to power possible.

And yet Four Last Songs survives while the work of most of his modernist detractors is long forgotten. The explanation lies partly in Strauss’s melodic fertility, gorgeous harmony and orchestration and superb writing for the soprano voice – the distillation of a lifetime’s experience in the opera house. But even more it is the humanity of the message that makes people turn again and again to this music. Here is a sharply focused sense of joy in life and shared love, intensified by awareness of the closeness of death. Strauss offers no religious consolation, but he shows that it is still possible: in the words of Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy, to ‘make peace with your mortality’. How he was able to do this so persuasively with Germany in ruins and news of the human cost of Nazism growing more terrible by the day is hard to say, but the fact remains that he did; and this finds expression in what is undoubtedly his greatest creation.

It is not clear in what order Strauss intended these songs to be performed, but not long after the premiere the current sequence was decided on, and it has stuck. Certainly, it makes compelling emotional and musical sense. We begin, naturally enough, with ‘Frühling’ (Spring: Renewal), but as felt by an older man. ‘September’ brings images of autumnal decay after summer’s ripeness and ends with a touching solo farewell for the horn – Strauss’s father’s instrument. In ‘Beim Schlafengehen’, the image of the soul floating free in the ‘magic circle of the night’ is captured in a rapturous duet for soprano and solo violin – the newly liberated soul’s wordless voice. The ending of a long-shared life is then evoked in ‘Im Abendrot’. Strauss’s long marriage to the formidable Pauline had not been stress-free, but his comment to Mahler that ‘she’s what I need’ was evidently sincere. As the soprano finally asks, ‘is this perhaps death?’, horn and cor anglais recall the transfiguration theme from Strauss’s much earlier tone poem Tod und Verklärung – slightly wistfully, it must be said. But then comes the warm close, with two piccolos recalling the poem’s pair of trilling larks; an image that surely needs no explanation.

© Stephen Johnson

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 4

1. Bedächtig. Nicht eilen (Deliberate. Not hurried) – Recht gemächlich (Very leisurely)
2. In gemächlicher Bewegung. Ohne Hast (At a leisurely pace. Without haste)
3. Ruhevoll (Restful)
4. Sehr behaglich (Very cosy)

In 1900, just after he’d finished his Fourth Symphony, Gustav Mahler wrote about how the work had taken shape. He had set out with clear ideas, but then the work had ‘turned upside-down’ on him: ‘To my astonishment it became plain to me that I had entered a totally different realm, just as in a dream one imagines oneself wandering through the flower-scented garden of Elysium and it suddenly changes to a nightmare of finding oneself in a Hades full of terrors … This time it is a forest with all its mysteries and its horrors which forces my hand and weaves itself into my work. It becomes even clearer to me that one does not compose; one is composed.’

Mahler’s remarks about ‘mysteries and horrors’ may surprise some readers. Writers often portray the Fourth as his sunniest and simplest symphony: an affectionate recollection of infant happiness, culminating in a vision of Heaven seen through the eyes of a child – with only the occasional pang of adult nostalgia to cloud its radiant blue skies. But Mahler was too sophisticated to fall for the sentimental 19th-century idea of childhood as a Paradise Lost. He knew that children could be cruel, and that their capacity for suffering was often seriously underestimated by adults. There is cruelty in the seemingly naïve text Mahler sets in his finale, ‘Das himmlische Leben’ (Heavenly Life): ‘We led a patient, guiltless darling lambkin to death,’ the child tells us contentedly, adding that ‘Saint Luke is slaying the oxen’. A moment or two earlier we catch a glimpse of ‘the butcher Herod’, on whose orders the children were massacred in the Biblical Christmas story.

What are images like these doing in Heaven? Apart from its ambiguous vision, this song-movement also offers one of the most original and satisfying solutions to the romantic symphonists’ perpetual ‘finale problem’. It couldn’t be less like the massive, all-encompassing finales many composers had struggled to provide in the wake of Beethoven’s titanic Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. Interestingly Mahler wrote this movement before he’d written a note of the preceding three. It was one
of several settings of poems from the classic German folk collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth’s Magic Horn) Mahler had composed in the 1890s. At one stage Mahler thought of including it in his huge Third Symphony; but then he began to see it as more clearly the ending of his next symphony, the Fourth. Even then, as we have seen, Mahler’s ideas changed as the new work took shape. At first he was thinking in terms of a ‘symphonic humoresque’, but then the ideas took on a life of their own and the symphony ‘turned upside-down’. In its final form, the first three movements of the Fourth Symphony prepare the way for the closing vision of ‘Das himmlische Leben’ on every possible level: its themes, orchestral colours, tonal scheme, most of all that strange emotional ambiguity – blissful dream touched by images of nightmare. Far from being Mahler’s simplest symphony, it is one of the subtlest things he ever created.

The very opening of the Fourth Symphony is a foretaste of the finale. Woodwind and jingling sleigh-bells set off at a slow jog-trot, then a languid rising violin phrase turns out to be the beginning of a disarmingly simple tune: Mahler in Mozartian vein. There is a note of contained yearning in the lovely second theme (cellos), but this soon subsides into the most childlike idea so far (solo oboe and bassoon). Later another tune is introduced by four flutes in unison – panpipes, or perhaps whistling boys. After this the ‘mysteries and horrors’ of the forest gradually make their presence felt, until in a superb full orchestral climax, horns, trumpets, bells and glittering high woodwind sound a triumphant medley of themes from earlier on. But this triumph is dispelled by a dissonance, underlined by gong and bass drum, then trumpets sound out the grim fanfare rhythm Mahler later used to begin the Funeral March of his Fifth Symphony. How do we get back to the land of lost content glimpsed at the beginning? Mahler simply stops the music, and the Mozartian theme starts again in mid-phrase, as though nothing had happened. All the main themes now return, but the dark disturbances of the development keep casting shadows, at least until the brief, ebullient coda.

The second movement, a Scherzo with two trios, proceeds at a leisurely pace (really fast music is rare in this symphony). Mahler described the first theme as ‘Freund Hain spielt auf’: the ‘Freund Hain’ who ‘strikes up’ here is a sinister figure from German folklore: a Pied Piper-like figure whose fiddle playing leads those it enchants into the land of ‘Beyond’ – death in disguise? Mahler evokes Freund Hain’s fiddle ingeniously by having the orchestral leader play on a violin tuned a tone higher than normal, which makes the sound both coarser, and literally, more highly-strung. Death doesn’t quite have the last word, though the final shrill forte (flutes, oboes, clarinets, glockenspiel, triangle and harp) leaves a sulphurous aftertaste.

The slow movement is marked ‘restful’, but the peace is profoundly equivocal. Mahler wrote that this movement was inspired by ‘a vision of a tombstone on which was carved an image of the departed, with folded arms, in eternal sleep’ – an image half consoling, half achingly sad, and clearly related to the Freund Hain/Death imagery in the Scherzo.

A set of free variations on the first theme explore facets of this ambiguity until Mahler springs a wonderful surprise: a full orchestral outburst of pure joy in E major – the key in which the finale is to end. This passage looks forward and backward: horns anticipate the clarinet tune which opens the finale, then recall the whistling boys’ flute theme from the first movement. Then the movement slips back into peaceful sleep, to awaken in …

… Paradise – or, at least, a child’s version of it. Sleigh-bells open the finale, then the soprano enters for the first time. Possibly fearing what adult singers might get up to if told to imitate a child, Mahler adds an NB in the score: ‘To be sung in a happy childlike manner: absolutely without parody!’. At the mention of St Peter, the writing becomes hymn-like, then come those troubling images of slaughter. The singer seems unmoved by what she relates, but plaintive, animal-like cries from oboe and low horn disturb the vision, if only momentarily. At last the music makes its final turn to E major, the key of the heavenly vision near the end of the slow movement. ‘No music on earth can be compared to ours’, the child tells us. Then the child falls silent (asleep?) and the music gradually fades until nothing is left but the soft low repeated tolling of the harp.

© Stephen Johnson