Sir Antonio Pappano: The 2025/26 Season

Sir Antonio Pappano begins his second season as Chief Conductor of the LSO this September. During the 2025/26 season, he’ll be continuing his exploration of British music, whilst also shining a light on some key American works, operatic masterpieces, and great Russian symphonies.

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‘This is my second season as chief conductor of the LSO, and I’m continuing my journey with British music. I love this music with all my heart, so I’m continuing with the symphonies of Vaughan Williams (with Symphony No 2) along with his Floss Campi, a piece for viola, chorus and orchestra, and Dona nobis pacem for chorus and orchestra. We’ll also be playing Walton’s Viola Concerto, which will feature Antoine Tamestit. He is somebody special, he makes that instrument sing and tells stories.

We are featuring Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Variations, an important piece of music that has been recorded by the LSO many times. It’s a series of variations that describe personal friends of Edward Elgar, and he just puts their initials. Now we know who these people are, their initials are at the head of every movement. There’s a backstory, and that’s all very interesting. But the humanity behind each variation and the characterizations of each friend are so varied and beautifully realised. It’s a heartwarming piece of music, and again, very stirring, very British, but very emotional too.

We also have the music of Benjamin Britten: his Violin Concerto with Janine Jansen, an extremely important piece of music that now I’ve performed with the LSO on several occasions. I’m very happy to keep returning to this piece, a masterpiece that features an incredible passacaglia.

I’m opening the season with Leonard Bernstein’s Third Symphony, ‘Kaddish’, an enormous piece dedicated to the memory of John F Kennedy, who was assassinated a few months before this piece was to be performed. It’s a very important work featuring a huge orchestra, chorus, solo soprano, boys choir and a narrator (originally written for his wife Felicia, to narrate). I’ve coupled it with Copland’s Third Symphony, a piece that Leonard Bernstein conducted like no other. It’s the quintessential American symphony. Copland uses the Americana that he used with Rodeo and Appalachian Spring within a great symphonic structure. And the piece is contemplative, exuberant and totally American; it dances and speaks of wide-open spaces.

Later in the season we preform Bernstein’s Symphony No 2, ‘The Age of Anxiety’, that is based on a text by W H Auden. It features a solo piano part, which is incredible because of its jazz nature, and it features the soloist Beatrice Rana who plays this piece wonderfully. I’ve performed it with her before, and I’m so looking forward to doing so again.

Like every other conductor, I’m drawn to the Shostakovich symphonies because of their obvious musical and political power. What draws me especially to them is their deceptive simplicity. Shostakovich can create the most moving atmospheres and the most deeply felt emotions that translate immediately to the audience. I will be performing the Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Symphonies, and each one of those symphonies comes at a very particular moment in the political history of the USSR at the time.

The Fifth was written in reaction to his Fourth Symphony being banned. Although the government thought that he had been rehabilitated and he was writing nationalist music, he was really masking his true feelings. It’s full of splendor and is very moving. The Ninth Symphony is very interesting because, in the wake of Russian success against the Nazis, he turns out and writes a small classical symphony, one of the shortest, full of irony, sarcasm and humour. The Tenth Symphony was written after the death of Stalin and, of course, there’s a feeling of freedom for the composer. However, he spends the entire first movement describing, in emotional terms, Stalin’s Russia.

Alongside Shostakovich’s Symphony No 9, I’ve programmed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Prokofiev’s enormous Piano Concerto No 2 with Seong-Jin Cho as soloist. It seemed a good idea to juxtapose the political nature of Shostakovich’s music and Beethoven’s Fifth; it’s such a strong work and something that is immediately appealing, but it’s something that you as a conductor are constantly wrestling with. What can I bring that’s new to it? It’s performed all the time by every orchestra in the world.

Well, just to have the basic energy to perform this piece and do it justice, even on a superficial level, is already something extraordinary. Does the orchestra have it within us to create something that grabs the audience for the first time? I hope so! It’s about focusing that energy and the symbiotic relationship between myself and my musicians.

Tristan and Isolde is an iconic title. It’s a piece of music theatre that challenges not only the singers to give of their utmost, but the conductor and the orchestra as well. Wagner uses the orchestra as a psychological voice that enhances and elucidates what is being said on stage. But what is being said on stage is often difficult to fathom because he uses a very complex type of language full of images – light and dark – and there’s a sense of menace about it all. And yet it’s music that requires everyone to conjure up the highest expression of romanticism, love and affection. It’s that extreme.

Opera is very dear to my heart. I think it’s something that the LSO needs to stay close to, and I certainly need to stay close to opera. I want the audience to share this lyric art with us because it adds a dimension to the season that is like no other.’