A Place to Call Home

The music of exile and belonging

What do we mean by ‘home’? A safe haven behind carefully-guarded walls? Or can it mean something broader – a culture, a place, a time or simply a feeling of belonging? And what is the meaning of home to people who have experienced exile, displacement, homelessness or despair? For an artist, a sense of home can be central to finding an individual voice – to the stories they tell, and the language in which they tell them. 

Music is no exception, and throughout our 2022/23 season the LPO and its guests will be exploring these questions and re-telling these stories – whether Dvořák, Smetana and Janáček wrestling a new and often joyful national voice out of the political and cultural ferment of 19th- and early 20th-century Central Europe, or an outsider like Elgar, expressing inner doubts in the midst of national celebration. Other composers faced crueller choices. Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos became a financial lifeline for a composer who lost everything except his genius when he fled Communist Russia. For Erich Korngold, writing music for Hollywood was literally a matter of life or death – an American visa was all that stood between his family and murder at the hands of the Nazis. 

The music of Bartók, Prokofiev and Hindemith echoes the tensions between new homes and old – between hope and despair – that shaped so much of 20th-century life and art. Few major composers were unaffected by that experience: Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time focuses on one particular 20th-century injustice, ‘Kristallnacht’, but draws its power from the African-American choral tradition, as well as Tippett’s own experiences of alienation as a gay man and a pacifist. Henri Dutilleux meditates on the words of Russian dissidents; an experience of inner exile that would have been familiar to Galina Ustvolskaya, who compared artistic life under Soviet rule to working ‘in a black hole’. 

And the story hasn’t ended, as wars, political instability, racial tension and economic suffering continue to force refugees across the globe to seek what might – or might not – be a better life. 21st-century music exists at a crossroads between ethnicities, traditions and identities, and although it has some tragic stories to tell, that intersection is also a place of tolerance, creativity and hope. We’ll be hearing from composers who’ve created a musical home that reflects their own identity and experience: the Syrian soul of Kinan Azmeh’s new Clarinet Concerto, Vijay Iyer’s cross-cultural visions, and Brett Dean’s powerful reckoning with Australia’s past. 

We’ll hear George Walker, Douglas J Cuomo and Derrick Skye all speaking honestly (and hopefully) about their dreams for America. And we’ll give the UK premiere of Heiner Goebbels’s A House of Call – a major, genre-defying new work that dismantles the traditional borders between performers and audience, drawing upon voices from across Europe and Asia to create a place where diversity, imagination, tradition and innovation can come together to form a new kind of harmony. A place, perhaps, to call home.