Mother Tongue, a new orchestral work by Freya Waley-Cohen, receives its world premiere on 6 November. Edward Gardner conducts London Philharmonic Orchestra, which commissioned the work, at Royal Festival Hall. The concert programme also includes Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin suite and Brahms’ Piano Concerto No.1 with Víkingur Ólafsson. Waley-Cohen and Gardner discuss Mother Tongue during a free pre-concert talk in the hall.

“Mother Tongue is inspired by the idea that a language holds all of the history and culture of its people and can be seen as an ancestral or even parental figure. Jack Underwood writes that ​‘the outside world, various and ready, runs parallel to the creativity of our inner lives, each tramline steering the other. And somehow language mediates’.

Each movement plays with these ideas in a different way: the first is the individual who takes a word or phrase through life with them, through new contexts that add layers and layers of meaning; in the second a whole society plays with the language, pulling grammar to its limits, inventing and re-inventing in each new generation so that meaning is always shifting; the third movement is the moment when an idea exists in your mind but you don’t yet know if a word for it exists and so it is pure and huge and whole and un-communicable; and in the forth there is the intensity of love that is built into the passing down of language from parent or carer to child and then onwards to their own child — over and over, giving the words of your ancestors, and everything ancient and modern that they hold within them, to each new generation.” — Freya Waley-Cohen