Brighton Festival - Vaughan Williams Anniversary Concert - Sunday 11th May 2008

Richard Hickox (conductor), Gerald Finley (baritone), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (Maurya), Matthew Brooke (Bartley), Sarah Fox (Cathleen), Gillian Keith (Nora) and Brighton Festival (Chorus).
The Wasps Overture, Toward the unknown Region, Songs of Travel and Riders to the Sea. £10, £15, £20, £25, £30.

Vaughan Williams stands alongside Britten and Elgar as one of the most popular and enduring of 20th-century English composers. Now, to mark 50 years since his death, one of his foremost interpreters, Richard Hickox, leads his own City of London Sinfonia in a special anniversary concert.

The evening opens with the spirited The Wasps overture, followed by the composer's Toward the Unknown Region, a flawless marriage of music and Walt Whitman's verse. World renowned Canadian baritone Gerald Finley then sings a rarely performed orchestral arrangement of Songs of Travel, eight poems by R. L. Stevenson in the tradition of the Romantic questing song cycle.

The second half features a rare concert performance of Vaughan Williams' haunting 'music drama' based on J.M. Synge's tragic one-act play about a griefstricken Irish fishing community. A heart-wrenching tale, its poetic rhythms and potent images of a windswept Arran Isle are perfectly mirrored in the composer's supple impressionism.

Concert to be recorded by BBC Radio 3.

Gary Numan

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13 March 2008
 

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