Friday 16 January 2009 at 7.30 p.m.
ST PAUL'S STRINGS
Elgar - Serenade for Strings
Britten - Lachrymae
Vaughan Williams - Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis
Britten - Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge
Andrew Thorn - viola
Andrew Morley - conductor
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As the New Year opens, a new group from St Paul's Sinfonia. This season we are showcasing both halves of the orchestra - the wind and the strings. The all-wind concert takes place in March. This month, the all-string concert focuses on the wealth of great music for string orchestra written by English composers of the twentieth century.
Elgar's Serenade for Strings actually dates from the last decade of the nineteenth century, but looks forward towards the style of the more ambitious Introduction and Allegro of 1905. Like many English composers, he took much of his inspiration from earlier English composers (he said he learned to write for strings from Handel), and the next two pieces look back explicitly to the late Renaissance. Britten's Lachrymae is a set of variations on a song by John Dowland, for solo viola and strings, which was originally written for the great Scottish violist William Primrose and has a great lyricism and beauty. Vaughan Williams's masterpiece, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, dates from only twenty years after Elgar's Serenade, but is unequivocally twentieth-century in its musical language, and proved to be a great inspiration for many of the English composers of the early twentieth century.
Finally in this concert comes one of Britten's earliest triumphs, the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge of 1937. With its witty parody of a wide variety of musical styles, coupled with an absolute mastery of form, and also acting as an affectionate tribute to his teacher and inspiration, it is one of the greatest works for string orchestra of the twentieth century, and brings this concert to a rousing conclusion
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Tickets £10/£8 - available on the door before each concert
