Britten Sinfonia
Jess Gillam saxophone
Thomas Gould leader/director
Programme to include:
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach ‘Allegro Assai’ from Flute Concerto in A Minor
Thomas Adès ‘O Albion’ from Arcadiana
Ralph Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Dave Heath The Celtic
Dmitri Shostakovich arr. Rudolf Barshai Chamber Symphony in C minor
No stranger to our concert platform or our Schools & Community programme, Jess Gillam is the perfect person to represent ten years of eclectic programming with our Resident Orchestra.
Dave Heath’s heart-on-sleeve concerto is a love letter to his former adopted home in Fife. It dazzles, shimmers and dances, unmistakably Scottish in origin. Its slow movement shares a spacious grandeur with perhaps Vaughan Williams’ signature work constructed around an ancient English hymn tune. There is a hymn-like quality to Adès’ hushed nostalgia-fuelled arrangement from his string quartet Arcadiana whilst Shostakovich’s symphony (also an enlargement of a string quartet) is by contrast fiercely impassioned and intensely dramatic. Like other works in this programme it seems to offer us tantalising glimpses of the past, of other music, whilst retaining a vibrant personality of its own.