£39.50 (Non JG member)
Overview
Barry Wordsworth (conductor) Matthew Trusler (violin) Bach (arr Stokowski) Toccata & Fugue BMV565 Britten Violin Concerto in D Minor Op.15 Butterworth A Shropshire Lad: Rhapsody Vaughan Williams Symphony No.4 in F Minor. This Remembrance Sunday concert opens with Bach’s gorgeous Toccata & Fugue, which was orchestrated by Leopold Stokowski in 1927 and later featured in the opening sequence of the Disney film Fantasia, where Stokowski as The Conductor shakes hands with Mickey Mouse! Britten’s Violin Concerto was written in 1939 and is heavily influenced by the escalation of hostilities in Europe. Violinist Matthew Trusler makes a welcome return as our virtuosic soloist in this emotional and technically demanding work. Matthew is a most interesting musician and person, having founded the Orchid Classics record label and the charity the Lenny Trusler Children’s Foundation. He also plays in a trio (Trio Apaches) with international cellist Thomas Carroll (one of our guest soloists last season) and pianist Ashley Wass. A new CD of Matthew playing the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No.1, which he performed with the Brighton Phil at the Dome two seasons ago, came out earlier this summer. Butterworth wrote A Shropshire Lad in 1913 based on poems by E Housman. He was a great friend of Vaughan Williams (they collected folk tunes together) and this evocative orchestral work heralds the end of a particularly idyllic time for Butterworth who was to lose his life in the trenches of the First World War. Vaughan Williams’s craggy and ferocious Fourth Symphony was written in 1935 as the storm clouds of war gathered over Europe. He always maintained he wasn’t influenced by war but the symphony does copy the form of Beethoven’s Fifth, written when Napoleon invaded Austria.