Our Next Concert

For this year's concert at the APEX, the Wolsey Orchestra is delighted to present a programme of music by English composers. Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his London Symphony a year or so before the outbreak of the first World War, although it went through a couple of revisions before reaching the final version that we're familiar with in the concert hall today. It is dedicated to his friend, and fellow composer, George Butterworth who had strongly encouraged Vaughan Williams to compose a purely orchestral symphony and who was tragically killed during WWI. It is therefore fitting that in the first half of our concert the orchestra will perform George Butterworth's most famous orchestral work, A Shropshire Lad - based upon a collection of poems of the same name by A E Houseman. Although much of Holst's music is very "English", his suite Beni Mora, also composed just before the outbreak of WWI, has a distinctly Middle Eastern feel to it, no doubt inspired by the music Holst had encountered during a holiday to Algeria in 1908. The orchestra will open the concert with Walton's rousing march Orb & Sceptre - written nearly 40 years later than the rest music in the concert - to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

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