Details

Religious mysticism, nationalism, pantheism, doomed love and a celebration of the human thirst for discovery are themes that are explored in this fascinatingly diverse programme. Szymanowski’s too-rarely heard Stabat Mater - his first composition on a religious text - synthesizes responses to the Polish folk music and landscape that he experienced in the 1920s in the area around Zakopane in the Polish Tatras. Twenty years earlier - on the other side of the mountain range, the Czech, Vitezslav Novák, made his own response to this beautiful and awe-inspiring region, with his wonderfully evocative symphonic poem In the Tatra Mountains. Dvorák was commissioned to compose a work to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America but, in the absence of a suitable text being sent to him, he elected to compose a celebratory setting of the ‘Te Deum laudamus’ for performance in New York in 1892. The programme is completed with Tchaikovsky’s devastating portrayal of the ‘star-cross’d lovers’, Romeo and Juliet.

Cast/Performers

Wendy Dawn Thompson (mezzo-soprano), William Berger (baritone)

Creatives/Company

Conductor(s): Sarah Tenant-Flowers, Jonathan Tilbrook