Britten Sinfonia - Birtwistle at 80: Fields of Sorrow

Baldur Bronnimann, conductor

Maxim Rysanov, viola

Eamonn Dougan, Britten Sinfonia Voices Director

Britten Sinfonia Voices

Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

Holst If you love songs, Lovely venus, David’s Lament for Jonathan, The Fields of Sorrow

Harrison Birtwistle The Fields of Sorrow

Harrison Birtwistle Melencolia I

Vaughan Williams Flos Campi

A fascinating programme of music which traces three major English composers responses to landscape and national identity. Vaughan Williams’ unique pastoral elegy Flos Campi (Flowers of the Field) explores a landscape of physical and spiritual longing, whilst Holst’s Fields of Sorrow is a cold and bleak emotional journey.  Using the same Ausonius text as Holst, Harrison Birtwistle demonstrates a highly individual continuation of the English pastoral tradition that has its roots in the rediscovery of landscape as a creative force.


TICKETS: available from the Cambridge Corn Exchange. Box office tel: 01223 357851; email: boxoffice@cambridge.gov.uk; online: cornex. co.uk/boxoffice