Martyn Brabbins conductor
Christine Rice mezzo-soprano

Vaughan Williams

Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus

Britten

Four Sea Interludes

Elgar

The Music Makers

The series closes with our resident orchestra performing music by three of the greatest English composers of the twentieth century.

Britten’s Four Sea Interludes are taken from his opera Peter Grimes and depict four scenes at the heart of the opera whilst evoking the beautiful, often bleak and sometimes stormy Suffolk coastline that is so important to Britten’s music. The opera deals with some of the difficult issues faced by a small fishing community and their treatment of the outsider, Peter Grimes.

The concert ends gloriously with The Music Makers, its echoes, quotations and fragments spanning Elgar’s whole musical life. The evening’s soloist is the versatile mezzo-soprano Christine Rice, whose singing has been described as ‘…glorious, subtle, wittily suggestive and sensual’ (The Sunday Times).