Soulful Epitaph

About this event

Take a musical journey with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at the Portsmouth Guildhall on Thursday 25 February. Chief Conductor Mark Wigglesworth leads a programme of Butterworth, Bridge and Tchaikovsky, alongside soloist and BSO Section Principal Cellist, Jesper Svedberg. Butterworth composed his poignant Rhapsody as an orchestral epilogue to his song settings of the various Housman poems, which explore life faced by the spectre of impending mortality. Influenced by Sibelius, Debussy and Vaughan Williams, it is a ravishing epitaph that sings of the tranquil landscape from which it grew. Bridge's Oration for cello and orchestra, an expressionist concerto in one movement, alternates ghostly funeral marches with outbursts of terror and indignation. It is both an elegy for the fallen of the First World War and an anguished warning. The cello writing is exceptional – at times a declaiming speaker, at others muttering a train of thought arising from deep within the unconscious. Tchaikovsky approached his Fifth Symphony from a position of extreme self-doubt, fearing his muse was exhausted. "I am dreadfully anxious to prove not only to others, but also to myself, that I am not yet pla

Event details

Date

Thursday, 25 February 2027

Start time

12:00

Venue

Portsmouth

See venue website, Portsmouth,

Getting there & venue info

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