Artistic Director's Notes March 2026 Concert

There is an art, or magic, to making concert programs. One has to judge the styles of the pieces, the lengths, and how taxing the pieces are for the performers. Sometimes we work from a program theme - a Christmas Concert, or a Concert of Mozart's music (I may be hinting at some concerts for our next season here!). And then sometimes we start programming a concert for more prosaic reasons.

This concert started from a prosaic place. In 2024, we received a sizeable grant to purchase some new music for our library. I have decided that we would use at least one piece from this expanded library in each of our upcoming concerts. After our performance of Haydn's Farewell Symphony last June (it has been years since the Orchestra performed a full symphony), I thought that I would like to perform a Beethoven symphony, and the 6th Symphony came to mind straight away (and we had just purchased a set of parts for it). The 6th Symphony is the first (or at least, one of the first) well-known programmatic pieces, i.e., there is a program (a story) that the composer wants to share with the listener. This is in opposition to what musicologists call absolute music, i.e., music that exists without a specific narrative program. The Romantic period of music saw a rapid development of more programmatic pieces being written.

The Beethoven 6th Symphony is called "The Pastoral" and suggests images and thoughts of the countryside - at least the countryside of Beethoven's time. It didn't take me too long to think of another piece, written at the end of the Romantic Period, that also expressively was about images - Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, orchestrated by Maurice Ravel. The Lark Ascending came next to my mind. Again, this piece is programmatic, but the program is more diffuse and more about the idea of a bird singing in the English countryside, rather than using accurate bird calls. It would take a further 10-20 years before the French composer Olivier Messiaen started to create works based on accurately notated birdsong.

Another rather prosaic thought about creating this program was that the pieces don't use all the performers. The brass and percussion are hardly used in the Beethoven (and the tuba is completely absent), and the Vaughan Williams uses a full string section, but a small number of other instruments. The solution came to me that I would write a piece of music that used all the instruments in the orchestra, and also didn't tax the strings too much. Perhaps this is an advantage of having an Artistic Director who is also a composer.

I hope you enjoy this concert, and I want to thank all my hard-working performing colleagues from the orchestra who turn up every Saturday for rehearsal. I want to thank David Bui for his hard work - it has been amazing to work with such a knowledgeable conductor.

And finally, I would like to thank all the volunteers who helped set the concert up, and ran the Front of House (our usual FoH Manager is off overseas) and handled the concessions and the raffle. Thank you all.