Summer Concert

Sat 12 June 2010  7:45pm - The Anvil, Basingstoke

Conductor:    Stephen Scotchmer

Programme:

Basingstoke Symphony Orchestra presents a delightfully suitable programme of music for the summer, commencing with the overture to Schumann’s only opera and ending with a work inspired by an Italian summer.

Schumann’s recently revived opera is based on a medieval legend in which the love between a Duke and his wife Genoveva ultimately triumphs, despite the best efforts of a servant who is overwhelmed by his desire for Genoveva.

Richard Strauss wrote his first horn concerto in 1883, at the age of eighteen.  The work was written for his father, a professional horn player, but the elder Strauss found the work too difficult.  The soloist in this performance is up to the challenge: Angela Barnes is a former winner of the brass round in the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition and currently plays second horn in the London Symphony Orchestra. 

Stephen Scotchmer’s Fantasy is a voluptuous work for full symphony orchestra.  It juxtaposes humour and pathos within a style that is reminiscent of film music.  Started over thirty years ago, the final orchestration has been written to suit the strengths of the BSO.    

Sibelius’s second symphony, written in 1901 while he was travelling in Italy and central Europe with his wife and young family, was first performed in Helsinki in March 1902. The work is the most popular and most frequently recorded of Sibelius's symphonies. The violent Slavic gloom of the first symphony is replaced by a more classical touch and by the light and mood of the Mediterranean.  The heroic and optimistic outer movements of the symphony were exactly what the Finnish public needed in 1902, during a period of Russian oppression. The conductor Simon Parmet described the work as “...a song of praise for summer and the joy of life."