A Jubilee celebration of the unparalleled legacy of British string music, culminating in Elgar’s masterpiece for strings, the Introduction and Allegro. The programme also includes a thrilling new work from composer David Matthews written in homage of the Introduction and Allegro, and a new arrangement of Elgar’s Nursery Suite, written to celebrate the birth of Princess Margaret and dedicated to her, Her Majesty The Queen and the Queen Mother. The programme also includes Doreen Carwithen’s touching Lento for Strings and the Lyric for Strings in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of American composer, George Walker.
Book by phone via Worcester Theatres – 01905 611 427
Or at the Huntingdon Hall Box Office
CrownGate, Worcester WR1 3LD (Sat nav postcode: WR1 2ES) MAP
3 June 2022 at 7:00PM
Worcester Guildhall
High St, Worcester WR1 2EY
English String Orchestra at Worcester Guildhall
English String Orchestra
Kenneth Woods, conductor
Tickets – £16
Programme
Elgar arr. Donald Fraser – Nursery Suite (world premiere)
George Walker – Lyric for Strings
David Matthews – Shiva Dances (world premiere)
Doreen Carwithen – Lento for Strings
Elgar – Introduction and Allegro
Donald Fraser.
British born, now a permanent US resident, British Academy Award winning Donald Fraser lives and works from his home outside of Chicago.
His studio is a converted barn.
Donald entered the Royal College of Music at age seventeen to study composing and conducting. His principal tutors were Sir Adrian Boult, Humphrey Searle and Alexander Goehr. He also studied with Nadia Boulanger. In his second year he was awarded all five composition prizes and a Cobbett Prize for conducting. At nineteen he began writing for film and television and, subsequently became resident composer at the Royal College of Art Film School and composer, conductor and Artistic Associate for the Old Vic Theatre Company. Donald has also created and produced TV,Film and Theatre programmes and many sound recordings for RCA, BMG, EMI, Philips, the BBC, Thames TV, PBS, Channel 4 and independent production companies. He has composed scores for over 30 documentaries, several feature films and TV series as well as more than 120 commercials, many radio dramas and music for the concert hall. Donald’s music been heard at many of the world’s major festivals including Edinburgh, Istanbul, Perth (Australia), Hong Kong as well as on theatrical tours to the United States, China, Japan and many European countries.
His music has been widely performed and recorded by artists, such as Yehudi Menuhin, Jessye Norman, Sir Thomas Allen, Sir Andrew Davis, Maxim Vengarov, Andrew Litton, Sir Alexander Gibson, Peter Donohoe, Sarah Brightman, Eugenia Zuckerman, Anton Armstrong, Josephine Lee, Duain Wolfe, Grant Gershon, John Scott, Constance Chase, Lea Salonga, Daniel Rodriguez, Julie Covington, Jim Litton, Lionel Friend, Matthew Oltman and Robert DeCourmier among others.
David Matthews.
David Matthews was born in London in 1943 and started composing at the age of sixteen. He was mainly self-taught, though he studied privately with Anthony Milner and was greatly helped by Nicholas Maw and Peter Sculthorpe. He also learned much from being an assistant to Benjamin Britten in the late 1960s. His extensive output includes ten symphonies, five symphonic poems, six concertos, sixteen string quartets, and much other instrumental, chamber and vocal music, His music is frequently broadcast, and a large number of his works are available on CD. Many of his pieces are inspired by the natural world, by paintings and literary texts, and by collaborations with instrumentalist friends. He has also written books on Tippett and Britten, and has worked extensively as an arranger.
His Ninth Symphony was the second to be composed for Kenneth Woods’s 21st Century Symphony Project and was recorded for CD by the English Symphony Orchestra in 2018. His latest orchestral CD, A Vision of the Sea, including that symphonic poem and the Eighth Symphony, with the BBC Philharmonic under Jac van Steen, was released in 2021, and his Tenth Symphony was premiered in May this year by the same forces. He has recently completed an opera, Anna, to a libretto by the late Sir Roger Scruton.
www.david-matthews.co.uk