A fascinating mix of music for our spring concert - April 6th, 2019
Monday 28th January, 2019
SPRING CONCERT 7.30pm 6th April 2019 Truro Cathedral
Three Spires often choose single major works for their concerts, or – as last November – a thematically chosen programme of pieces. For our next concert we are presenting an interesting varied mixture, this time of works that are perhaps less well known, or at least seldom heard in Cornwall.
This will be your opportunity to hear one of the great “heavyweights” of the piano concerto repertoire, Prokofiev’s Third, played by Cordelia Williams, who has been described as a “rising star” in BBC Music’s magazine’s feature “Great Artists of Tomorrow”. You may remember Cordelia giving a stunning performance of the Rachmaninov Third with us in March 2015. In planning this concert, Chris Gray and Cordelia compared lists of their very favourite piano concertos – and they settled immediately on the Prokofiev. It’s one of those pieces of music from the early 20th Century (it was completed in 1921) which seems to have one foot in the beautiful lyricism of earlier tradition and one foot in the uncertainties and dissonances of the frightening new century. It’s one of the most fascinating periods of music because of this tension.
Click here to watch, for about a minute of this video, Lang Lang with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil for a glimpse of the delicate beauty…….. and, from here to the end, to see the incredible exuberance and fun and excitement of Prokofiev’s work. If you decide to watch the whole Youtube clip, you’ll see Lang Lang also playing some of the Bartok 2nd Concerto.
The concert programme: the Singers will be performing a fine example of the Anglican cathedral tradition with Elgar’s Great is the Lord; the terrific but little heard Toward the Unknown Region, a setting of a Walt Whitman poem by Vaughan Williams (hear it here); and the Gloria by the popular John Rutter – a piece sometimes performed with brass band only but here (as with the other sung pieces) accompanied by the full colour of the orchestra. To complete the programme, the orchestra will play Vaughan Williams’English Folksong Suite.
