Summary

This concert is private and forms a part of the English Music in Yorkshire Tour with Martin Randall Travel.

There can be few more moving tributes to Benjamin Britten (1913-76) in his centenary year than his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, six settings of English poems on the theme of evening which he composed in 1943. Dies Natalis are settings for tenor and orchestra of poems by the saintly Thomas Treherne (1638-74) by Gerald Finzi (1901-56). Around these soaring masterpieces are added Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s Chacony, the elegiac A Lament from Divertimento on ‘Sellinger’s Round’ by Sir Michael Tippett (1905-98) and the beautiful Ulysses Awakes (1989) for viola and orchestra by John Woolrich (born 1954), performed by the soloist for whom it was written.