Bliss – Things to Come
Butterworth – A Shropshire Lad
Gurney arr Keedes – Severn Meadows (soloist Lorna Anderson)
Vaughan Williams – A London Symphony (no 2)
This is the fourth and final Centenary Commemoration concert given by SCO over the past four years to mark the events of one hundred years ago. SCO are delighted to welcome back Lorna Anderson to sing the haunting and moving song cycle Severn Meadows by Ivor Gurney. Five of the songs were written whilst on active service in Flanders. George Butterworth wrote A Shropshire Lad in the shadow of the Second Boer War and many hear in it a premonition of his death on the Somme. Things to Come by Arthur Bliss written in 1936, paints a dark and sinister picture of the future whilst Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony, another work inspired by a novel by H.G Wells, captures the hustle and bustle of city life, as well as it’s grandeur.