St Albans Symphony Orchestra: English Classics

Vaughan Williams: The Wasps Overture
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Elgar: Symphony No.1

The Wasps was Vaughan Williams’s foray into incidental music, written for a performance of a satirical production at Cambridge University.

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is a work for string orchestra based on an original composition by Tallis written in 1567.

Elgar had been planning to write a symphony for 10 years and, when premiered, his Symphony No.1 was acclaimed as ‘an immediate and phenomenal success’ and ‘perhaps the finest masterpiece of its type that ever came from the pen of an English composer’.