RICHARD TOGNETTI
Artistic Director and Lead Violin
SCULTHORPE
New Work [world premiere]
XENAKIS
Shaar
BARTÓK
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis
R STRAUSS
Metamorphosen
A thrilling kind of resonance occurs when a large string orchestra performs. In the 20th century, composers exploited this phenomenon to create works of great power and beauty. Here’s a rare opportunity to hear the ACO, augmented by talented young musicians from our Emerging Artists Program, perform these incomparable modern masterpieces.
The sounds of viols and organ echo across the centuries in Vaughan Williams’ stirring and mystical tribute to the music of England’s golden age. The ‘Tallis Fantasia’ is one of the masterpieces of the repertoire, a gothic cathedral wrought in sound, both massive and ornate.
Haunted and haunting, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is deservedly regarded as one of his best works, a distillation of many of his preoccupations: symmetry, Hungarian folk music and the nocturnal sounds of the countryside. This music pulses with human emotion, from despair to joy.
Every performer is a soloist in one of the richest products of Richard Strauss’ fertile twilight years, Metamorphosen. An elegy for a country and a culture destroyed by war and for Strauss’ waning physical powers, Metamorphosen is a web of counterpoint spun on the subject of grief and resignation.
Xenakis said “the listener must be gripped and – whether he likes it or not – drawn into the path of the sounds, without special training being necessary. The sensual shock must be just as forceful as when one hears a clap of thunder or looks into a bottomless abyss.” Xenakis explores the deep links between music, mathematics and physics with visceral emotive force in Shaar.