BBC Concert Orchestra

Gustav Holst: A Somerset Rhapsody, Op.21/2
George Butterworth: A Shropshire Lad
Julius Harrison: Worcestershire Suite
Interval
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphony No.3 (Pastoral)
.: With poetry:
Rupert Brooke: The great lover
Thomas Hardy: The man he killed
Ivor Gurney: To the poet before the battle (poem)
Wilfred Owen: Dulce et decorum est
Wilfred Owen: The letter
Siegfried Sassoon: Died of wounds
Siegfried Sassoon: Trench duty
A.E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad

Nostalgia - a painful yearning for an unrecoverable past.

In a programme of music and poetry from before, during and after the First World War, the BBC Concert Orchestra explores the shuddering resonances of that epoch-shattering conflict.

Gustav Holst in his prescient 'A Somerset Rhapsody from 1906-1907' sets the scene - 'a pastoral countryside becoming filled with human activities but surviving them all'.

An early victim of the war, George Butterworth fell at the Somme in 1916. Steeped in English folklore, his rhapsody 'A Shropshire Lad' evokes one of Housman's elegies to the idealised English working man.

Julius Harrison's 'Worcestershire Suite', a golden oldie from 1918, keeps the home fires burning with the warm glow of nostalgia.

War fostered close bonds as well as unbearable loss, and Holst's lifelong friend Ralph Vaughan Williams' 'Pastoral Symphony' can be seen as a requiem for a lost generation. It combines the evocation of a timeless rural France with a sense of 'never again', symbolised by the telling use of a wordless solo voice - as if struck mute by unspeakable, unrepeatable horror.

The Front Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall at 6pm - Ivor Gurney, his life, poetry and music
Poet and composer Ivor Gurney wrote his deeply troubled life into some of the most exquisite and original poetry and songs in English. Surviving the trenches of the First World War, he lost his fight against mental illness in 1922, and spent the final 15 years of his life locked up in asylums.

Despite his illness, he wrote and composed prolifically. He provides a rare insight into the mind of an asylum patient, and yet his work is not just about suffering; from the asylum he wrote war poetry, well after the war was over, and his work is full of moments of real beauty, humour, and appreciation of landscape. His is a fascinating voice, almost uniquely expressing his love of the countryside and his personal anguish in two mediums simultaneously.

Join musicians from the University of Cambridge and Ivor Gurney expert Dr Kate Kennedy to explore the life, poetry and music of this extraordinary man.

Free

BBC Concert Orchestra
Charles Hazlewood conductor
Rebecca Evans soprano
Laurence Fox reader