LONDON: St Giles Cripplegate

Sunday 23rd April, 2023

6:30pm

Event information

Welcome in the fresh spring air with LGSO.

Our Spring Concert, on Sunday 23 April, features the always dramatic and exciting A Night on the Bare Mountain from Mussorgsky, Wiseman’s The Nightingale and the Rose for narrator and orchestra, and finally Berlioz’s epic Symphony Fantastique.

Originally conceived for the never-to-be opera St John’s Eve, A Night on a Bare Mountain is one of Mussorgsky’s most popular and well-known pieces. Originally struggling to find performers willing to programme the concert, and even adding a full choir to the arrangement at one point, Rimsky-Korsakov made this Fantasia staple what we know and love today.

Using words from Oscar Wilde, Wiseman’s The Nightingale and the Rose features a narrator with the orchestra. In this beautiful story, Wilde explores the themes of love and sacrifice through a nightingale who sings for a lovesick young student, which is mirrored in the orchestral score accompanying. The student is pining for a girl, but the girl will only dance with him if he presents her with a red rose. The nightingale vows to herself to get him one. However, only one rose bush agrees to produce for the bird, and only by using the blood of the its own heart. The nightingale eventually agrees, believing the student’s love to be more important than her own life. Yet, by the time the nightingale dies and the student receives the flower, the girl he desires has already moved on – preferring the jewels of another, richer suitor.

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is a piece of program music that tells the story of an artist gifted with a lively imagination who has poisoned himself with opium in the depths of despair because of hopeless, unrequited love. It has been suggested that Berlioz actually wrote the symphony whilst high on opium, and that is effectively representing his own unrequited love for his eventual wife. The LGSO is out in full force for this most epic of concert finales and it is one not to be missed.

Narrator: Zeb Soanes
Conductor: Christopher Braime
Leader: Corey Wickens

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