Holst’s Planets Suite at Gloucester Cathedral
Centenary performance of Holst’s Planets Suite and Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending.
Gloucester Cathedral is delighted to be hosting a very special centenary performance of Holst’s much-loved Planets Suite, in the composer’s own county Cathedral.
The Cheltenham Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Gloucester Cathedral’s Director of Music Adrian Partington in what will be a roof-raising concert of light and sound. The Cathedral’s own Girl Choristers will perform the famous ethereal ladies’ chorus that ends the suite.
The concert will begin with a performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture.
Written at the end of WW1, during which Holst spent time working with troops at Salonica, the Planets Suite is an apt start to the Cathedral’s autumn programme of events commemorating the end of the war.
Laura Kinnear, Curator of the Holst Birthplace Museum, will deliver a pre-concert talk in the Lady Chapel at 6.00pm, covering her research into Holst’s war work and the ongoing Salonica exhibition at the Museum.
The Sauret Strad returns to Gloucester …
The programme will also include fellow Gloucestershire composer Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending, frequently named as one the Britain’s favourite classical works, and composed as a response to WW1. We are thrilled that rising star Nazrin Rashidova will perform the violin solo in this work, and even more so that she will be playing it on the 1685 Sauret Stradivari.
During her PhD research into the violinist and composer Emile Sauret, Nazrin, discovered that the Stradivari instrument named after him has made at least one prior visit to Gloucester. Sauret performed at a concert at Gloucester Shire Hall on 4 April 1893.
A review of the concert in the Gloucester Journal that week reads as follows:
Gloucester has seldom had the opportunity of listening to a violinist so talented as M. Emile Sauret, to whom we are inclined to award the chief honours of the evening. Spohr’s ‘No. 8 Gesangscene’ and Mackenzie’s ‘Pibroch’ were admirably adapted to illustrate the possibilities of the violin in the hands of such a master of the violin as M. Sauret. His purity of tone was as delightful as his execution was facile, and it is high praise to say that we liked his performance as well as that of any violinist we have heard – an experience which includes Sarasate among others. There are violins and violins just as there are violinists and violinists. M. Sauret played on a genuine Strad.
We thank John Ludlow, the current owner of the instrument, for allowing it to return to Gloucester for this concert.
A pre-concert and interval bar will be available from 6.30pm in the cloisters.
The concert is on Saturday 22 September 7.00pm
Pre-concert talk: £5 - Concert tickets: £13 - £36
Explore Gloucestershire
5 September 2018
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