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Programme Note

At the 2025 International Festival, we have commissioned a series of expert essays to help you Dive Deeper into your Festival experience.

This programme note by Sarah Urwin Jones explores the Visions and Voyages you can expect to hear on the night.

Visions and Voyages 

The Nocturne for Orchestra by Elizabeth Maconchy

Born in rural England to Irish parents, Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994), was one of the most distinctive voices in 20th century music in England, merging classicism and modernism with great originality.  Like Ralph Vaughan Williams, who would later be her tutor at the Royal College of Music, she wrote her first composition aged six; unlike Vaughan Williams, who became a leading exponent of a new pastorally-inclined English music, her mature sensibility would lean more towards the central European modernism of Bartok. After the hugely successful premiere of her cantata The Land at the Proms in London (1930), she became much sought-after, although her work faded from the public eye, as was the way for most female composers, after her death in 1994. 

The Nocturne for Orchestra (1950) is an enlightening showcase of her command of orchestration. An evocative vision of night, as if in a dream, it swirls between dissonance and lyricism, moonlight and shadows, the twinkling of stars and the ephemera of dreams: night in all its spellbound beauty and menace.  

Violin Concerto in D Major by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), son of Vienna and staggeringly precocious, even by child prodigy standards, had written his much-acclaimed first ballet at the age of 11 and the enduring opera, Die Tote Stadt at 23. By the early 1930s, as the Nazis rose to power, he was flitting between a classical career in Europe and work as an increasingly-sought after film music composer in Hollywood.  

Korngold was Jewish, and by chance in America when the Anschluss was declared in 1938. His remaining family in Austria managed to escape to join him. Despite his success, Korngold never warmed to his enforced exile, watching from afar the destruction of the people, places and Viennese musical heritage that informed his lavishly-coloured works. Contracted to work on the score for the Errol Flynn swashbuckler, The Adventures of Robin Hood, he vowed never to write another piece of concert music until the Nazis, who would ban his music as ‘degenerate’, were defeated.   

Korngold seems to have begun sketching his Violin Concerto in D Major (1945) in 1937 whilst working on the Flynn drama, Another Dawn, using its main theme for the opening of the Concerto. Korngold put the work aside when the violinist who tried it out declared it too challenging, but returned to it in 1945 when he realised that his huge Hollywood success had diminished his reputation in the concert hall. Abandoning film composition from the late 1940s, he created some of his most enduring classical works, often – as throughout the Violin Concerto – reworking his film music themes.

Immediately compelling and dramatic, the violin concerto’s opening yearning theme is offset by the achingly beautiful second movement Romance, and a thrillingly energetic finale evocative of folk dance. Throughout, the violin dominates, skittering frequently up the fingerboard in a display of virtuosity that never gives the soloist (Jascha Heifetz at the 1947 St. Louis premiere) a moment’s rest. 

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), one of Britain’s best-loved twentieth century composers, was no child prodigy, but a gifted and assiduous worker, who one senses might not have allowed himself to be a prodigy even if he had noticed he had the makings. His first great orchestral success came in his thirties, after a decade spent searching for a genuine new English musical style and destroying many of his early works.  

Fascinated by history and common experience, he had been avidly collecting the fast-disappearing folksong of rural England since 1903 whilst simultaneously researching Tudor and Elizabethan choral music as Editor of the new English Hymnal. But it was the three months he spent in Paris in 1908 studying with Maurice Ravel which brought an epiphany, ‘to orchestrate in points of colour rather than in lines.’

A Sea Symphony

A Sea Symphony (1903-1909), Vaughan Williams’ first, was an immediate result, premiering in 1910 shortly after his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The oceanic subject matter of this epic work, innovatively the first truly choral symphony, was in vogue, but the structure came from the composer’s fascination with the deeply mystical poems of the American poet Walt Whitman.

Setting lines from four sea poems in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Passage to India, the symphony opens with a breathtaking brass fanfare as the chorus ecstatically announce, ‘Behold the Sea, itself’, as if defining all its majesty in one monumental breaking wave, from B flat minor to D major. A shanty-esque orchestral theme introduces ‘a chant for sailors of all nations’ by the baritone soloist, before the soprano invokes thoughts of ‘the soul of man’, and those lost at sea.

The second movement, ‘On the Beach at Night Alone’, is a nocturne for baritone and chorus, contemplating the universe and the ‘vast similitude’ under the stars. In less philosophical vein, the third movement Scherzo, ‘The Waves’, musically evokes a ship’s passage through the waves, the sopranos the ‘whistling winds’ above.  

The long final movement, ‘The Explorers’, bears traces of Vaughan Williams’ indepth studies of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.  But it is through Whitman’s ‘silent thoughts of Time, Space and Death’ that Vaughan Williams charts the mystical voyage of our souls, exhorted to ‘steer for the deep waters only’. 

© Sarah Urwin Jones 2025