The Â鶹ԼÅÄ Symphony Orchestra opens its 2014-15 Barbican season with a celebration of the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Singers at 90.
The Â鶹ԼÅÄ Singers, under their Chief Conductor David Hill, perform Judith Weir's Vertue, Tavener's Song for Athene and Britten's Hymn to St Cecilia in a concert including two American classics. In My Father knew Charles Ives, John Adams re-imagines Ives’s multi-layered musical soundscape through his own memories of playing in marching bands. Ives’s radical masterpiece, his Fourth Symphony, is an intricately woven mesh of hymn tunes, popular songs and his own music, performed by multiple ensembles playing at different speeds and in different keys. The result, which Ives never heard, is a vast, dynamic theatre of sound whose influence continues to resonate through American music today. Distinguished American conductor Andrew Litton conducts both works.
Following the withdrawal of soprano Pumeza Matshikiza from this concert, the world premiere of Kevin Volans’s The Mountain That Left will be postponed to a future date.
