It’s almost impossible to hear Butterworth and Berg without our knowledge of things to come. Is the Englishman’s dreamily alluring orchestral rhapsody an eerie foreboding of his own death in WWI? Is the shrill, titanic tussle of Berg’s concluding march a premonition of the impending cataclysm? There are other influences – the poignancy of A.E. Housman’s elegiac poems, the unmistakable imprint of Mahler on Berg’s giant canvas – but what engulfs them and Elgar’s extravagant Bach transcription is the thrilling immediacy and immense power of a gargantuan orchestra. Carter’s ruminations on Wallace Stevens and two new works by English composers complete the programme.
