Stephan/Walton/Howells/ Shostakovich
19:30
Fri 16 Nov 2018
The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
In 1915 Rudi Stephan’s promising career was cut brutally short when a sniper shot and killed the 28-year-old German composer on the Eastern Front. A rarity well worth reviving in a second concert reflecting on the Armistice, Stephan’s Music for Orchestra (1912) opens a concert that also features Herbert Howells’s moving tribute to Francis Purcell Warren, a fellow composer who died on the battlefields a year later, and Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, a profoundly brave riposte to Stalin, written as the Second World War drew to a close.
Lawrence Power takes the spotlight in Walton’s haunting Viola Concerto.