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Details
Watford Colosseum
Rickmansworth Road
Watford
Hertfordshire
WD17 3JN
England
Programme
Arthur Bliss – Choral Symphony 'Morning Heroes'
Benjamin Britten – Ballad of Heroes, Op.14
Ivor Gurney – Gloucestershire Rhapsody
Performers
Samuel West – Narrator
Ben Johnson – Tenor
David Temple – Conductor
BBC Concert Orchestra
Hertfordshire Chorus
Programme Note
This is a concert marking the centenary of the end of the First World War.
Bliss composed Morning Heroes, a choral symphony for orator, chorus and orchestra, as a tribute to his brother Kennard Bliss and all those who died in the First World War. It is a moving work of remembrance, composed by someone who had experienced the war’s horrors personally, and which contrasts the harsh realities of war with the more romantic images described in classical texts. It has been talked of as one of the finest choral works of the period.
Britten was well known as a pacifist but he actually composed his three movement Ballad of Heroes as a tribute to the fallen British members of the International Brigade who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Two of the movements are settings of poems by W.H.Auden who had fought with the Brigade. Its musical contrasts echo the uncertainties of a time when growing hostilities were leading to the Second World War.
Poet and composer Ivor Gurney who fought in the First World War, wrote Gloucestershire Rhapsody in 1919 when he was giving voice to the contrast of his experiences between the Flanders trenches and the beauty of the landscape of his native Gloucestershire.
