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As part of its 40th anniversary season the City of London Sinfonia is touring this programme, which marks the centenary of the ill-fated expedition to the South Pole led by Captain Robert Scott. It has already been heard in Birmingham, Cambridge and Cardiff and it can be heard again in London in a few weeks’ time. Cheltenham was a most appropriate place to present this programme since one of...
One can never be sure of the right response to Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition, if only because the leader wrote to his wife that it had been 'much better than lounging about in too great comfort at home.'
The brave are often rash, and the sadness associated with those lingering deaths as the British party vainly struggled back to base, beaten to the South Pole by Amundsen, is tempered with...
The City of London Sinfonia's commemoration of the centenary of Robert Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition – they reached the south pole, but perished on their return – had a particular resonance for Cardiff. Scott's ship, the Terra Nova, set sail from the Welsh port, carrying coal as backup fuel, and was met there on its return by Scott's widow Kathleen and son Peter.
Scott's diaries and...
If you want to put Britain’s current cold snap into perspective, you couldn’t do better than attend this touring concert: an entire programme about Captain Scott, accompanied by readings from his journal and photographs of his ill-fated trek across the Antarctic a century ago. What was the temperature outside the hall in Birmingham on Friday? Minus one? As the title of Cecilia McDowall’sSeventy...
What superb timing – a concert celebrating a heroic struggle against the deep freeze of the Antarctic was staged just before the most severe weather of the winter hit the West Midlands.
The performance on Friday by the City Of London Sinfonia, conducted by the excellent Stephen Layton, was dominated by the masterly compositions of Ralph Vaughan Williams. It also featured the premiere of a work by...
Over an hour's worth of American music recorded by a British choir and none of it was composed by Eric Whitacre or Morten Lauridsen!
The real story, though, is that this is a spiritually uplifting anthology of exquisite music crafted by American composers fully deserving of the attention bestowed on them by one of Great Britain's finest choirs. Maestro Layton is a master of shading and dynamic...