Guy Johnston, Nicholas Morton, Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra, Martin Andre

Guy Johnston cello
Nicholas Morton baritone
Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra
Martin Andre? conductor

Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis 15’
Gurney (orch. Howells) By a Bierside; In Flanders 6’
Britten Four Sea Interludes 15’
Howells Cello Concerto (concert premiere) 37’

It’s not often that you get to hear the first performance of a piece that was begun nearly a century ago. But here, in the very building that Gloucestershire-born composer Herbert Howells came of age musically, we hear his Cello Concerto in its entirety for the first time. A newly completed final movement joins two other passionate and lyrical movements that Howells composed in the 1930s.

The rest of this programme knits together various connections between Cheltenham, Gloucestershire and the Royal College of Music. All four composers featured were students at this South Kensington crucible of the modern English musical renaissance. Howells and Gurney, teenage audience members at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival premiere, were stunned by the serene brilliance of Vaughan Williams’_ Tallis Fantasia_ in 1910. And the orchestral interludes from Britten’s breakthrough opera Peter Grimes were premiered in the very first Cheltenham Music Festival concert in June 1945.