A Remembrance Day concert that turns away from the tragedies of war and focuses instead on music written by artists who were deeply shaped by it, yet still produced works of hope, encouraging us never to give up even in hard times.
At its heart is Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony, a heartfelt prayer for peace first heard at the Proms in 1943, during the Second World War, by a composer who had seen the horrors of the First World War up close as an ambulance driver. The programme also includes Strauss's Oboe Concerto, which grew out of a request from an American soldier after the war, and Korngold's Theme and Variations, the work he regarded as his final opus. Oboist Sasha Puller, a British-born soloist who recently left her post at Howarth of London to focus fully on performing, takes the solo role.
