Salomon Orchestra, Cathal Garvey & Charlie Lovell-Jones in Walton, Britten & Vaughan Williams

This 12 months is the eightieth anniversary of the ending of World Struggle Two, and organisations are discovering all kinds of how to create occasions that replicate this. 

For his or her live performance at Smith Sq. Corridor on 14 June 2025, Salomon Orchestra are joined by conductor Cathal Garvey and violinist Charlie Lovell-Jones for 3 twentieth century English works that resonate with the anniversary in several methods – Walton’s Orb and Sceptre, Britten’s Violin Concerto and Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 3 ‘A Pastoral Symphony’.

Walton’s march was written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and while the work is influenced by earlier marches by Walton himself and Elgar, it additionally displays the extra assured environment of post-Struggle Britain. 

In contrast, Britten’s Violin Concerto was written in 1938/39 and accomplished within the USA and Canada the place Britten and Peter Pears have been in self-imposed (and non permanent) exile through the conflict. The premiere was carried out by John Barbirolli in New York and it solely reached England in 1941 (on the Queen’s Corridor). Typically lyrical and elegiac, the work is in fairly distinction to Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem (of 1940) which mirrored a darker extra intense view of the worldwide state of affairs.

Soloist Charlie Lovell-Jones was a Christ Church Prize Scholar at Oxford College, he graduated in 2020 with a Gibbs Prize in Music. He obtained a Bicentenary Scholarship on the Royal Academy of Music and graduated in 2022 with the Strings Postgraduate Prize. He was the youngest-ever member of the John Wilson Orchestra and has since led the orchestra occasionally.

While Britten would write the Struggle Requiem within the aftermath of the World Struggle Two, an intriguing truth in regards to the earlier world conflict was the a number of of the composers who participated in it failed to write down such intense, offended works within the aftermath, composers equivalent to Ravel, Bliss, Holst and Vaughan Williams. RVW started concepts for A Pastoral Symphony while he was a stretcher bearer within the Royal Military Medical Corps and fairly than the English cow gazing over a fence of Fixed Lambert’s jibe, the works preliminary genesis mirrored the grim panorama of conflict torn Northern France, with a bugler’s slip in taking part in the Final Publish. The entire tone of the work is reflective. RVW accomplished the work in 1922 as A Pastoral Symphony, solely later numbering it (till his Symphony No. 4 he appeared to push in opposition to numbering his symphonies).

Full particulars from the Sinfonia Smith Sq. web site.