Venue: Albert Hall, Nottingham

Sarah Tenant-Flowers &
Jonathan Tilbrook, conductors
Rebecca von Lipinski, soprano
Wendy Dawn Thompson, mezzo-soprano
William Berger, baritone

SZYMANOWSKI Stabat Mater
NOVÁK In the Tatra Mountains
TCHAIKOVSKY
Romeo and Juliet - Fantasy Overture
DVORÁK Te Deum

Religious mysticism, nationalism,
pantheism, doomed love and a
celebration of the human thirst for discovery are themes that are explored in this fascinatingly diverse programme. Szymanowski’s too-rarely heard Stabat Mater - his first composition on a
religious text - synthesizes responses to the Polish folk music and landscape that he experienced in the 1920s in the area around Zakopane in the Polish Tatras. Twenty years earlier - on the other side of
the mountain range, the Czech, Vitezslav Novák, made his own response to this beautiful and awe-inspiring region, with
his wonderfully evocative symphonic poem In the Tatra Mountains. Dvorák was commissioned to compose a work
to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America but, in the absence of a suitable text being
sent to him, he elected to compose a celebratory setting of the ‘Te Deum laudamus’ for performance in New York in 1892. The programme is completed
with Tchaikovsky’s devastating portrayal of the ‘star-cross’d lovers’, Romeo and Juliet.

The concert finishes at approximately 9.20pm