麻豆社

Live at 麻豆社 Proms: Sir Andrew Davis conducts the 麻豆社 Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Vaughan Williams and a new work by Anthony Payne. And Ray Chen plays Bruch's Violin Concerto.

Live from the Royal Albert Hall, London
Presented by Ian Skelly

Tchaikovsky: The Tempest
Anthony Payne: Of Land, Sea and Sky (麻豆社 commission: world premiere)

c. 20.10 PROMS INTERVAL: A Walk in the Darent Valley
Writer Melissa Harrison describes a classic English midsummer walk in a thunderstorm. An excerpt from her acclaimed collection Rain: Four Walks in English Weather.

c. 20.30
Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor
Vaughan Williams: Toward the Unknown Region

Ray Chen, violin
麻豆社 Symphony Chorus
麻豆社 Symphony Orchestra
Sir Andrew Davis, conductor

Vaughan Williams's Toward the Unknown Region was his first large-scale masterpiece, setting the visionary words of Walt Whitman. Sir Andrew Davis also conducts Tchaikovsky's swashbuckling The Tempest and the world premiere of Anthony Payne's Of Land, Sea and Sky, with texts by Payne himself which reference nature and the Somme. Bruch's radiant First Violin Concerto completes the programme.

PROMS INTERVAL: A Walk in the Darent Valley
This evening's Proms Interval is an account of a classic English summer walk in a thunderstorm. It accompanies a concert which has landscape and the spirit of adventure at the heart of it in the work of Anthony Payne and Vaughan Williams. The acclaimed novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison explores our relationship with the weather as she follows the course of a thundery rain shower deep in the Kent countryside. At the end of a long period of drought, she walks alongside the River Darent and reflects on how the countryside changes in wet weather, and how the English identity is shaped by the elements. The extract is introduced and read by the author herself and is taken from her recently published collection Rain: Four Walks in English Weather which received the following critical acclaim:

'Instantly beautiful.' Robert Macfarlane

'Harrison is writing us a new kind of modern pastoral: peopled, raw, messy and shining.' Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk.