Vaughan Williams + Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, featuring video work by contemporary artist Harold Offeh
We're delighted to launch a new season of de Havilland Philharmonic Orchestra concerts – our first full season for three years! The season begins with a celebration of two significant events: Black History Month and Vaughan Williams' 150th anniversary.
- Vaughan Williams – The Wasps (Overture)
- Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – Symphonic Variations on an African Air, op. 63
- Vaughan Williams – Symphony No. 2 (A London Symphony)
The concert begins with a performance to celebrate Vaughan Williams’ 150th anniversary (b.1872). The Orchestra opens with The Wasps (Overture), part of Williams’ incidental music to Aristophanes’ eponymous play, and ends with his London Symphony. This was written in response to a suggestion by fellow composer George Butterworth resulting in Vaughan Williams incorporating some musical sketches about London into a symphonic form.
We mark Black History Month with a work by the London-born Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, an early 20th century classical composer and son of a West African father and English mother. His Symphonic Variations on an African Air has been chosen by the contemporary artist Harold Offeh as the accompaniment to his video artwork Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63 (2019). Offeh’s film which focusses on the presentation of Black bodies in the landscape, will be screened at the concert with the Orchestra providing a live soundtrack to it. Offeh will also give a short talk introducing the artwork before the screening.
Harold Offeh's film also forms part of UH Arts + Culture’s upcoming visual arts group exhibition Empathy for People, Empathy for Things opening later this month.
For events taking place at the Weston Auditorium, Bar Ambition is now the place to go for food and drink. We strongly advise pre ordering any refreshments to avoid a delay in the interval. Click here to find out more.