Program Nine • A New Elizabethan Age? by Walton, Vaughan Williams, Sibelius, la 12 elo 2023, Alkaen (2023/2023), Musiikinjohto Leon Botstein, Fisher Center, Annandale, United States

Program Nine Marks the American Symphony Orchestra’s first concert of the festival, presenting two of his late symphonies alongside other key orchestral works of the period. While drawing on his own incidental music for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, the Sinfonia Antartica, his Seventh Symphony, is nonetheless a fully realized modern masterpiece. Scored for vast forces including bells, organ, wind machine, and wordless women’s chorus, this darkly atmospheric work is adventurous both timbrally and harmonically. Brighter in tone yet no less sonically bold, the vividly orchestrated Eighth Symphony was recognized with a New York Critics Circle Award. These late symphonies share the program with Proud Thames, Elizabeth Maconchy’s commanding, winning entry to a Coronation Overture-writing competition; the sparkling Partita for Orchestra by William Walton, then emerging as one of the next generation’s leading lights; and Andante festivo, an earlier work by Jean Sibelius, to whom Vaughan Williams had dedicated his Fifth Symphony and, like many British composers, felt indebted.