Jaime conducts Enigma Variations

First, you’ll tour through the instruments of the orchestra with Benjamin Britten’s delightful A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

Then, you’ll hear a work by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a figurehead of England’s Folk Music Revival, who would spend his time rambling through the countryside to ‘collect’ folk tunes from villagers. One of the best-loved works in classical music, The Lark Ascending draws on such tunes, creating a glorious pastoral picture of a bird in flight on a clear, bright day.

After a long day of apparently torturous teaching, Elgar sat down at the piano to clear his mind, and began to tinker. The final work on this program is the tune he called Enigma – to express the ‘nothingness’ from which it came. Each of the fourteen variations on this never-revealed theme paints musical portrait of one of Elgar’s friends. The most famous – Nimrod – is one of the most emotionally profound and magnificent works of all time.

Program
Britten The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending
Elgar Enigma Variations

Artists
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Jaime Martín conductor
Tair Khisambeev violin