English Symphony Orchestra - Zoë Beyers plays Korngold, and Tchaikovsky’s dramatic Symphony No.4

‘Renewal and Celebration’ - Continuing the English Symphony Orchestra’s residency at Cheltenham Town Hall, Tchaikovsky’s dramatic fourth symphony emerged following a period of profound personal crisis for the composer. As a declaration of new-found confidence, hope and optimism in the face of life’s challenges, famously supercharged by the ‘fate’ motif in the brass, it is almost without equal in the classical canon. Erich Wolfgang Korngold had spent many of his prime years as a a film composer in exile from his native Vienna. At the time he fled to America, he declared he would not write for the concert hall so long as Hitler was in power, and for over a decade, he held firm. At long last, as the world celebrated the end of WW II and a new era of renewal and hope in Europe, Korngold composed his Violin Concerto, a work that overflows with a decade of melodic riches the composer had been waiting to share with the world. Elgar, much like his hero Brahms, approached writing a first symphony with a mix of trepidation and anxiety. His first sustained attempt to write one in 1903 produced no symphony, but instead Elgar’s greatest tone poem, In the South. 

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