Video a la carta: Concert Club: England, my England

The Bachtrack Concert Club is a series of videos personally curated by our editors, who hand-picked pieces from the fantastic performances in our on-demand archive.

Mark Pullinger curated a programme of English music. Scroll down to watch, read the programme and see related articles

At the opening weekend of BBC Proms, Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin demonstrated how wonderfully non-British orchestras can play Elgar. English music is all too rarely programmed outside the UK – and then only a handful of works or composers, such as Elgar’s Cello Concerto – which prompted me to choose English works performed by a Swedish and a Norwegian orchestras.

The two works I’ve chosen are very different in feel. Elgar’s overture Cockaigne is subtitled "In London Town" and is an affectionate portrait of the capital city at the turn of the 20th century. Much darker is the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, Benjamin Britten’s song cycle based on six poems on the subject of night, which slips into something quite eerie and sinister.

- Mark Pullinger