The Language of Eden
With Roderick Williams and the SCO Chorus
The Queen's Hall, Edinburgh
City Halls, Glasgow
Andrew Manze conductor
Roderick Williams baritone
SCO Chorus
Gregory Batsleer chorus director
From poignant pastoral visions to stirring choral majesty: SCO Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze conducts an evening of rapturous English music and striking new sounds, in the company of exceptional British baritone and composer Roderick Williams and the fine voices of the SCO Chorus.
Williams sings in his own orchestral arrangements of Butterworth’s bittersweet A Shropshire Lad, in which nostalgia for the English countryside mingles heartbreakingly with premonitions of the coming war. Vaughan Williams, meanwhile, summons visionary wonder to celebrate the power of music itself in his radiant Serenade while the young Elgar unleashes passion and lyricism in his playful Serenade for Strings.
After Haydn’s startling ‘Representation of Chaos’, Roderick Williams is also the soloist in a brand-new choral work by Jay Capperauld, with libretto by Niall Campbell, that reimagines the birth of language itself, The Language of Eden.
*Commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
