Welcome to the start of Salomon Orchestra's 60th anniversary year celebrations with wonderful music by Lili Boulanger, Grace Williams and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

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We are delighted to welcome Matt Scott Rogers as our conductor for the first time. Matt recently completed five seasons on the conducting staff of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

He is currently on the music staff of Royal Danish Opera and conducts regularly at Malmö Opera.

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Also we welcome Fenella Humphreys as our soloist. As winner of the 2018 BBC Music Magazine Instrumental Award, she has won critical admiration and audience acclaim with the grace and intensity of her playing.

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Lili Boulanger (1893 - 1918) - 

D'un soir Triste (1918), D'un matin de printemps (1918)

French composer Lili Boulanger was the first female winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize, and younger sister of the noted composer and composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. Her two short symphonic poems D’un soir triste and D’un matin de printemps were both composed towards the end of her tragically short life, and ably demonstrate her individual compositional style.

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Grace Williams (1906 - 1977) - Violin Concerto (1950)

Born a generation later, Grace Williams is widely considered one of Wales’ foremost female composers. Following a degree at Cardiff University, Williams then studied composition at the Royal College of Music under Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Composed in 1950, the self-critical composer seems to have repressed the work, which only came to light in 2006.

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Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958) - Symphony No.6 (1948)

This work was composed immediately following the second world war, and then further revised in 1950. The Symphony is noteworthy for its unusually discordant harmonic language, and for its inclusion of a tenor saxophone among the woodwinds. In several respects this symphony marks the beginning of Vaughan Williams's experiments with orchestration that so characterise his late music.