Green and Pleasant Land as the series will be known offers a unique opportunity to London's concert scene as the series spans across three of London's major venue's, the newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall, Royal Albert Hall and the Orchestra's home, Cadogan Hall. This in itself is unique to any other London Orchestra.
This series of quintessentially English Orchestral Music offers a high calibre of exuberant artists well known to this repertoire. This includes Leonard Slatkin, Sir Thomas Allen, Barry Wordsworth, Nigel Kennedy, Sir Andrew Davis, Vernon Handley, Steven Isserlis, Paul Daniel, and Tasmin Little to name but a few, offering a rich and diverse range of music from the light hearted film and television signature tunes of Coates, Farnon, and Binge to the lyrical Cello Concerto of Finzi.
Following on from the Warner Classics top selling album British Light Classics, Green and Pleasant Land begins with a live concert of the CD at Cadogan Hall on the 30th October. Other highlights of the season include Principal Guest Conductor Leonard Slatkin taking the helm to conduct Holst's Planet's Suite with Sir Thomas Allen joining the RPO in Walton's powerful Belshazzar's Feast.
Celebrating Elgar's 150th Anniversary, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performs two Elgarian concerts. The first in London's Royal Albert Hall on the 18th November featuring Ann Murray, Andrew Kennedy and Matthew Best, conducted by Brian Wright in Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, with the second concert in the Spring of 2008 where the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's long awaited return to the Royal Festival Hall is joined by Nigel Kennedy to perform Elgar's Violin Concerto – the concerto he is most closely aSingapore Symphony Orchestraciated with. Nigel Kennedy's return to the London classical scene is long awaited with great anticipation.
The series would not be complete without the works of Tippett and Vaughan Williams with a performance of Child of our Time conducted by Sir Andrew Davis on 6th April 2008 and Vaughan Williams Symphony Nos. 2, 4 and 5, which will be performed across the three venues during spring 08.
Ian Maclay, Managing Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra says: "It is a wonderful and unique opportunity for the Orchestra to perform our Green and Pleasant Land series across three major London venues. The concerts cover a vast range of English repertoire incapsulating some of the greatest English works ever written". -- www.rpo.co.uk
