Howard Skempton CD Launch Concert

Ensemble 360 and James Gilchrist present music by Howard Skempton alongside vocal favourites by Beethoven and Vaughan Williams.

In celebration of Ensemble 360’s new CD featuring works by Howard Skempton, this concert features two pieces revised in 2018 especially for chamber ensemble. These are presented together with Beethoven’s To the distant beloved, often regarded as the first ever song-cycle, and Vaughan Williams’s beautifully elegiac On Wenlock Edge. The composer’s settings of A.E. Houseman’s Shropshire Lad poems are sung by James Gilchrist, praised by The Times as an interpreter of English song who is “in a class by himself”.

“[Skempton’s music is] austerely beautiful, sparse, decidedly enigmatic.” The Guardian

This concert is generously supported by Maurice and Sheila Millward

Programme

• Skempton: The Moon is Flashing
• Beethoven: An die ferne geliebte
• Skempton: Piano Concerto
• Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge