RDSO honouring veterans with ‘Lest We Forget’ concert
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The Red Deer Symphony Orchestra will be honouring our veterans and commemorating the fallen on Saturday, November 10 with their second concert of the season, Lest We Forget.
The concert gets underway at 8 p.m. at Gaetz Memorial United Church.
Lest We Forget’s beautiful and evocative programming is thoughtful and inspiring. A concertante work for violin and chamber orchestra, Vaughn Williams’ The Lark Ascending is a stunning work. Meditative and quiet, it is a pure expression of avian artistry that takes the listener through song and flight. Vaughn Williams laid the work aside in 1914 to serve his country in the British Army during WWI. No doubt leaving the front line with a new outlook on nature and the eternal character of its beauty he, like so many other artists at the time, wrote music that seems much more spiritual than in the pre-war period. The inclusion of war imagery near the end of George Merideth’s poem, upon which the work is based, surely fueled the composer’s will to finish this now much celebrated work. No doubt that RDSO Concertmaster, Naomi Delafield, will masterfully perform so that as the lark elevates, as will the soul.
Guest vocalists Roderick Bryce, Hannah Pagenkopf, Spiritus Chamber Choir and Music Director Tim Shantz are on for bringing out Gabriel Faure’s Requiem and Le Cantique de Jean Racine.
