Gathering Storm Clouds | British piano music of the early 20th century

Part of Summer Music in City Churches: a new festival of beautiful music and words in stunning historic churches, marking one hundred years since the end of the Great War

Ravishing British music of the early 20th century for piano, drawing on the love of composers for town (Ireland’s Three London pieces) and country (Vaughan Williams’s rarely heard The lake in the mountains), nature (Delius’s On hearing the first cuckoo in spring, and rare works by Ivor Gurney) and history (Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, transcribed for two pianos). The pastoral idyll is shattered by Bridge’s Sonata for piano, expressing the composer’s reaction to accounts of First World War atrocities.