Kew Sinfonia - The Oboe has all the Tunes

Our soloist Polly Bartlett is supported by the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Musicians Programme. She was woodwind finalist in the BBC Young Musician 2016 with her performances being broadcast on both BBC Radio 3 and BBC 4 television.

Polly will perform Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto which has a pastoral quality, with a highly tuneful solo part which expresses nostalgia for the 18th century.

The theme of tuneful nostalgia is also there in Charles Ives’s Third Symphony which harks back sentimentally to a nineteenth-century childhood of hymns, bells, and children's games.

Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony is light-hearted and energetic. Beethoven was nominally the conductor of the first performance, though the orchestra largely ignored his ungainly gestures and followed the principal violinist instead. Kew Sinfonia couldn’t wish for a more superb leader than Cathy Schofield of the Bridge Quartet, and Marc Dooley is a brilliant conductor and in this his final concert as our Principal Conductor we pay tribute to the technical quality and inspiration he has brought to us.