The English Chamber Orchestra presents ‘Teatime Music’ a series of four afternoon tea concerts, streamed straight to your living room. Pour yourself a cuppa, crack open the posh biscuits, and enjoy a smorgasbord of programmes, performed by the world's most recorded chamber orchestra.
Based on a poem of the same name by Mallarmé, Debussy’s The Afternoon of the Faun dreamily depicts the waking of a faun from his afternoon nap and his recollection of encounters with nymphs, beginning with a languid solo flute, and melting into a gorgeous, timeless pastoral idyll.
Ravel brings us to another fantastical world in his Mother Goose Suite, with familiar characters such as Tom Thumb, Beauty and the Beast, and the Sleeping Beauty, depicted so exquisitely by his alchemical orchestration, faithfully arranged by Iain Farrington, and brought to a breathtakingly beautiful finale in the Fairy Garden.
Presented between these two works is Ravel’s daydream-like Introduction and Allegro, written in 1904 to show off the expressive range of the newly-invented double-action pedal harp.