Season Launch: New Music Britain | London Symphony Orchestra

Tradition is about the present – and the future – as well as the past. Sir Simon Rattle opens our new season with a concert that spans 100 years of British music.

When Ralph Vaughan Williams conceived his Pastoral Symphony, it wasn’t the misty fields of an imaginary England that inspired him. He was in France, on the Western Front – where the sound of a distant trumpet unlocked a vision vast enough to transcend the noise (if not the anguish) of the First World War.

But then, British music has never conformed to easy stereotypes. In this opening concert of our new season, Judith Weir reads ancient Taoist poetry, and finds ideas of radical simplicity. Peter Maxwell Davies attends an all-night party (and finds a bracing hangover cure) on his adopted home of Orkney. And because music never stands still, Sir Simon Rattle introduces the world premiere of two movements from a new choral work by Julian Anderson, inspired by the poetry of exile. Not what you might expect …