Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival : 3 - Britten Sinfonia

Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the much loved and internationally renowned Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival returns this summer, treating audiences to a magical long weekend of concerts by world class artists, performed in beautiful historic churches and including masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire both new and old.

‘I played Bach regularly during the composition of the Concerto, and was greatly attracted to the ‘Brandenburg’ Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my [first] movement is a conscious borrowing from the third Brandenburg, however, I do not know.’ Igor Stravinsky

Our orchestral concert opens with Stravinsky’s Chamber Concerto, commissioned by US Diplomat Robert Bliss and named after his elegant home in the Georgetown district of Washington DC. Written when he was just 13 years old Mendelssohn’s concerto in D minor for violin and strings is less famous than his ‘other’ violin concerto, but is an exquisite and highly inventive work from the young genius. Thomas Ades’s short ‘Shanty’, co-commissioned by Britten Sinfonia, is written for fifteen individual voices, sometimes together and sometimes divergent, creating a widening seascape – and was described by the Guardian as ‘hypnotic, captivating’. The programme concludes with Saint-Saens’s dramatic first cello concerto, described by Rachmaninoff as the greatest of all cello concertos.