Saffron Hall 10th Birthday: Jess Gillam and Britten Sinfonia

No stranger to our concert platform or our Schools and Community programme, Jess Gillam is the perfect person to represent ten years of eclectic programming with our Resident Orchestra.

Dave Heath’s heart-on-sleeve concerto is a love letter to his former adopted home in Fife. It dazzles, shimmers and dances, unmistakably Scottish in origin. Its slow movement shares a spacious grandeur with perhaps Vaughan Williams’s signature work constructed around an ancient English hymn tune. There is a hymn-like quality to Adès’ hushed nostalgia-fuelled arrangement from his string quartet Arcadiana whilst Shostakovich’s symphony (also an enlargement of a string quartet) is by contrast fiercely impassioned and intensely dramatic. Like other works in this programme it seems to offer us tantalising glimpses of the past, of other music, whilst retaining a vibrant personality of its own.