BBC Radio 3 presents Departures, Returns and Colour at the Ulster Hall, Belfast on 15 August 2025!
Join BBC Radio 3 for a FREE evening invitation concert with the Ulster Orchestra, promising a programme of musical meandering.
In 1848, as revolution raged across Europe, Franz Liszt made the decision to walk away from his life as piano virtuoso and settle down in the German city of Weimar. Over the next twelve years he forged a reputation as one of the most original composers of the Romantic Era, inventing the symphonic poem. Liszt's new form of orchestral piece spun poetic or literary fables in music, evoking moods and images in its themes and harmonies, depicting heroes and villains, dramas and triumphs. When he left Weimar, he planned to call time on the genre. However, one final, valedictory symphonic poem, came many years later in 1881 – From the cradle to the grave – and it’s that work which begins the concert. It was inspired by a drawing by the Hungarian artist Mihály Zichy, depicting three stages of existence: birth; the struggle for being; and death, the cradle of the life to come.
The Songs of Travel by Vaughan Williams come next – a set of 9 songs, sometimes described as a kind of “English Winterreise”.
Based on poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 of the songs were premiered in 1904 at the Bechstein Hall in London, by the English baritone Walter Creighton and our own Hamilton Harty at the piano. BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, James Atkinson, will navigate the highs and lows of the orchestrated version of the cycle: from optimism, to loneliness and nostalgia.
César Franck’s Symphony in D minor rounds off the programme. Completed in 1888, it is his only symphony and one that is dedicated to his pupil, the composer Henri Duparc. It’s premiere attracted negative reviews. Yet, when Franck died two years later, every major living French composer attended his funeral to honour him. It is an important work in the French orchestral canon and this Belfast performance, under Jac Van Steen, is not to be missed.
