Life, death and transcendence: Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending finds a 21st-century counterpart in a new work from Deborah Pritchard.
Clemens Schuldt
In the shadow of the First World War, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending sounded like a vision of peace. Deborah Pritchard’s Calandra evokes the same spirit in a 21st century context; it’s specially written for the radiant tone and poetic insight of soloist Jennifer Pike.
Calandra, says Pritchard, represents a different kind of lark – 'an Eastern European lark, native to Ukraine…symbolic of freedom, ascending without borders'. Like Vaughan Williams, Pritchard is responding to her time; but music can deal with turbulence as well as serenity and guest conductor Clemens Schuldt frames these two idylls with Britten’s volcanic Sinfonia da Requiem – a protest against the inhumanity of World War Two – and Strauss’s musical fantasy of triumph rising from the darkest tragedy. Strong emotions; ravishing sounds.
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