Belshazzars’s Feast
November 25th 2023 7.30 p.m.
Chapel of St Augustine, Tonbridge School
The programme for our first event of the 2023-24 season highlights Music Director Naomi Butcher’s interest in English music, both choral and orchestral. For this joint concert she has selected adaptations of familiar words as set by Vaughan Williams from George Herbert’s poetry (some of which you may know as the words to Anglican hymns), and by Gustav Holst from English folk tunes collected in the early years of the 20th century.
The orchestra will play the beautiful Kentish Downs Overture, by the Kent-based composer Susan Spain-Dunk, which you may not know, but we are sure you will come to love, and then the joint forces will thrill you with the dramatic sounds of William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast – a real contrast in musical colours. The soloist will be Benedict Nelson, who delighted us last year when he came to sing in our Verdi Requiem.
So whether your taste is for the old or the new – although we cannot count the music of the last century as new, some of it might be new to you – there will be something to please your ears, as your eyes gaze on the splendours of the Chapel of St Augustine, Tonbridge School.
