Rivers are a powerful metaphor representing the passage of time and the journey of life. Many composers have been inspired to write music that take brooks, streams and rivers as means of exploring these themes. This concert features four ‘rivers of music’.

Wagner’s ‘Siegfried’s Rhine Journey’ is an orchestral interlude from the opera Götterdämmerung. It beautifully depicts a sunrise, the flow of the river and Siegfried’s mixture of emotions including pain at leaving his beloved Brünnhilde, stirrings of courage, and an increasing sense of foreboding.

Czech composer Smetana’s folk-style influenced Vltava is one of the best-known pieces of classical music about a river. Vltava’s source lies in the Bohemian forest: two flutes represent the two streams which burble and then merge as the musical river journeys past a peasant wedding, moonlit meadows, castles and wild ruins, the Rapids of St. John until it broadens at Prague and feeds into the Elbe River.

Errollyn Wallen CBE is Master of the King’s Music. Mighty River was written in 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Wallen writes, “The work makes reference to the hymn Amazing Grace and the spirituals Deep River and Go Down Moses. It is as if the perpetual motion of the music, like water, like time, through its sheer momentum, comes across the cries and echoes of human hearts and voices, singing out of suffering, repentance, humility and hope.”

After the interval our programme returns to the Rhine with Robert Schumann’s Symphony no. 3, the ‘Rhenish’. Schumann wrote this five-movement symphony in 1850, the year in which he, his wife Clara, and their seven children moved to Düsseldorf. The mood of the symphony is euphoric and includes an awe-inspiring depiction of Cologne Cathedral which the family had visited by train. The whole symphony was sketched and orchestrated in just five weeks.