As the opening concert for the 2025 concert series, experience the Fidelio Orchestra in a round for an atmospheric performance of music spanning more than two centuries. Only twenty-five people making music in an intimate setting in the dimly lit Church of St Andrew’s Holborn.
The string orchestra is joined by soloist Laura Wallace, a vivid example of how the passion and the interest for music can go along a profession strictly outside of the music industry. A practicing solicitor with a top law firm, Laura plays the oboe at the highest level since her early involvement with the Oxford University Orchestra.
From the meditative genre-defining melodies of Alessandro Marcello’s oboe concerto, for years believed to be a composition by Vivaldi, to the dark harmonies of Grażyna Bacewicz. The metamorphosis of music through the two-hundred-and-thirty years that separate these two works is no better embodied than by Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for 23 strings, a work written during the final months of the Second World War and that seems to collapse simplicity and complexity onto each other, as if history would have to start folding onto itself.
It is arguable whether music really did change after Strauss in a way that was never going to go back. What surely did change was the European social context and the main tenets of the Western world. The Venetian pre-capitalistic urban landscape where Alessandro Marcello and Vivaldi operated had very little to share with the consumeristic machine that would grip cities like London and Paris or the socialism imposed in Warsaw and East Berlin from the late 1940’s.
The juxtaposition of these three short pieces helps us meditate on how difficult it is to tell the roots from the leaves in a tree that has weathered so much throughout its life.
A. Marcello Concerto for Oboe and Strings in D minor S D935 (1717)
G. Bacewicz Concerto for String Orchestra (1948)
R. Strauss Metamorphosen TrV 290 (1945)
Fidelio Orchestra
Laura Wallace, oboe
Raffaello Morales, conductor
Please contact us if you have access issues.
Wines and drinks
Available to purchase on the night from the bar at the venue.
Tickets
Standard seat £18.5
Concession (under 18) £9.5
Donations
Please donate to the Fidelio Orchestra so we can keep providing meaningful opportunities to young professional musicians. Anything you can give would be greatly appreciated.
