67TH Season

2006 – 2007

 
MEDIA RELEASE

WARWICKSHIRE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ANNOUNCES NEW SEASON

 
The Warwickshire Symphony Orchestra announces its 2006-07 subscription season which begins with an autumn concert featuring an exciting young cellist. Oliver Coates attained the highest degree result in the Royal Academy of Music's history and went on to achieve an MPhil with distinction at Oxford University (New College). He is a winner of the 2006 Philip & Dorothy Green Award for Young Concert Artists, awarded by The National Federation of Music Societies.

Oliver made his London debut at the age of 15 with the Haydn C Major Concerto in St. John's, Smith Square. Since then he has performed as a soloist and chamber musician around the world.

The programme for the first concert celebrates the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth and Shostakovich's centenary and includes the Overture to Mozart's opera Don Giovanni and Shostakovich's Cello Concerto in Eb. Written for Mstislav Rostropovich in the early 1960s, the Cello Concerto quickly established itself as a first division piece in the cellist's repertory. It has a mixture of musical energy and broad, open-hearted melody, exciting and profound.

Carl Nielsen's greatest symphony, "The Inextinguishable", which the orchestra has never performed before, concludes this exciting concert. There is a level of violence in the symphony (1914-16) new in Nielsen's art. The comfortable world of the first three symphonies had been shaken by the shock of the First World War. The work, Nielsen said, gave expression to 'the elemental Will of Life'. The concert takes place on Saturday 7 October 2006 at 7.30 pm in the Guy Nelson Hall in Warwick.

The WSO's ever-popular Christmas Concert takes place on Sunday 3 December at the Royal Spa Centre, and will include Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia, Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol and music for the popular film Pirates of the Caribbean. Jeffery Dench makes a welcome return to narrate Ting Tang the Elephant, originally written and read by Johnny Morris. The concert is being presented in association with Marie Curie Cancer Care.

On Saturday 3 March 2007, at the Guy Nelson Hall, the orchestra presents a Celebration of Tchaikovsky, with his Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet, Variations on a Rococo Theme, with James Barralet playing the cello solo, and Symphony No 4 in F minor.

Completing the Subscription Season on Sunday 15 July 2007 is the orchestra's concert as part of the Warwick International Festival, when Peter Donohoe - a patron of the WSO - is the soloist in Bach's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor. A performance of Guy Woolfenden's witty Divertimento to celebrate his 70th birthday and Schubert's haunting Unfinished Symphony complete this festival concert.   

All four concerts are being conducted by Guy Woolfenden, who has been the orchestra's principal conductor since 1972.  With more than 150 scores for the Royal Shakespeare Company and an impressive list of credits with major European theatre companies, including the Comédie-Française, Paris, the Burgtheater, Vienna and the Norwegian National Theatre, Oslo, Guy Woolfenden's theatre music is highly regarded throughout the world. Guy is currently commissioned to write a piece for Saint James' Singers and Orchestra and Soloists, entitled Sounds and Sweet Airs - A Shakespeare Journey. It will receive its first performance at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday 21 October 2006 during the Stratford on Avon Festival.

Further Information and photos for press from Amanda Laidler, 077072-721775 or WSOpress@btinternet.com

Regularly updated information may also be found on the orchestra's website at www.wso.org.uk