BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Studio Concerts Bax & Vaughan Williams

For today’s programme, the BBC Philharmonic is conducted by John Wilson in music by two giants of British music.

Bax’s musical seascape of the north Cornish coast opens our concert, inspired by a visit there in 1917, and evokes the Castle at Tintagel and the mythology of Arthurian legend. By contrasting the rural and the urban, the concert ends with Vaughan Williams’ portrait of the English capital, its bustling sounds and the calm of the Thames flowing through the city by night. Vaughan Williams admitted to conductor Sir John Barbirolli that it was the Symphony he himself liked best of his nine.