On 23 May Martin Yates led the BBC Concert Orchestra in two rarely-heard jewels of the British music repertoire at the English Music Festival in Dorchester Abbey: William Alwyn’s An English Overture “The Innumerable Dance” and Vaughan Williams’ Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue.
Alwyn’s Overture is a 10-minute work for large orchestra whose title is drawn from lines in William Blake’s Milton: “every tree / And flower and herb soon fill the air with an innumerable dance, / Yet all in order sweet and lovely”. The piece lends its title to Adrian Wright’s 2008 biography of the composer (Boydell & Brewer). It premiered in 1935 in a broadcast by the BBC Orchestra; a contemporary review in the Musical Times commented that it “showed the lustiness of spring”, and was recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and David Lloyd-Jones for Naxos in 2006.
An English Overture opens with a whispered passage on tremolando strings, before blossoming into a broad, symphonic climax, which breaks into a more energetic triple-time dance-like sequence for strings and solo woodwinds. The coda sees its wildness unleashed with strident brass interjections and a boisterous, percussive conclusion.
The Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue was composed in 1901 while Vaughan Williams was a student at the Royal College of Music where it received its first performance, conducted by Charles Villiers Stanford; in 1905 the 32-year-old composer conducted it with the Leeds Municipal Orchestra. This was its last recorded performance until the manuscript of the work surfaced at Yale University in 1966. The 19-minute diptych, originally conceived as the second and third movements of a three-part symphonic rhapsody, was revived by Mark Elder and the Hallé in 2009 – succeeding their world premiere recording of the previously unheard complete incidental music from The Wasps in 2006.
Gramophone praised John Wilson’s 2011 recording of the work with the BBC Concert Orchestra, describing a “confidently paced, compassionate and ultimately stirring essay, studded with enthralling glimpses of great achievements to come; the orchestral writing, too, is already remarkably assured, with some marvellously unclotted brass sonorities in particular.” In 2024 the BBC Concert Orchestra performed the piece with Daniel Hyde at the Easter at King’s Festival.