For our first concert of 2024 Banbury Symphony Orchestra's programme includes some lesser-known works, which are only now beginning to emerge from undeserved obscurity.

​

• Ethel Smyth: The Wreckers overture

• Antonin Dvořák: American Suite

• Leokadiya Kashperova: Symphony in B minor

 

Smyth's (1855-1944) best-known piece is a song called The March of the Women (1910), which became the official anthem for the suffragette movement. She was a passionate activist and after throwing bricks through the windows of cabinet minsters was imprisoned for two months. The Wreckers (1906) was one of six operas that she wrote and was performed at the Proms in 2022 after many years of lying in obscurity. The opera is set in a remote part of Cornwall in the 18th century and tells the story of villagers plundering ships they have lured onto the rocks.

​

Dvořák's American Suite (1894) has five movements featuring many folk melodies from his native Bohemia with an American twist. He initially wrote the music for piano but then orchestrated it, although he didn't live to hear it performed.

​

Kashperova (1872-1940) was a Russian pianist, teacher (she taught Stravinsky the piano) and composer. She studied at the St Petersburg Conservatoire and the Russian Musical Gazette noted in 1912: "Her gifts as a composer are a most welcome phenomenon of St Petersburg’s musical life". She toured internationally as a pianist, playing her own works as well as others, but after the revolution settled in Moscow; had to compose in secret and was forgotten by the Russian public. Of Kashperova's Symphony in B minor, the conductor Jane Glover has written: "Without question, Kashperova was formidably equipped: her orchestration is remarkably sure-footed, robust and inventive; her lyrical qualities are passionate and gloriously affecting; she has a great sense of structure, even drama; and, above all, her music is completely Russian".

​

​We are delighted to be playing in the church of St Peter and St Paul in Deddington and we look forward to welcoming you there.

​

Tickets

Tickets are £10 and 18s and under remain FREE!

Advance booking strongly recommended.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​