Name: Family Concert
Start: 2023-06-17T18:30:00
Location: St. John's Smith Square

Fenella Humphreys

Marc Dooley

Fulham Symphony Orchestra

Hannah Kendall’s ‘The Spark Catchers’ pays tribute to the women and girls employed at a match factory in London’s East End, who went on strike in 1888 protesting their hazardous working conditions. It is inspired by a poem by Lemn Sissay, commissioned for the London 2012 Olympics.

A selection of Debussy’s piano Préludes, reimagined for orchestra by Colin Matthews, evokes the Alhambra’s imposing Wine Gate, a mischievous water nymph, a portrait of ‘the girl with the flaxen hair’, and a legendary cathedral rising from the sea.

The concert concludes with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which spans extremes of emotion, from the darkness of its opening funeral march to an exuberant finale, with the famous Adagietto at its heart.

Mahler, Debussy and Kendall

Smith Square Hall

Doreen Carwithen’s swashbuckling overture was written for a 1954 British adventure film. Anna Clyne tells the story of a seamstress, lost in her thoughts, imagining a series of five fantastical tales. The evening ends with Eleanor Alberga’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, adapted from Roald Dahl’s subversive retelling of the Brothers Grimm story.