ACCLAIMED stage and screen actor, Samuel West is to join the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder to perform in the opening piece of the Hallé’s inaugural Thursday concert of the 13/14 season, Benjamin Britten’s Britten in Wartime on Thursday 3 October.
Samuel West will narrate excerpts from the original script, as the Hallé perform Britten’s music.
The concert journeys back to 1942 when an anxious public in Britain and America tuned in to a special CBS radio broadcast jointly commissioned with the War Office – An American in England. Benjamin Britten had been brought onboard to score the series of drama documentaries, the music being performed by the 62-piece Royal Air Force Orchestra in dress uniform.
The Hallé premiere explores one of the broadcasts, Women of Britain, which focussed on the role of British women and their part in the war effort. Samuel West will narrate excerpts from the original script, as the Hallé perform Britten’s music.
Samuel West, whilst highly acclaimed for his work on the theatre stage has also performed at the BBC Proms five times and was soloist in Henry V at the 2002 Last Night. He also makes regular appearances at Wigmore Hall and in 2012 performed Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Strauss’s Enoch Arden, Walton’s Façade and Henry V and the Britten and Auden film scores Night Mail, The Way to the Sea, Coal Face, The King’s Stamp.
The Hallé continues with the 1942 theme for the rest of the programme, when the dreadful Nazi siege of Leningrad was at its peak, with a performance of Shostakovich’s mighty Leningrad Symphony dedicated to the city and its people.
The Hallé, Thursday 3 October 2013 at 7.30pm, The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. Britten Britten in Wartime.Shostakovich Symphony No.7, ‘Leningrad’. Sir Mark Elder conductor. The Bridgewater Hall Box Office: 0844 907 9000 Online booking: www.halle.co.uk
The orchestra rehearsing recently at St Peter's Church
