Scottish composer Helen Grime’s impressive Everyone Sang was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 in 2010 for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Named after a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, it is a work of both elation and melancholy, celebrating the orchestra as a grand, unified whole as well as a group of individual sections and sounds.
Alfredo Casella was the major figure in modern Italian music between the wars. Written in 1938 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, his brilliantly orchestrated Concerto for Orchestra has a first movement which is by turns vigorous and tender. The magical variations of the imposing central Passacaglia are followed by the wonderfully extrovert and tuneful finale.
Although never played again in Rachmaninov's lifetime after its disastrous first performance in 1897, his First Symphony is now recognised as a work of great power and imagination. The slow movement contains one of his most romantically beautiful melodies whilst the fiery finale has a magnificently festive Russian theme.