Flowers of the Field

Part of Summer Music in City Churches: a new festival of beautiful music and words in stunning historic churches, marking one hundred years since the end of the Great War

A programme of music poignantly harking back to a pastoral age devastated by the outbreak of the First World War, combined with settings of haunting war poetry. Includes the Shropshire lad song cycle and The banks of green willow by George Butterworth (killed at the Somme, 1916), Patrick Hawes’s moving setting of Wilfred Owen’s poem I know the music, and Vaughan Williams’s evergreen Lark ascending of 1914. The festival closes with Gerald Finzi’s affecting Requiem da camera, written in memory of friends and colleagues lost in the trenches, and expressing the grief of a nation.