ASO Masterworks: English Light

Molly Turner leads the Alabama Symphony Orchestra in an all-English program anchored by two of the repertoire’s most beloved works. Elgar’s Enigma Variations is a musical portrait gallery — fourteen variations, each a sketch of someone dear to the composer — and a major showpiece of the orchestral canon. Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is altogether quieter: a meditation for string orchestra that seems to exist outside of time. The program also features Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn and Ethel Smyth’s “On the Cliffs of Cornwall” from The Wreckers, a vivid seascape by one of British music’s most pioneering yet undersung figures.