Jaime conducts Enigma Variations - Melbourne Town Hall (expired event)

Jaime Martín conducts this stunning program of perennial English charmers – some of the most popular orchestral music ever written.

• First, you'll tour through the instruments of the orchestra with Benjamin Britten’s delightful A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

• Then, you'll hear a work by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a figurehead of England’s Folk Music Revival, who would spend his time rambling through the countryside to ‘collect’ folk tunes from villagers. One of the best-loved works in classical music, The Lark Ascending draws on such tunes, creating a glorious pastoral picture of a bird in flight on a clear, bright day.

• After a long day of apparently-torturous teaching, Elgar sat down at the piano to clear his mind, and began to tinker. The final work on this program is the tune he called Enigma – to express the ‘nothingness’ from which it came. Each of the fourteen variations on this never-revealed theme paints musical portrait of one of Elgar’s friends. The most famous – Nimrod – is one of the most emotionally profound and magnificent works of all time.

Duration: approx. 1 hour and 30 minutes including interval