Flanders Symphony Orchestra

Jan-Latham Koenig & Flanders Symphony Orchestra
photo Simon Van Boxtel

The Flanders Symphony Orchestra under it music director Jan-Latham Koenig is visiting London's Cadogan Hall on 4 and 5 November 2015 for a pair of concerts which mix familiar repertoire with the distinctly unfamiliar, including Ibert's The Ballad of Reading Gaol the French composer's response to the humanitarian message in Wilde's poem, Schoenberg's setting of Byron Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte written in response to Pearl Harbour and Lesueur's music for Napoleon's coronation.

The first concert, on 4 November 2015, is themed on Flanders and World War I. Richard Blackford's In Flanders Fields is joined by Debussy's Berceuse Heroique and Elgar's Carillon, two works which were written as contributions to King Albert’s Book which paid homage to the suffering after the German invasion of Belgium in World War I. Also in the programme is Jacques Ibert's The Ballad of Reading Gaol, based on Oscar Wilde's poem of the same name, and will be narrated by Simon Callow.

The second concert, on 5 November 2015 is based around music written for or about Napoleon, with Lesueur's Coronation Music for Napoleon, Beethoven's sublime Choral Fantasy and the perhaps less inspired Wellington's Victory, Berlioz's The Fifth of May and Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte.