In 2007 new-music ensemble the London Sinfonietta and period-instrument outfit the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment together gave the first performance of Heiner Goebbels’s Songs of Wars I Have Seen, commissioned by the Southbank Centre to mark the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall. Seventeen years later, the two orchestras are reunited under fast-rising conductor Chloe Rooke for a London revival of this landmark setting of wartime diary entries by Gertrude Stein, a work that manages to prove harrowing, poignant and consoling all at once, and whose visions of war have scarcely been more relevant.
There will be no interval
Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3
Image: Chloe Rooke © Nick Rutter