poster for 2018 Creative Capitals Disc 1
× For approximately two hundred years following the death of Henry Purcell, England failed to produce a composer of international merit. The German critic Oscar A. H. Schmidt famously derided the nation as Das Land ohne Musik (“The land without music”). But throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England nevertheless remained rich creative ground; London in particular attracted many of the continent's greatest composers—from Handel and Mendelssohn to Edvard Grieg—who in turn helped make that city one of the Western world's musical capitals. The opening disc of Creative Capitals LIVE celebrates London's cosmopolitan musical energy, juxtaposing these expatriate masters with two fresh voices of English music's early twentieth–century renaissance, Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams.