BBC NOW 2026-27 Season North Wales International Music Festival

This concert opens in a world of shimmering pastoral beauty with Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. Inspired by English folk song and the open countryside, its serene lyricism and sense of timeless stillness remain among the most evocative portrayals of the natural landscape in English music.

We then turn to the present day with Cameron Biles-Liddell’s Nature’s Dance, a new Harp Concerto, commissioned by BBC Radio 3. This world premiere performance is a piece built from grit and steel, the materials that forged many of the communities of North Wales.

After the interval, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the Pastoral, brings the programme to a triumphant close. A vivid musical celebration of nature, the symphony reflects Beethoven’s deeply personal emotional response to the countryside. Each movement tells its own story, from the “Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the countryside” to the gentle murmur of the brook with its birdsong calls. Joyful, heartfelt and richly imaginative, the Pastoral Symphony remains one of Beethoven’s most uplifting works.