Awakening & Farewell
3:00pm, Sun, 11 Oct 2026
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Production: Awakening & Farewell Type of event: Performance Start time: 3:00pm End time: 5:00pm Venue: Albert Hall Conference Centre
North Circus Street
Nottingham
NG1 5AASee map below Ticket pricing/options: Adults/OAPs - £21.00 for any seats
Students/chidlren - £7.00 for any seatsTickets: 
Tickets available from NPO members or on the doorDescription: Welcome to the first concert of our 2026/27 season, which explores themes of nature, human transition and mortality. All these masterworks use soaring vocal and instrumental lines to reflect an acceptance of life's journey.
Anna Clyne - This Moment
Richard Strauss - Four Last Songs
Soprano: Esther Shea
Gustav Mahler - Symphony No 1 in D major "The Titan"
Anna Clyne – This Moment
This Moment is inspired by the calligraphy of Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed away in January 2022. It is a meditation on his words “this moment is full of wonders.” This Moment is also a response to our collective grief and loss in recent years, and borrows extracts of the Kyrie and Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem.
Richard Strauss – Four Last Songs
These four songs are the last compositions Strauss finished. The Four Last Songs depict the farewell of a man who leaves the scene of earthly struggle and triumph without disappointment or reproach, without fear of destruction and doom, but with serene confidence in eternity and immortality. When the poet asks “Can this be death?”, the horn answers with that same Transfiguration Motif which Strauss wrote sixty years prior to his own death.
Esther Shea - Soprano
Praised for her “smooth, steady tone” by Seen and Heard, Esther Shea is a soprano from Jersey in the Channel Islands whose artistry is defined by a desire to tell stories that move and resonate with audiences.
She is currently studying for her Master’s degree at the Royal Northern College of Music with Mary Plazas.
Esther won the RNCM Concerto Competition, as well as the Joyce and Michael Kennedy Award for the Singing of Strauss and the Williams Howard Award.Esther Shea appears by kind permission of the RNCM.
Gustav Mahler – Symphony No 1 in D major
Mahler based his first symphony around an elaborate program encorporating ecstatic nature imagery and descriptions of the grotesque and macabre. The symphony’s finale at one time bore the descriptive title Dall’Inferno al Paradiso, and the third movement funeral procession was heavily influenced by Hunter’s Funeral Procession, in which the forest animals carry the body of the dead hunter, portrayed in the minor-key version of Frère Jacques.
The symphony opens with a magical, sustained high A in the strings representing nature waking from a long winter. The main melody directly quotes Mahler’s own song "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld" from Songs of a Wayfarer.
The second movement is a robust, rustic Austrian Ländler, featuring heavy stomping rhythms and a more easygoing, waltz-like middle trio section.
The third movement's melody is humorously interrupted by a raucous, wailing Klezmer-style brass band and the explosive, turbulent finale struggles out of the shadows of the previous movements, ultimately crashing through to a blazing, triumphant D major heroic conclusion.
It promises to be a spectacular opening to the season! Not to be missed!
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