Enjoy the Magic of Classical Music with Warwickshire Symphony Orchestra
Join us for unforgettable performances of timeless masterpieces
7:30 pm Saturday 18th October 2025
Warwick Hall Warwick
About WSO
Our next Concert
Saturday 18th October Autumn Concert
7.30 pm - Warwick Hall Warwick
Coriolanus Overture - Beethoven
Cello Concerto - Dvorak
Symphony No. 5 - Vaughan Williams
Andrew O'Reilly - soloist
Roger Coull – conductor
Date for your diary - Family Concert
23rd November 2025
Spa Centre -Leamington Spa
Our Conductor
Principal Conductor - Roger Coull
Warwickshire Symphony Orchestra 's Principal Conductor is Roger Coull
Roger Coull’s route into conducting has come very much from the eyes and ears of a performer. As a string quartet leader of international standing he has always been used to interpreting music and every aspect of the process of turning a vision into performance.
Associate Conductor - Paul Leddington Wright
Warwickshire Symphony Orchestra's Associate Conductor is Paul Leddington Wright
Paul started conducting at the age of 15 He won an organ scholarship to study at Cambridge and continued his conducting alongside his studies.
Following university, he started a career in Musical Theatre. Work in the West End and provincial theatre lasted until he moved to Coventry to take up the position of sub-organist then musical director at the Cathedral (a position he retired from recently)
Beethoven - Coriolanus Overture
Beethoven depicts a Roman leader's transition from brutality to tenderness.
Based on the story of Roman leader Gaius Marcius Coriolanus by Heinrich Joseph von Collin, rather than Shakespeare's version, Beethoven wrote this spirited overture in 1807.
Concerned about giving too much of the plot away in the overture by summing up the entire play in one movement, the composer stresses the over-arching moods in the story, rather than attempting to capture the narrative.
A main theme in C minor represents Coriolanus' resolve and war-like tendencies while a more tender E-flat major theme represents the pleadings of his mother to desist.
Coriolanus eventually gives in to tenderness, but since he cannot turn back having led an army of his former enemies to Rome's gates, he kills himself. In Shakespeare's play, on the other hand, he is murdered.
Dvorak - Cello Concerto
Antonin Dvorak created one of the all-time greatest works in the solo cello genre with his cello concerto in B minor. Curiously though, Dvořák had written in 1865, “The cello is a beautiful instrument, but its place is in the orchestra and in chamber music. As a solo instrument it isn’t much good… it whinges up above, and grumbles down below. I have written a cello piece, but am sorry to this day that I did so, and I never intend to write another.” This comment referred to an earlier work for solo cello and piano.
Dvořák finally worked on his B minor concerto for three months and completed the work on 9 February 1895. It is dedicated to his friend Hanuš Wihan, a colleague from the Prague Conservatoire. So his earlier misgivings for the instrument were forgotten and one of his most well known works was created.
Vaughan Williams - Symphony No. 5
The “Symphony of the Celestial City…”
This is how biographer and classical music scholar Michael Kennedy poetically described Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5. Indeed, this music, completed in 1943 as the Second World War raged, moves into an alternate world of radiant light, quiet serenity, and sublime mystery. Following Vaughan Williams’ ferocious and dissonant Fourth Symphony, it returns to the eternal, pastoral reassurance of England’s metaphorical “green and pleasant” countryside.
The term “Celestial City” also comes up in Vaughan Williams’ opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which he began in 1909 and completed only in 1952. When Vaughan Williams began sketching the Fifth Symphony in 1936, he doubted that he would ever be able to finish the opera, or the “morality” as he labeled it. Bits and pieces of The Pilgrim’s Progress sprang to life first as the building blocks of the Symphony.
Bringing classical music to life: WSO in concert
