Ulster Orchestra: The Great Outdoors

Charles Ives described the opening of The Unanswered Question as a ‘cosmic landscape’ and this concert is very much rooted in landscapes of all types, from Ives’s exploration of the human spirit’s connection to the realm of nature to the pastoral idyll of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Gavin Higgins’s Horn Concerto was written for our soloist, Ben Goldscheider, and is inspired by the Forest of Dean, where Higgins grew up. There are echoes of hunting calls and Wagner in a work that finishes with a movement uniquely inspired by the forest floor and titled Mycelium Rondo.