Nocturne for Orchestra

Program notes

About the Work

Elizabeth Maconchy is best known for her thirteen string quartets, and her orchestral music is heard far less often. The Nocturne is a short piece for full orchestra, about seven minutes long, dating from 1950 and 1951. It comes from the busy years after the war, when she was much in demand among British orchestras and ensembles, and beyond its date very little about its origins has been recorded: programme notes written for recent performances say frankly that hardly any documentation survives.

The title places it in a long line of night pieces, from Chopin’s piano nocturnes to the orchestral ones of Debussy, and Maconchy would have known another kind as well. She was drawn to the music of central Europe more than to the English pastoral school in which she had been trained, and Bartók, whose slow movements are full of the rustlings and stillness of the night, was the composer she admired most. Her Nocturne is not a lullaby. Commentators describe a piece that is evocative and mysterious, at moments menacing, with a full-blooded climax at its centre.

It has gained ground in recent years as interest in Maconchy’s music has revived. Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra opened a concert of British music at the Barbican with it in February 2025, and it serves the same purpose on this tour: a few minutes of unfamiliar British music before two of the best-loved works in the repertoire.

What to Listen For

The piece opens high and still. The upper strings hold a thin, glinting sonority and shift slowly between two chords, and against that background the woodwind play angular, searching lines that overlap one another.

The lower strings are more restless and push the music forward. Listen for the harp, which ushers in a more dream-like passage coloured by tuned percussion, and for the trumpets, whose brief fanfares give way to long melodic lines.

The climax comes in the middle, led by the trombones, in a great swell of warm orchestral sound. It clears quickly. A solo violin is left exposed, and from there the texture thins until the instruments fade into silence one by one.