By the end of the nineteenth century, British composers were eager to recapture the musical glory of the English Renaissance. Tonight we will hear two British composers who indeed conquered that feat.

Vaughan Williams composed Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for two string orchestras and string quartet on the occasion of the Three Choirs Festival at the cathedral of Gloucester and he conducted the premiere on the evening of September 6, 1910. Williams had spent years collecting folk songs from all parts of England and had undertaken the revision of the hymnal of the Anglican Church, making it, "a thesaurus of all the finest hymn tunes in the world." During the course of his task he discovered a group of nine melodies composed for The English Psalter in 1567 by Thomas Tallis. In his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis Williams seamlessly combines Tallis’s tunes with themes of his own based on motivic fragments from the original melody. The piece is constructed using three ensembles of different sizes producing a sense of antiphonal dialogue, contrasting high strings with low, and solo passages from the quartet, in order to create a sense of monastic chant. Though it is one of the composer’s earliest works, it remains his most popular. 

Elgar wrote Introduction and Allegro for Strings in 1905 and dedicated the work to pianist, Samuel Simons Sanford, a friend and champion who served as professor of applied music at Yale Univerity. The piece premiered on March 8, 1905 at the Queen’s Hall in London. The composer conducted the London Symphony Orchestra. In 1901 Elgar had traveled to Ynys Lochtyn where he wrote a sketch of a melodic motif involving the interval of a falling third. In the program notes for the premiere Elgar wrote, “The sketch was forgotten until a short time ago, when it was brought to my mind by hearing, far down our own Valley of the Wye, a song similar to those so pleasantly heard on Ynys Lochtyn. The singer of the Wye unknowingly reminded me of my sketch.” It is a melody “in folk style,” inspired by a musical idea heard “in the wild,” but it is best viewed as an original melody. The composer wrote dozens of changes of tempo within the piece as well as a great variety of string techniques and as in William’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro employs the concerto grosso principle for string quartet contrasted with a full chamber ensemble.

Established in 2007, the Meccore String Quartet is one of Europe's most compelling young ensembles. They had the honour of performing as the first ever Polish String Quartet during a ceremony of Holocaust Remembrance Day in the German Bundestag. The quartet has received numerous awards from prestigious chamber music competitions and has claimed international distinction following their nomination for the “Paszport Polityki” award in the classical music category for their “innovative approach to the music and for breaking the musical stereotypes.” The quartet was first tutored by the members of the Camerata Quartet and then studied with the Artemis Quartet at the Universität der Künste in Berlin and Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Brussels. Through a scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage the ensemble continues to fulfil their mission to popularize chamber music in places with limited access to culture.