There is a particular lyricism – a sense of landscape, weather, and inner weather – that runs through the great British orchestral tradition. It is music shaped by sea mist and cathedral stone, by pastoral stillness and industrial thunder. Few conductors understand this expressive terrain more deeply than Donald Runnicles, whose career has long been entwined with the works of Elgar, Britten and other great British conductors.
Asked to choose seven of the greatest British works for orchestra, Runnicles begins not with obscure connoisseur’s choices but with pieces that have entered the bloodstream of cultural memory: Holst’s The Planets, with its cosmic swagger and terror; Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 5, serene and searching; and the aching farewell of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Around these, he places works that illuminate British music’s surprising breadth – from grandeur to introspection, from public ceremony to private yearning – a tradition both unmistakable and continually evolving.
Greatest British works for orchestra
1. Gustav Holst: The Planets
Gustav Holst's The Planets is rightly one of the pillars of British music and one of the most popular pieces for both audiences and orchestras. It’s so well orchestrated and each movement is an extraordinary depiction of not just an object but a feeling and a personality – you can almost imagine these planets as human beings. Jupiter brims with joy, Venus features some of the most serene music in the world and, as a whole, the piece exudes a sense of mystery and timelessness. That you’ll often hear snippets of it in many different contexts is testament to its brilliance.
2. Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
There’s a reason Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is consistently in Classic FM radio station’s top ten. I’ve performed it fairly frequently and it continues to take my breath away. You really do feel, with those first ethereal G major chords, that you have entered a mystical, magical space. It’s a cathedral of sound, with a geographic element to it: some of the music sounds as if it’s coming from behind you, some from the nave, and some seems to be coming from above. But at the same time, it feels like a deeply personal work.
3. Benjamin Britten: War Requiem
I performed Britten's War Requiem in my most recent concert in Dresden with the Dresden Philharmonic, on 13 February this year – the anniversary of the firebombing of the city – and to bring this piece there was profoundly significant. I find its power – and, sadly, its continuing relevance –astonishing. The idea of combining the timelessness of the Latin Mass with the brutal specificity of Wilfred Owen’s poetry is remarkable. In lesser hands, such a juxtaposition might jar, but here it becomes something heartbreakingly sad and, at the same time, deeply beautiful.
4. James MacMillan: Symphony No. 4
I have admired James MacMillan’s music throughout my career. He wrote this symphony for a rather significant birthday of mine in 2015, and what I love is the way it intertwines the modern with the ancient. Haunting themes emerge out of a modern soundscape, and you feel as though you are standing on a Scottish moor, listening to music that feels ancient and primitive. Premiering it at the BBC Proms ten years ago was incredibly moving, and I’m looking forward to bringing it to Dresden this season, when James joins us as composer-in-residence.
5. Edward Elgar: Cello Concerto
Edward Elgar was, it seems, someone who rarely experienced happiness. He struggled with depression and with the British sense of inferiority in an orchestral world dominated by Richard Strauss and Mahler. I hear all of this in the Cello Concerto. It is a deeply personal work, offering a glimpse into a glorious yet troubled mind, filled with quiet anguish and self-doubt – feelings we all recognise. The music sublimates this pain so movingly it can bring you to tears, saying what words cannot. And, as with Britten, what is left unsaid feels as powerful as what is expressed.
6. Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5
The Fifth Symphony is remarkable, not least because it was written during one of the darkest periods in Britain’s history – the early 1940s, when there was little sense that we would emerge victorious from the Second World War. Vaughan Williams, who had served as an ambulance driver on the front lines during the First World War, was acutely aware of the horror and brutality of conflict, and that awareness emerges in parts of this music. Yet the work is also a beacon of hope that we would come through this war. And is there a more moving opening to a slow movement than that of the Romanza, with its hauntingly beautiful English horn solo?
7. William Walton: Symphony No. 1
I think of William Walton as the British Sibelius. Some of this 1935 piece seems hewn out of granite, and it’s phenomenally orchestrated, with a glorious slow movement and plenty of Italian sunshine (Walton began writing it while living in Italy). Ever since Beethoven, composers felt that the final movement of a symphony must serve as the culmination of all that precedes it – a challenge not all have met successfully. Often, the promise of the first three movements remains unresolved at the end. But there’s nothing anti-climactic about this work. It’s perfectly proportioned and viscerally exciting, for both the audience and the orchestra.
Who is Donnald Runnicles?
Sir Donald Runnicles studied at the University of Edinburgh and St John’s College, Cambridge, before beginning his career as a singers’ coach and assistant conductor in Mannheim, Germany. He has been music director and principal conductor of the San Francisco Opera, music director of the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming, US, and chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. This autumn, he begins his tenure as chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic, launching the season with a British Festival highlighting leading artists and compositions from the UK.