Local composer, teacher and musical director Geoff Page has written and performed musicals for both professional and amateur productions. He has a witty penchant for ‘the dark side’, as many of his titles suggest: ‘Academy of Death’, ‘No Sleep for the Haunted’, and ‘Typhoid Mary’. ‘The Masque of Red Death’ is no exception, taking its title from a macabre short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1935, at the age of 50, Alban Berg received news that Manon Gropius, the daughter of dear friends, had died from polio aged 18. He immediately threw himself into fulfilling a commission for a violin concerto, dedicating it ‘To the Memory of an Angel’. It proved to be his last work, and surely it is one of his best and most expressive, combining techniques of 12-tone composition with rhapsodic solo writing, culminating in variations on the Bach chorale ‘It is enough!’ Michael Foyle is our virtuoso for this extraordinary work.

Born in 1903, Avril Coleridge-Taylor inherited her father Samuel’s musical talent. She established a career as a conductor, working with many top professional orchestras; she also composed and even founded her own orchestra. ‘A Sussex Landscape’, written in 1940, is far from merely serene and pastoral as the title suggests; rather, it can be heard as a woman’s impassioned reaction to impending war.

William Walton’s second symphony (1956-60), composed twenty-five years after his first, was initially deemed ‘not modern enough’ by British critics. The work found favour in America, however, which caused it to be ‘reborn’, in the words of Walton’s wife. Perhaps it was the rhythmic energy of the opening Allegro, or the dazzling orchestration, or the sheer invention of the variations which comprise the last movement which appealed to the Americans. In any event, the Brits quickly changed their tune and came to realise this is Walton at his best.