BBC Concert Orchestra 2025-2026 Gaia x BBC Concert Orchestra: Sounds of the Earth

Under the glow of Luke Jerram’s replica of our planet, hear a concert of heavenly works for strings, from Vaughan Williams to Hildur Guðnadóttir.

The scene is set for tonight’s concert by Vaughan Williams’ timeless Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which opens with solemn chords before expanding into soaring strings. This contemplative work was inspired by a Tudor tune by 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis, and first performed in Gloucester Cathedral in 1910.

We skip forward in time for two short works by Oscar-winning composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir. The melancholy cello melody of ‘Bær’ drifts into silence, before driving rhythms announce ‘Opaque’.

Gaia bathes in musical light as we hear contemporary composer Dobrinka Tabakova’s Sun Triptych, composed in 2007. The shimmering ‘Dawn’ builds to a glorious ‘Day’, alive with movement and warmth, and then ‘Dusk’ settles in, meditative and mellifluous.

Speaking directly to the heart, Barber’s transcendent Adagio for Strings is a staple in film soundtracks, thanks to its raw emotional power. As critic Michael Steinberg said, ‘Barber – at 26 – created something that has that rare quality of seeming always to have been there.’

Arvo Pärt wrote his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten on hearing of the older composer’s death in 1976. He said, ‘for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally – and now it would not come to that.’ Bells and layers of descending strings give the impression of a church service.

The concert takes place underneath Gaia, a touring artwork by UK artist Luke Jerram. Measuring seven metres in diameter and created from 120dpi detailed NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface, the artwork provides the opportunity to see our planet, floating in three dimensions.