Samuel Wesley was the son of Charles Wesley the hymn writer and the nephew of John Wesley the evangelist.  He was a musical prodigy to rival Mozart, and developed as an adult into by far the most important English contemporary of Beethoven.  This concert brings together three major works that reveal his musical preoccupations.  His remarkable Symphony in Bb (1802) is the only English symphony that can stand comparison with Haydn’s London symphonies, while the delightful ‘Ave maris stella’ (1786) is scored for two sopranos and strings and reflects his interest in Roman Catholic church music and, in particular, the music of Pergolesi and other Neapolitan composers.  Wesley thought the ‘Confitebor tibi Domine’ (1799), a setting of Psalm 110, his finest work.  In its creative fusion of the Baroque choral idiom with the modern Classical style, it is a worthy companion to Haydn’s Creation, written a year or two earlier.

Peter Holman is internationally known as a champion of unfamiliar English music of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  His series of recordings in the English Orpheus series on Hyperion Records have been universally praised and have led to a critical reappraisal of the ‘dark age’ of English musical history.