Stoneleigh Youth Orchestra return to Fairfield Halls with a concert of profound emotional scope, bookended by two monumental works of heroic defiance, plus one of classical music’s greatest ever swansongs.

Arnold’s Peterloo Overture portrays the innocent victims of the suppression of an 1819 meeting on political reform but also leaves us in no doubt that they did not die in vain.

Soprano Katy Thomson joins the Orchestra for Strauss’s Four Last Songs, his final completed work. Written when he was 84, it is an autumnal farewell to a life well lived, where death is neither feared nor resisted, but accepted with moments of transcendent musical bliss.

In 1936, Shostakovich’s music was attacked by the Soviet authorities, who called it ‘muddle instead of music’; he knew his career, and perhaps even his life, were under threat. His response was his Fifth Symphony, subtitled 'a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism'. Journeying from an opening shrouded in grim darkness to a rousing, victorious march at its conclusion, it was a resounding success and brought about his return to favour. But behind the symphony’s ending of apparent triumph, do we actually hear the voice of a composer (and a Russian people) living under tyranny? Join us and decide for yourselves!