Story : Donald Runnicles conducts a programme that looks to the past – a musical meditation on history, death and loss that still speaks powerfully today, 100 years after the start of the First World War. The concert sets Mahler’s bitterly elegiac Ninth Symphony against the ecstatic string writing of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, a work reimagining an English identity that would so soon find itself under threat.