Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad reflects a world on the brink of collapse while Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony is a vision of war-ravaged France. Like Butterworth, both Rudi Stephan and Frederick Kelly were killed in the First World War; the latter’s exquisite Elegy for strings was performed at his own memorial concert. Stephan’s Music for Orchestra (1912) finds a desperate intensity in its Expressionist colours.
