A Concert of Remembrance

Virtuoso violinist Alda Dizdari, renowned for her original and deeply personal programming, presents a carefully curated selection of works for violin and piano written in the aftermath of two devastating World Wars. At the heart of the evening lies the composers’ profound emotional responses to a changing world—struggles shaped by conflict, loss, displacement and remembrance—interwoven with Dizdari’s own deeply personal connection to each work.

The evening opens, fittingly on 11 November, with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. One of the most cherished works in the violin repertoire, its soaring lyricism and contemplative beauty evoke a profound sense of remembrance, making it a particularly poignant choice for Remembrance Day.

Edward Elgar’s magnificent Violin Sonata follows—a work imbued with the atmosphere of a world forever altered by war. Through its intimacy and nostalgia, Elgar captures the poignancy of a vanished era, revealing both the tenderness of memory and the emotional weight of a world left behind.

George Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance takes us into a richly psychological landscape, where childhood memories and nostalgia become a vehicle for expressing the composer’s profound love for his homeland. Written at a time of immense personal and political upheaval, as Enescu faced exile following the end of the war and the establishment of the Communist regime in Romania, the work becomes both a deeply personal recollection and a poignant farewell to a homeland he could no longer return to.

Through these works, Alda Dizdari and pianist Tom Blach create an evening that is not simply a journey through music, but an exploration of memory, identity, loss, exile and resilience—revealing how profoundly the upheavals of history can shape the most intimate human stories.