BBC SO/Brabbins

In 1944, Ealing Studios started to plan a film based on Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated attempt to reach the South Pole. The team was unanimous in its choice of a composer. ‘Everyone agreed that if Vaughan Williams could be interested, he was the one man in the world to write the score,’ recalled the studio’s director of music, Ernest Irving. 

The score Vaughan Williams delivered is now recognized as one of the most outstanding works of its kind, its distinctive sound world of tremolo strings and wordless soprano voice conjuring up the unworldly conditions Scott faced and eventually making their way into the composer’s own Sinfonia Antarctica. Marking 150 years since the composer’s birth, Martyn Brabbins conducts Vaughan Williams’s extraordinary cinematic masterpiece live to a restored version of Charles Frend’s Scott of the Antarctic.