A short but emotionally draining evening

What promised to be an emotional evening was made that much more intense with the death of Richard Hickox, just days before he was due to conduct the first staging at ENO of Vaughan Williams' short but beautifully moving Riders to the Sea. Hickox was one of the great champions of British music and had a special affinity for the works of Vaughan Williams. His presence will be greatly missed.It was a flash of inspiration to use Sibelius' tone poem Luonnotar as a prologue to the opera. The two pieces seem almost made for each other, both odes to the natural world: Luonnotar almost literally depicting the birth of the world itself; Riders, a meditation on death and the destructive power of Nature. Luonnotar was performed is its original Finnish (is this a first for ENO)?As the curtain rises, Lunonnotar is suspended high in an upright fishing…