Not that long ago, the idea of a major metropolitan orchestra hosting a festival of English music would likely have seemed absurd. After all, it was only in 1904 that a German critic and yoga enthusiast named Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz described the United Kingdom as “das Land ohne Musik”. That’s “the land without music”, for those of us unable to read Schmitz in the original, and even if his phrase was uttered during the early stages of the nationalistic sabre rattling that would soon lead to a pair of horrifically brutal wars, there’s some truth to it.

Quick: name one British composer operating between the 1695 death of Henry Purcell and the 1899 debut of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

Can’t do it? Don’t worry: you’re not alone. But if you’re looking for a crash course in the extraordinary blossoming of English music that followed Elgar’s masterpiece, it would be hard to improve on the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming Spring Festival, which this year is subtitled A British Fantasy. The event aims to place English music in an expansive historical context, in part by including 20th-century works that reference early British composers—such as Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis—alongside contemporary works like Velocity, by 33-year-old Gavin Higgins. And the festival’s first concert, Songs and Serenades, offers an especially apt introduction to the field, featuring as it does works by three of the four demigods of early English modernism: Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Benjamin Britten.

We can thank conductor and soloist James Ehnes for that. “The artistic staff at the VSO—and [VSO music director] Bramwell Tovey, as well—said, ‘Give us some British music that you think could work for a play/direct program,’ ” the Brandon, Manitoba–born musician explains in a telephone interview from Dallas, Texas. “I just sort of rattled off a bunch of pieces and they said, ‘Okay! We’re done.’ It was actually an amazingly simple process, putting that program together.”

Perhaps that’s because Ehnes and Tovey have a long history together. Their first collaboration came in 2006, and involved recording William Walton’s Violin Concerto; they’ll repeat that initial encounter, in a way, on the Spring Festival’s second night. This time around, however, Ehnes will appear on his second-favourite instrument, in Walton’s Viola Concerto.

“I think if you were to ask a lot of violists, they would say that this is the greatest of all the viola concertos,” he says of this work by the fourth British demigod, which will share the program with Gustav Holst’s The Planets and Higgins’s Velocity. “It’s just a fantastic piece of music. It’s sort of wistful music; it’s very poignant, which is all the more remarkable for having been written by a very young man. But it’s also very virtuosic, for an instrument that is not traditionally thought of as being a highly virtuosic instrument.

“Like most of the great concertos, it has everything,” he adds. “It has beautiful melodies; it has lyricism; it has drama; it has great interplay between the soloist and the orchestra; and there are some extended sections with just the orchestra that are very exciting. It’s just really wonderfully effective stuff.”

For all that Ehnes loves English music, he’s reluctant to describe it. Some of the clichés, he admits, are true: Elgar did define a language that others later built on, and many of the genre’s most famous pieces—including Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, which he’ll play on opening night—do appear to spring directly from the bucolic English landscape. But such familiar constructs give only an incomplete view, he cautions.

“Often these composers were not shy about letting us know the picture that they were painting,” he notes. “But, that being said, I think that sometimes there is a bit of a misconception that British music is all about, you know, rolling hills and beautiful fields and the seashore.…Aaron Copland, who apparently was otherwise a very, very nice man, said a very funny and disparaging thing about some piece of Vaughan Williams’s: he said it was ‘like looking at a cow for 45 minutes’, or something like that. Before I really knew the repertoire, that was kind of the idea I had—but that’s just scratching the surface.”

James Ehnes appears with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Orpheum on April 22 and 24, as part of Spring Festival: A British Fantasy.