One can never be sure of the right response to Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition, if only because the leader wrote to his wife that it had been 'much better than lounging about in too great comfort at home.'

The brave are often rash, and the sadness associated with those lingering deaths as the British party vainly struggled back to base, beaten to the South Pole by Amundsen, is tempered with exasperation.

Vaughan Williams caught that mood perfectly in his Sinfonia Antarctica, especially in the bleak third movement. It's so comprehensive a picture of an inhuman landscape that man's intrusion seems to be an affront.

This concert, conducted by Stephen Layton, commemorated the centenary of Scott’s ill-fated journey.

By the Antarctica symphony - his seventh - Vaughan Williams was frequently contemplating grim vistas. The end of the Sixth possibly depicts a land laid waste by atomic warfare. The 'pastures' of his Pastoral Symphony were churned by the guns of the Great War.

The concert began with some of his music for the film of Scott's expedition. The symphony, not his best, could have done duty as well. Extracts from Scott's letters home were read by Hugh Bonneville.

Perhaps the newly-commissioned Seventy Degrees Below Zero, by Cecilia McDowall, a setting for tenor and orchestra of a poem by Seán Street based on Scott's words, and Scott's 'To My Widow' letter, best hinted at the issues involved. It was dramatically sung by Robert Murray.

Soprano Katherine Watson and the Bath Camerata/Wells Cathedral School Chamber Choir lent ethereal voices to the symphony.