Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Ralph Vaughan Williams

Music for Casals Friends & Colleagues

It’s hardly surprising that anyone would be moved to write music for Pablo Casals. Regarded by many as the greatest cellist of his time, perhaps ever, he was certainly a giant-of-an-artist and of a man. Born in Catalonia, he stood up to the Franco regime, entering into self-imposed exile and refusing to perform in countries that recognized Franco’s authority. He rediscovered the Bach cello suites in a secondhand bookshop and made them famous. Over the span of his career, he played for both Queen Victoria and John F. Kennedy.

As a conductor and administrator, he founded the Prades Festival and Casals Festival. He established the Puerto Rico Symphony and Conservatory. He gave master classes, conducted and recorded at Marlboro. He was even a talented composer.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear works dedicated to Casals by three of his friends and colleagues.

Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his seldom-heard “Fantasia on Sussex Folk Tunes” around the time he was at work on his Piano Concerto and “Job: A Masque for Dancing.” Casals performed the piece in 1930. It was not heard again until 1983, the year of its world-premiere recording (featuring Julian Lloyd Webber). The composer later undertook a full-scale concerto for Casals. It was never completed, but the sketches for its slow movement were realized for a 2010 performance at the BBC Proms, under the title “Dark Pastoral.”

Donald Francis Tovey, who would achieve fame as a musicologist and writer on music, wrote quite a lot of music himself, most of it now forgotten. In 1935, he composed a concerto for Casals. At nearly an hour in length, the work may be the longest cello concerto ever written.

In 1912, Tovey was a houseguest of Casals and cellist Guilhermina Suggia, at their summer home at Playa San Salvador on the Mediterranean coast. There, he played tennis, swam and performed chamber music with the likes of Enrique Granados and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. He also made great strides on his opera, “The Bride of Dionysus.” As a show of thanks, he composed for his hosts a Sonata for Two Cellos in G major, which became part of the evenings’ entertainments. The work’s second movement is a set of variations on a Catalan folk song. We’ll hear it performed by Marcy Rosen and Frances Rowell, from a Bridge Records, Inc. release.

Finally, Arnold Schoenberg, himself an amateur cellist, had done editorial work on three pieces by the 18th century composer Georg Matthias Monn for inclusion in the publication “Monuments of Music in Austria.” When Casals invited Schoenberg to conduct his orchestra in Barcelona, the composer set about arranging a “new” concerto, based upon a harpsichord work by Monn, written in 1746. We’ll hear Schoenberg’s transformation of the piece performed by Yo-Yo Ma.

I hope you’ll join me for “Casals’ Pals” – music written for Casals by notable composers, friends and colleagues – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

September 15, 2019
Armstrong Gibbs Underrated British Composer

I’m not going to strong-arm anyone into liking Armstrong. It’s easy enough to fall in love with the easy charm and seductive melodies of Armstrong Gibbs.

Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1889-1960) is mostly known for his songs. He studied composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music. Nevertheless, he is often dismissed for gravitating toward musical forms that could easily be described as “slight.”

He did contribute his share of British Light Music, to be sure, but he also wrote symphonies. The second of these, the “Odysseus Symphony,” for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, is clearly cut from the same cloth as Vaughan Williams’ “A Sea Symphony.”

It was Princess Elizabeth – the current Queen Elizabeth II – who requested of Armstrong a piece for her eighteenth birthday. The result was this gorgeous miniature, called “Dusk,” which became one of Gibb’s best-known works.

Happy birthday, Armstrong Gibbs!

August 10, 2019
Whitman’s British Isles Influence

While Walt Whitman has attained a venerable status here in the United States, as essentially America’s national poet, more surprising, perhaps, was his impact on composers of the British Isles.

Whitman was beloved by artists in the U.K. Interestingly, I learned in doing some reading in preparation for these shows that writer Bram Stoker was so taken with Whitman, the man, that allegedly he modeled his characterization of Dracula upon him (for more, follow the links below). And he meant it as a compliment! Stoker viewed Whitman as the quintessential man and kept up a correspondence with him until the poet’s death.

More to our purposes, this Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear two works by Gustav Holst, composer of “The Planets:” the “Walt Whitman Overture,” written in 1899, when Holst was about 25 years-old, and “The Mystic Trumpeter” from 1904.

Holst first encountered Whitman’s poetry while still a student at the Royal College of Music. He would go on to set a number of Whitman texts. “The Mystic Trumpeter” made a particularly strong impression on him. His musical response was an important stepping stone in the composer’s artistic development, emerging as he was from a decade of Wagner worship and not yet giving himself over to the absorption of folk English material. Still, there are certainly glimpses of the mature artist to come.

Holst’s good friend and colleague, Ralph Vaughan Williams, was also influenced by Whitman, not only in the writing of his frequently recorded “A Sea Symphony,” portions of his cantata “Dona nobis pacem,” and his work for chorus and orchestra, “Toward the Unknown Region,” but also in the less frequently encountered mini song cycle, “Three Poems by Walt Whitman.” The set consists of “Nocturne,” “A Clear Midnight,” and “Joy, Shipmate, Joy!” Written in 1925, the songs are products of Vaughan Williams’ maturity. The composer was around 53 years-old.

Frederick Delius was yet another English composer deeply influenced by Whitman. Delius’ settings for baritone, chorus, and orchestra, titled “Sea Drift,” from 1903-04, are collectively regarded as one of the composer’s finest achievements. “Sea Drift” was composed at the peak of Delius’ vitality.

His “Songs of Farewell,” however, were produced under quite different circumstances. Delius was both blind and paralyzed, suffering from the effects of advanced syphilis, when he received an unexpected gift in the arrival of a young musician by the name of Eric Fenby, who offered his services as an amanuensis. The result was a rekindling of Delius’ creativity.

“Songs of Farewell,” a cycle of dreamy choral settings after Whitman, was dictated to Fenby by Delius in 1929-30. There are five songs: “How sweet the silent backward tracings;” “I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak;” “Passage to you;” “Joy, shipmate, joy!;” and “Now finale to the shore.”

We continue our celebration of “the good gray poet,” all month long, for the occasion of the bicentennial of his birth. Whitman was born in Huntingdon, NY, on Long Island, on May 31, 1819, and he died in Camden, NJ, on March 26, 1892.

“Walk out with me toward the unknown region…” Join me for “The Mystic Trumpeter,” the second of four programs, this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Read Bram Stoker’s effusive letter to Whitman here:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/01/09/bram-stoker-walt-whitman-letter/

Walt Whitman’s influence on “Dracula” and (possibly) the 1931 “Frankenstein:”

https://bigthink.com/book-think/walt-whitman-frankenstein-dracula-and-the-afterlife

May 12, 2019
Darwin Galapagos & Vaughan Williams’ Cats

It was on this date in 1835 that Charles Darwin arrived at the Galapagos Islands aboard the Beagle.

Fun fact: Darwin was the great uncle of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Vaughan Williams, however, was partial to cats.

September 15, 2018
Vaughan Williams Remembered on WWFM

With all the hoo-ha surrounding the 100th anniversary of the death of Claude Debussy, it’s easy to forget that Ralph Vaughan Williams (who studied for a time with Ravel) died 60 years ago today. Yeah, I know 60 doesn’t quite have the marketing punch of 50 or 100, but Vaughan Williams is one of my all-time favorite composers, so I am going to go with it.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll remember one of England’s finest composers by way of three rare recordings he made of his own music.

Unlike Sir Edward Elgar, who was given the opportunity to record most of his major output, Vaughan Williams was generally overlooked as a conductor by the major labels – which is a shame, because the few recordings he did make are superb.

Among the acoustical documents, none match the hilarity of RVW’s 1925 performance of “The Wasps” overture. Vaughan Williams’ recording is by far the fastest – and jauntiest – “Wasps” on record, although I’m unsure whether it is due to the composer’s own preference, or because of the limitations of the technology. It’s hard not to smile at such manic high spirits.

By contrast, his 1937 recording of the Symphony No. 4 is a masterpiece of temperament and ferocity – all the more jarring in that the turbulence evoked in the work is not at all what most people associate with this composer. The urgency of the music is captured, eerily, at a time when the ink was still fresh on the page and the world was on the brink of chaos. It certainly belies the snide dismissal of much of the composer’s output as languid “cow-pat” music.

In all, Vaughan Willliams’ meager commercial discography as a conductor wouldn’t even fill two hours. It is most fortunate, then, that a few concert recordings have emerged over the years. We’ll conclude with of one of RVW’s loveliest pieces, the “Serenade to Music,” the work which actually brought tears to the eyes of Sergei Rachmaninoff at its first performance in 1938. The text is from Act V, scene I, of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night,
Become the touches of sweet harmony.”

This performance was captured at Royal Festival Hall on November 22, 1951. Vaughan Williams was 79 years old. What’s especially remarkable is that the recording features 11 of the 16 soloists who sang in the work’s 1938 premiere. We’ll hear it from a compact disc issued on Albion Records, the official label of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.

Vaughan Williams’ ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey alongside some of the nation’s greatest artists – yet, in some measure, the composer is still underestimated, especially by those outside the British Isles. I hope you’ll join me as we remember RVW on the 60th anniversary of his death. That’s “Vaughan, But Not Forgotten,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

August 26, 2018

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