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Tag: Ralph Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams Buried a Commoner Honored

65 years ago today, the foremost English composer of his time, and one of the great composers of the 20th century, Ralph Vaughan Williams was interred in Westminster Abbey. He was the first commoner to be so honored in almost 300 years – since the death of Henry Purcell, in fact.

Rightly or wrongly, England’s musical reputation had taken a nosedive in the interim (the country’s cultural standing was derided in Germany as “Das Land ohne Musik”), with most of its musical luminaries imports (especially Handel and Mendelssohn), until the nation reclaimed its own with Sir Edward Elgar and his contemporaries around the turn of the 20th century. But Vaughan Williams did more than anyone for the development of an English national sound. What’s more, he was deeply committed to making music with and for his compatriots. He had a generous heart, and by all accounts he was a kind man. It was near Purcell, in Westminster’s north choir aisle, that his ashes were laid to rest.

Vaughan Williams requested that two of his works be included in the service: his anthem “O taste and see” and his setting of the hymn “All people that on earth do dwell” (OLD 100TH), both written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – which took place at the Abbey five years earlier, in 1953. Vaughan Williams’ hymn “Come down, o love divine” (DOWN AMPNEY) accompanied his funeral procession. The composer’s great champion, Sir Adrian Boult, conducted “Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus” and selections from “Job,” along with Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, for a commemoration, held immediately prior to the funeral service.

The funeral was broadcast live on the BBC. Here’s a very brief extract:

And a copy of the complete program:

https://www.westminster-abbey.org/media/12534/ralph-vaughan-williams-funeral-1958.pdf

Vaughan Williams remains, alas, one of the most underappreciated of the great composers. His body of work, for anyone who cares to look beyond the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and “The Lark Ascending,” is stunning. The most common image we hold is of a rustic artist who perfected slovenly chic. Yet he was perhaps unsuspectedly cosmopolitan, uncommonly energetic, and uncannily productive. In reading Eric Saylor’s recent biography of the composer (“Ralph Vaughan Williams,” Oxford University Press, 2022), I was astounded to realize that, once he found his mature voice, he basically churned out one masterpiece after another, in quick succession, for decades. Alas, outside the UK, it’s as if Vaughan Williams sleeps undisturbed with all his treasures in the Valley of the Kings. Mark my words, someday they will be rediscovered!

“O taste and see,” at Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022

“All people that on earth do dwell,” at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012

September 19, 2023
Casals & His Composer Friends on The Lost Chord

He put his career on hold to stand up to Franco. He rediscovered the Bach cello suites. He played for Queen Victoria and John F. Kennedy. He founded the Prades Festival. He established the Puerto Rico Symphony and Conservatory. He gave master classes, conducted and recorded at Marlboro. He was even a talented composer.

Pablo Casals was a giant of an artist and of a man. Is it any wonder so many of his colleagues were moved to write music for him?

This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear works dedicated to Casals by three of his composer 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, composed quite a lot of music himself, most of it now forgotten. In 1935, he wrote 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.

Pau takes a bow! I hope you’ll join me for “Casals’ Pals” – music written for Pablo Casals by notable composer friends and colleagues – on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Remember, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

September 16, 2023
Bard Vaughan Williams Article Submission

I just finally submitted my article on the Bard Music Festival to the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society. All 4000 blessed words of it. We’ll see how that goes. I don’t believe I’ve ever tangled with such a bear of a piece before, which I don’t quite get, since Bard and RVW are right in my wheelhouse. I guess I choke in front of an audience or something. It IS the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, after all. It’s one thing to write about what you know, but it’s quite another when you know your audience REALLY knows! In any case, unless the editor throws it out the window, some of it may turn up in the October issue. Now I’ve got to clean myself up and rejoin the world!

September 6, 2023
RVW Symphony No 9 Premiere 65 Years On

Ralph Vaughan Williams died 65 years ago today. Here’s the world premiere recording of his Symphony No. 9 of 1956-57. Critics of the day were largely dismissive of the work, finding it enigmatic, and puzzled by the composer’s decision to include among his orchestration three saxophones and a flügelhorn. Horrors!

In recent decades, it seems the very characteristics that confounded the gatekeepers – the symphony’s visionary, violent, elusive, and ambiguous nature – are some of the very qualities for which it is now praised. This is not the kind of valedictory anyone was expecting from the octogenarian so famous for the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and “The Lark Ascending.”

RVW had been scheduled to attend the recording session, which, in the event, took place only hours after his passing, on August 26, 1958. The performance is prefaced by a brief, spoken introduction by his great champion, the conductor Sir Adrian Boult.

.youtube.com/watch?v=gpiXjrxRrlY&t

August 26, 2023
Tippett’s Piano Sonata Rediscovered

One of the pleasures of attending the Bard Music Festival – which focuses on a primary composer and his or her world – is the chance to listen to music by dozens of ancillary figures that in one way or another further illuminate the year’s subject. This makes for some felicitous discoveries. One of these, in this year devoted to Ralph Vaughan Williams, was surely the Piano Sonata No. 1 by Michael Tippett.

I went through a Tippett phase, back in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, when I first discovered his Concerto for Double String Orchestra, his oratorio “A Child of Our Time,” the “Suite in D (for the Birthday of Prince Charles),” and the opera “The Midsummer Marriage,” which I was lucky to see in a revival at New York City Opera. But then I kind of cooled on him, still liking the pieces I liked, of course, but not going out of my way to revisit the thornier, more perplexing works of his later development. There are exceptions, of course. I’ve always been partial to his Symphony No. 4, for instance, which the composer compares to a birth-to-death cycle, complete with intermittent “breathing” effects. And of course, I have recordings of his piano sonatas, which, if I ever listened to them at all, have sat dormant on the shelf. In the case of No. 1, no longer!

The sonata was composed in 1939, it turns out not long after the Concerto for Double String Orchestra. You would never know it from the music, but at the time the composer was going through quite a lot of turbulence. He’d recently weathered a particularly messy break-up. Tippett was homosexual, so even under the best of circumstances, there would have been a degree of stress at a time when same-sex relationships were viewed as criminal offenses. But the break-up was acrimonious and threw the composer into turmoil. Furthermore, Europe was full to bursting with political and military tension. Tippett always leaned far to the left, which placed him in further jeopardy with the authorities, especially when he not only refused to fight, but to participate in the war effort in any way.

Vaughan Williams always did much to assist and support younger composers, not only as a teacher but as a colleague, even if he didn’t particularly care for the kind of music they happened to be writing. Tippett was one such composer. I don’t believe it ever came up during any of Bard’s panels or pre-concert talks, but Vaughan Williams, as one of the country’s most venerated composers, volunteered himself as a character witness during Tippett’s trial as a conscientious objector.

Tippett admitted to, as a young man, having despised Vaughan Williams and all that he stood for. But probably in part because of the elder composer’s unusual kindness, he came to realize “there was an essential goodness about the man.”

Later, after Vaughan Williams’ death, Tippett began to perceive that it was Vaughan Williams more than anyone else “who had made us free.” After two hundred years of German cultural domination following the death of Henry Purcell, when the most popular composers in England were Handel, Haydn, and Mendelssohn, Elgar brought new hope; but it could be argued, and to Tippett’s way of thinking, it was Vaughan Williams who allowed English composers to be comfortable in their own skins. He had bequeathed to all who followed the freedom to be “English.”

Tippett talks about Vaughan Williams here:

The first movement of Tippett’s sonata is cast in the form of a theme and variations; the second is based on a Scottish folksong, “Ca’ the yowes” (which Tippett also employs in the Concerto for Double String Orchestra); the third movement scherzo, in sonata form, unusually bears the greatest weight (I hear flashes of Beethoven); only to have that weight lifted in the fourth movement by a cakewalk. Tippett was always interested in Black music, with jazz, blues, boogie-woogie, and spirituals frequent influences on his work.

Tippett’s sonata was performed at Bard by Orion Weiss. Here’s a recording with Phyllis Sellick, who introduced the piece, from the 1940s.

And Daniel Harding and the London Symphony Orchestra with the lovely Concerto for Double String Orchestra:

PHOTO (left to right): Sir Adrian Boult, Michael Tippett, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Ursula Vaughan Williams in 1958. Tippett would be knighted in 1966. Decades earlier, Vaughan Williams declined a knighthood. In 1935, he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George V.

August 17, 2023

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