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Tag: Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams at 150 A Master’s Vision

One of England’s greatest composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams looked back to his country’s agrarian roots as a roundabout way of securing the future of its cultural identity. On the 150th anniversary of his birth, I salute him in all his rumpled glory.

As did so many composers who were caught in the wildfire of nationalism that swept across Europe, beginning in the middle of the 19th century, Vaughan Williams rebelled against the prevailing academicism that reached its tendrils from the capitals of German music to choke the “provincial” hinterlands. He emerged from an environment that had produced far too many knock-offs of Mendelssohn and Brahms. Vaughan Williams would revolutionize his compatriots’ perception of art music by embracing the sounds of the English countryside.

However, like Béla Bartók, he was no simplistic, twee purveyor of folk music. On the contrary, the rhythms and inflections of his native land were already part of his DNA. The songs he documented while roaming the fields and fens with his colleague, Gustav Holst, merely brought to the surface what was already innate. What he expressed in his original music was thoroughly digested and deeply personal.

Some of Vaughan Williams’ best loved works are imbued with nostalgia for a faded world, but the composer pushed forward also, through two world wars and into the Great Beyond. He was not a conventionally religious man, but mysticism seems to color a fair amount of his music. He was also unafraid, in works like his Sixth Symphony, to stare desolation unflinchingly in the face. Technically, his lessons with Maurice Ravel made him a thoughtful orchestrator, so that throughout his life he deployed his instrumental forces with considerable craft and creativity. Given the proper attention, there is much to engage on all levels of his music.

While you might not want to take his advice on the best way to tie a tie, musically, with Vaughan Williams, you are always in the hands of a master. Put your faith in Ralph (pronounced “Rafe”) for the Vaughan Williams sesquicentenary.

Thank you, RVW, for a lifetime of enrichment, and happy birthday!

October 12, 2022
Vaughan Williams 150th NYC Celebration

October 12 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams. American admirers of the composer are totally in the wrong country this year. The U.K. has been a nonstop RVW jamboree.

That said, if you’re in New York City or the vicinity tomorrow, organist David Briggs will present his transcription of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5 on the composer’s birthday at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, NYC, 980 Park Avenue, at 7 p.m.

If you can’t be there, the concert will be livestreamed and archived through Friday. For more information, visit the St. Ignatius website and click on the links. If you plan to view the livestream, make sure you make your reservation using the correct tab!

https://ignatius.nyc/music/concerts/

Briggs has also recorded this transcription, at Truro Cathedral in Cornwall. The CD is available for purchase from Albion Records, the official label of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.

https://rvwsociety.com/transcriptions/

If our American orchestras can’t be bothered to program any of RVW’s symphonies – and what I wouldn’t give to be able to hear an orchestra play No. 5 tomorrow – at least someone is in a position to pull out all the stops.

October 11, 2022
Vaughan Williams’ Wasps Premiere: Unassuming Start

How unassuming was the premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ incidental music for “The Wasps?”

Aristophanes’ comedy, a stinging commentary on the Athenian judicial system, was produced as the Cambridge Greek Play at Trinity College in 1909. The play itself was performed in Greek, with translations sold to the audience. As you can see, when you click through the gallery of photos at the link at the bottom of this post, the composer’s credit is buried midway down the third page of the printed program (as “R. Vaughan Williams”). The music is offered for sale, “price three shillings.”

The year before, Vaughan Williams spent three months in Paris studying with Maurice Ravel, who was at first reluctant to take him on as a pupil. But RVW wouldn’t take no for an answer. Despite his earthy disposition (his response to Ravel’s assignment to write a minuet in the manner of Mozart was met with an unprintable response), Vaughan Williams quickly earned his teacher’s admiration and soon his friendship. Ravel later remarked that Vaughan Williams was “the only one of my pupils who does not write my music.” RVW, already in his mid-30s and three years older than his teacher, learned his lessons well (at least the ones he considered valid), assimilated what he found useful, and applied it to the achievement of his own objectives.

Ravel’s influence is most evident in the transitional moments of “The Wasps Overture” and in its dreamy central section. The opening, of course, is a musical joke, self-evident from the onomatopoeic buzzing around the orchestra, but the middle introduces one of those immediately endearing, big-hearted English melodies. The jolly, rollicking theme in the outer portions of the overture sounds equally homegrown.

Vaughan Williams’ complete incidental music runs to approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. It was recorded for the first time, with English narration, in 2006. The overture has been a concert favorite since its introduction. Vaughan Williams himself recorded the jauntiest version on record, back in 1925, at a manic 7 minutes and 25 seconds. An average performance of the work is more in the ballpark of 9-10 minutes.

You’d think that more American orchestras would have taken it up as a guaranteed crowd-pleaser to open concerts during this RVW sesquicentennial year. But U.S. music directors and administrators – “The Lark Ascending” and the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” aside – remain largely immune to the charms and allure, and certainly the versatility, of Ralph Vaughan Williams. For the composer’s enthusiasts, it’s a good year to live in the U.K.

“Gentlemen who are willing to be tried for the chorus are requested to state whether their voices are tenor or bass.” Stills from the 1909 Cambridge production.

https://www.cambridgegreekplay.com/plays/1909/wasps

The overture opens this 26-minute concert suite, which also includes the equally charming “March Past of the Kitchen Utensils” (at the 13-minute mark).

Vaughan Williams and Ravel

https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/feb/28/ravel-vaughan-williams-friendship-radio3-ravel-day

October 10, 2022
Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre & Halloween

I’m going to be celebrating an awful lot of Vaughan Williams the next few days, but just so as not to completely snub Camille Saint-Saëns on his birthday (today), here’s a seasonal favorite.

“Danse Macabre” was originally conceived as a chanson for voice and piano. The composer made several other arrangements. Most famous is the more fully developed orchestral work, but he also wrote a version for voice and orchestra. Here it is performed by Nelson Eddy, of all people.

Still, it’s better than Nelson’s commercial recording, which is terrifying for all the wrong reasons.

Here’s a translation of the text, by Henri Cazalis:

Zig, zig, zig, Death in cadence
Striking a tomb with his heel
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune
Zig, zig, zag, on his violin

The winter wind blows, and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden trees
White skeletons pass through the gloom
Running and leaping in their shrouds

Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking
You can hear the cracking of the bones of the dancers
A lustful couple sits on the moss
So as to taste long lost delights

Zig zig, zig, Death continues
The unending scraping on his instrument
A veil has fallen! The dancer is naked
Her partner grasps her amorously

The lady, it’s said, is a marchioness or baroness
And her green gallant, a poor cartwright
Horror! Look how she gives herself to him
Like the rustic was a baron

Zig, zig, zig. What a saraband!
They all hold hands and dance in circles
Zig, zig, zag. You can see in the crowd
The king dancing among the peasants

But hist! All of a sudden, they leave the dance
They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed
Oh what a beautiful night for the poor world!
Long live death and equality!

Happy birthday – and happy Halloween – Saint-Saëns!

October 9, 2022
Vaughan Williams Rare Recordings

Unlike Sir Edward Elgar, who was given the opportunity to record most of his major output, Ralph 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.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll anticipate the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of England’s finest composers (October 12, 1872) by way of three rare recordings he made of his own music.

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,” a work which, at its first performance, actually brought tears to the eyes of Sergei Rachmaninoff. (On the first half of the concert, Rachmaninoff was soloist in his own Piano Concerto No. 2.) The text is taken 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.”

The recorded 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 celebrate RVW for his sesquicentenary. That’s “Vaughan, But Not Forgotten,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

October 9, 2022

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