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Tag: Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams Christmas Music & Darwin’s Legacy

Ralph Vaughan Williams may have been the son of a clergyman – his father was a vicar who died when he was three – but he was also the great nephew of Charles Darwin. Let’s just say, liberal social and philosophical opinions ran in the family.

While Darwin was never an outright atheist, he did hold his own unconventional ideas on religion. When young Ralph inquired of his mother after his great uncle’s “On the Origin of the Species,” she replied, “The Bible says God made the world in six days. Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer: but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way.”

By college, Vaughan Williams branded himself an atheist, but later he settled into a lifetime of “cheerful agnosticism.” He may have embraced some rather progressive ideals, but Vaughan Williams was no rebel angel. He was invariably respectful and well-behaved, in a distinctly English kind of way.

Also, he loved Christmas. It’s possible that no other major composer wrote as much music influenced by the birth of Christ than did Vaughan Williams. In particular, he loved both the pageantry and simple joys of the season.

It will be with comparative ease, then, that I will fill the bulk of my afternoon program today with selections from Vaughan Williams’ Christmas music, which is as varied as it is plentiful. We’ll enjoy the massive cantata “Hodie,” the rarely-heard “masque,” or ballet, “On Christmas Night” (after Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”), and even the Suite for Viola and Orchestra, which includes movements titled “carol” and “Christmas Dance.”

First, our Noontime Concert will be a unique and thoughtfully constructed Christmas program presented by the Philadelphia-based choir, The Crossing. The Crossing has built a reputation as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary choral music. The group was the recipient of a 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance, for its recent recording of Gavin Bryars’ “The Fifth Century.”

Bryars’ “The Open Road” will be included on today’s concert, which will feature twelve works by living composers, organized around the theme of motherhood. Poignant reflections on the Nativity are set against apposite musical meditations by contemporary artists, including the world premiere of music by Michael Gilbertson – his setting Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska’s poem, “Born.”

This program, recorded last year, was presented on two Jeffrey Dinsmore Memorial Concerts. Dinsmore, who was the ensemble’s co-founder, died suddenly in 2014 at the age of 42. The Crossing’s Christmas concerts are made possible in part through contributions to the Jeffrey Dinsmore Memorial Fund. The fund also underwrites the commissioning of new works. You can learn more about it and the “Jeff Quartets,” a project that incorporated music by fifteen composers whose lives Dinsmore touched, at the organization’s website, crossingchoir.org. Search to the right of the homepage, under “Projects.”

I hope you’ll join me for The Crossing@Christmas, on today’s Noontime Concert. A Vaughan Williams Christmas will follow. It’s music of reflection, rejoicing, and good cheer, from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

December 18, 2018
Autumn Yardwork Great Composers

Autumn: the great composers do yardwork.

Clockwise from left: Rachmaninoff (with scythe), Copland (with rake), Vaughan Williams (with pitchfork), and Mahler (lollygagging?)

October 13, 2018
Vaughan Williams Birthday WWFM

If you like cats, you’d better like Vaughan Williams, and if you like Vaughan Williams, you’d better tune in today between 4 and 6 p.m. EDT, as I’ll be celebrating his birthday, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

** Coming up at 6 p.m.: Spooky comedies for Hallowe’en on “Picture Perfect!” **

October 12, 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
British Composers at Marlboro: Vaughan Williams & Bax

On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll be doing some real Channel surfing – the English Channel, that is – with two works by British composers who were steeped in cross-cultural currents.

Ralph Vaughan Williams studied in Paris with Maurice Ravel for three months in 1907-08. Ravel took few pupils, but he said of Vaughan Williams, “he is my only pupil who does not write my music.” For his part, Vaughan Williams credited Ravel with helping him to overcome a heavy Germanic influence. Ravel had the effect of lightening the textures in Vaughan Williams’ music and sharpening his focus.

Vaughan Williams’ “Phantasy Quintet” of 1912 was one of numerous works commissioned from England’s great composers by one Walter Wilson Cobbett, a businessman and amateur musician whose dual passions were chamber music and music of the Elizabethan era. (“Phantasy” was Cobbett’s preferred spelling.) The quintet is full of Tudor inflections and stamped by Vaughan Williams’ tell-tale love of folk music. The composer doubles his violas, and the instrument is heard to great effect throughout the piece. We’ll hear a performance from the 1975 Marlboro Music Festival, with James Buswell and Sachiko Nakajima, violins; Philipp Naegele and Caroline Levine, viola; and Anne Martindale, cello.

Sir Arnold Bax composed his evocative “Elegiac Trio” in 1916. The work, scored for flute, viola, and harp, appeared the year after Claude Debussy’s trio for the same instrumental combination. Its alluring melancholy emerged from a world at war. Bax was especially affected by escalating tensions between England and his beloved Ireland, which had just boiled over into violence with the Easter Rising. We’ll hear a performance of the trio from 1978, with Carol Wincenc, flute; Caroline Levine, viola; and Moya Wright, harp.

Ravel too had his influences. His String Quartet in F major, composed in 1903, when he was 28 years-old, bears a superficial resemblance to Debussy’s famous quartet. But whereas Debussy’s aim was to obscure the rules of classical harmony in a sensual pursuit of greater artistic freedom – he confided to his diary, “Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity” – Ravel returned to classical standards, revealing his mastery through quiet innovation within traditional forms. We’ll hear a performance from 2007, with Soovin Kim and Jessica Lee, violins; Jonathan Vinocour, viola; and Scott Bae, cello; from a concert that took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA.

Musicians from Marlboro tour several times throughout the year. The final tour of this season will take place from April 29 to May 6, with stops in Greenwich, CT (at Greenwich Library); New York City (Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall); Philadelphia (Perleman Theater at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts); Washington, DC (Freer Gallery’s Meyer Auditorium); and Boston (the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum). On the program will be Haydn’s String Quartet in D major, Op. 20, No. 4; Krzysztof Penderecki’s String Trio; and Johannes Brahms’ String Quintet No. 1 in F major, Op. 88. You’ll find more information at marlboromusic.org.

It’s a Franco-British alliance this week, on “Music from Marlboro.” Join me Wednesday at 6 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

A bewhiskered Maurice Ravel in 1907, the year he met Ralph Vaughan Williams

April 25, 2018

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