Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Vaughan Williams

Remembering Sir Neville Marriner

Adieu, Sir Neville, and thank you for all your wonderful recordings. I cut my teeth on many of them – a cherishable album of Vaughan Williams, featuring Iona Brown in “The Lark Ascending;” Ottorino Respighi’s “The Birds” and “Ancient Airs and Dances” with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; a gorgeous Fauré program, including “Pelléas et Mélisande” and “Masques et Bergamasques;” a haunting Scandinavian collection, featuring a spritely “Serenade for Strings” by Dag Wirén.

You were always an alert accompanist in concerto recordings of Murray Perahia and Pepe Romero. You had a firm grasp of Rossini opera. You were a reliable conductor of Haydn and Mozart (your performances with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields were featured on the soundtrack to “Amadeus”). And you understood Virgil Thomson better than Stokowski.

You crammed so much into a very long life (92 years). You performed with Pierre Monteux (who would become your teacher), Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwangler and Henry Wood, for crying out loud. Your last concert was on Thursday!

Way to go, Sir Neville. I will miss you, but I will always, always have your recordings. Thank you again for all the beautiful music.

Sad news: Neville Marriner is gone, at 92

October 2, 2016
Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony on WWFM

Principally because of alluring musical flights of fancy like “The Lark Ascending,” Ralph Vaughan Williams has been somewhat pigeon-holed as the foremost proponent of the “cow-pat school” of English composition. While he certainly did spend a good deal of his life strolling the English countryside, he considered himself first and foremost a Londoner. Join me this afternoon at 1:00 EDT to partake of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 2, “A London Symphony.”

Vaughan Williams claimed that while the work bore a programmatic subtitle, it was meant to be experienced primarily as “absolute” music. He preferred it be thought of as a symphony by a Londoner, as opposed to an attempt to portray the actual city.

Nonetheless, the symphony contains allusions to street music, barrel organs, the jingle of hansom cabs, and the Westminster Chimes, among other things, and it certainly is tempting to conjure images of the hustle and bustle of Piccadilly Circus and, perhaps, in the slow movement, one of the nocturne paintings of James McNeill Whistler.

It’s one of the featured highlights this afternoon, as the country mouse plays city mouse, from noon to 4 p.m., on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.

PHOTO: Vaughan Williams and Foxy: “Did somebody say mouse?”

August 23, 2016
Lloyd & Vaughan Williams Symphonies on WPRB

Right now on WPRB, we’re listening to the Symphony No. 4 by the underrated English composer George Lloyd, a work which grew out his experiences serving in the Royal Marines during WWII.

Lloyd’s vessel was struck by a torpedo while he was manning the transmitting station deep within the ship’s hold. He nearly drowned, as many of his shipmates and close comrades actually did, in fuel oil. Though he survived the ordeal, he suffered from shell shock and could not speak for nearly a year.

As he recovered, he began to compose again, hoping to exorcise his demons. The result was his Symphony No. 4, subtitled the “Arctic,” a surprisingly optimistic work, considering its genesis. But, as the composer points out, he also experienced much beauty during his service in the North Sea, including a memorable trip up the Norwegian coast.

Of the infectious marches that characterize the work’s final movement, the composer remarked wryly, “… perhaps I was trying to end the symphony by reaffirming the old convention that when the funeral is over the band plays quick, cheerful tunes to go home.”

Coming up in the 9:00 hour, we’ll have another English symphony, suggestive of the opposite pole, the Symphony No. 7 by Ralph Vaughan Williams, subtitled “Sinfonia Antarctica.” Vaughan Williams’ opus grew out of his film score for the Ealing Studios adventure “Scott of the Antarctic,” which starred John Mills as doomed explorer Robert Falcon Scott.

Vaughan Williams’ symphony captures a sense of foreboding in the face of punishing elements and the desolation of the Antarctic landscape. Along the way, he evokes chill winds, crashing ice slides, and the play of penguins and whales.

Sir Adrian Boult recorded the work twice. The earlier recording featured spoken prefaces by Sir John Gielgud, who reads from English poets and Scott’s diary. The performance itself is quite good, though expectedly not as vivid as the later, stereo remake. So as to share the best of both worlds this morning, I will interpolate the Gielgud readings into the stereo performance.

Stick around, and you’ll also get to hear music inspired by the aurora borealis, by Uuno Klami and Geirr Tveitt. We’ll go to any lengths to keep cool, until 11 EDT on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com.

August 18, 2016
Vaughan Williams Pastoral Symphony Ormandy 1972

On this, the day after Memorial Day, I’ve stumbled across a YouTube video of a concert broadcast of Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “A Pastoral Symphony” (his Symphony No. 3), which was completed in 1922.

While a good many of Vaughan Williams’ pieces are indeed pastoral, this one has something of a haunted undertow that belies its placid moniker. The composer was serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps in France during the First World War. At the end of the day, he would drive his ambulance up to the top of a hill and listen to a bugler practicing. On one occasion, the bugler accidentally played the interval of a seventh, as opposed to an octave. The trumpet solo in the second movement of the symphony enshrines this memory.

It is pastoral, all right. As peaceful as the dead. The great Benita Valente sings the wordless soprano part in the final movement, like a distant milkmaid wandering the countryside. The contrast with the waste and destruction of the war leads to a moving and intense elegy that takes over, in this particular recording, around the 31 minute mark.

Vaughan Williams’ next symphony, the Symphony No. 4, spilled over with rage and violence, clearing the air for one of the most hopeful utterances in all of music, his Symphony No. 5, composed, oddly enough, during the darkest days of World War II.

Peter Warlock, who famously characterized Vaughan Williams’ music as “just a little too much like a cow looking over a gate,” called the Pastoral Symphony “a truly splendid work” and “the best English orchestral music of this century.”

Ormandy and the Philadelphians performed the piece on October 12, 1972, to mark the centennial of Vaughan Williams’ birth. 1972 also happened to mark the semicentennial of “A Pastoral Symphony.”

May 31, 2016
Happy Groundhog Day Waiting for Spring

Happy Groundhog Day!

As you probably know by now, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, prognosticating an early spring. We’ll have 17 hours of blazing sunshine before you know it.

I’d have posted earlier, but somebody was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay past deadline on his article. Come to think of it, my sick beard makes me look a little bit like this groundhog.

Here’s Vaughan Williams’ “Folk Songs of the Four Seasons,” with its chorus “Early in the Spring” (following a prologue, “To the Ploughboy”).

February 2, 2016

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