Vaughan Williams: Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus'

With the sublime The Lark Ascending as its centrepiece, this collection illustrates the way that Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries expressed their national identity, drawing inspiration from folk song, landscape, poetry and the rich history of British music. With favourites by Elgar, Delius, Butterworth and Walton––including Elgar’s unforgettable Introduction and Allegro and Delius’s Summer Night on the River––the works gathered here are romantic, nostalgic and quintessentially British.

Now rightfully acknowledged as a towering figure, Vaughan Williams was the first composer to write in the English language, using folksong in the Norfolk Rhapsody, a Tudor hymn in the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and absorbing and transforming his influences in the stunningly beautiful Serenade to Music.

During the 16th and 17th centuries England had been a leading participant in the delevopment of European music, but after the early death of Purcell in 1695, music in England came to be dominated by musicians of foreign origin: notably Handel and Mendelssohn. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) is the best-known of a new generation of composers that came after Elgar and made up what became known as the English Musical Renaissance. Along with Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams travelled the country collecting and preserving English folksong traditions, and was largely responsible for the revival of interest in folksong. So strong was his interest in the subject that, like Holst, folksong was absorbed into his compositional style and was to influence his concert music, giving it a uniquely English quality. Starting with the evocative Thomas Tallis Fantasia, (RVW's look back at his great 16th-century predecessor) this set contains some of the composer's best-known and most-loved music, including the popular Fantasia on Greensleeves and the beautiful Lark Ascending.

Sir Neville Marriner and his Academy made some of the most priceless recordings of Vaughan Williams for Decca and Philips, and this collection restores to circulation his Philips traversal of music by this composer, with the addition of five pieces made for Decca - the Romance for harmonica (with Tommy Reilly), possibly the best version of The Lark Ascending ever recorded (with the late Iona Brown), his second recording of Fantasia on Greensleeves, the Concerto Grosso and the English Folk Song Suite. The collection is filled out with the nine perky folk song arrangements he recorded, receiving their first international release on CD.

Vaughan Williams – Symphony No.8 – ‘Live’ Recording Of The First Performance The Symphony No.8 was dedicated to Sir John Barbirolli, and, as with the ‘Antartica’ premiere, the first performance was remarkably fine, exciting the 83-year-old composer to write on the score ‘For Glorious John, with love and admiration from Ralph’.

Perhaps the composer was somewhat uncertain regarding several aspects of the new work: at a rehearsal of the symphony, in February 1956, he approached the trumpets and asked ‘Is that all right for you? I haven’t written anything too difficult for you?’ ‘It’s all right, Dr Vaughan Williams,’ came the reply, ‘there’s nothing we can’t manage.’ Thankfully, we can hear on this preserved recording of the premiere, just what a magnificent first performance the work was given. Less than seven weeks later, Barbirolli and the Hallé inaugurated their new Pye Records contract with the first recording of the Symphony (available on SJB1021).

Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto is a magnificent composition – easily the finest such Concerto ever written; the recorded HMV performance, in this collection, is outstandingly good, but the work, fine as it is, does not seem to have inspired composers to write further for the genre, which has meant that the music has tended to be unjustly ignored. A similar fate has befallen another such work by Vaughan Williams – the Five Variants on ‘Dives and Lazarus’, composed for harp and string orchestra in 1939. The collection of his music on this CD demonstrates aspects not only of the composer but of the profound grasp of ‘Glorious John’ in Vaughan Williams’s varied means of expression, for not all conductors encompass the composer’s range as Barbirolli was able to do. Less challenging in their demands are two of Vaughan Williams’s best-known shorter orchestral works – the Overture to ‘The Wasps’ and the Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’. All these recordings offer a lasting testimony to Barbirolli's total mastery as one of the greatest conductors Britain has ever produced.