A Portrait of Vaughan Williams

Read About This Recording

Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of our century's most beloved and intriguing composers. His music mirrored the distant, profoundly English, past; both rued and celebrated his war-torn present and cast a template for the future. He was a bundle of contradictions-an atheist turned agnostic who was endlessly fascinated by Christian rites and stories, and who produced some of our century's most sublime liturgical settings; a hulking and kindly man who appeared to be everyone's ideal uncle, yet whose music could swing between the most blessed serenity and unbridled, nightmarish, rage; a doggedly persistent artist who let nothing stand in his way, yet never lost his deeply existential sense of humor. After conducting his volcanic Sixth Symphony, he is reputed to have muttered as he strode from the stage, Damned modern music!

When all is said and done, the essential Vaughan Williams resides in the generous sampling found on this four-disc compendium. It documents his reposeful, spiritual, side-that which throws such darker works as his Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, and Job, A Masque for Dancing, in telling relief.

We dare say that if you randomly focus on just one of the 23 works presented, you will be hooked for life. My suggestion: Start on track one and go from there. All have been recorded in state-of-the-art sound by the most sympathetic Vaughan Williams advocates to be found anywhere. That they are mostly British is no surprise; that they all elevate RVW's music from the specific to the universal shows that they are all true musicians in the highest sense of the word.

This collection could have insured its own immortality by merely citing RVW's greatest hits-his Fantasia on Greensleeves, his The Lark Ascending, or his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. It does so, and in quite special performances. It also presents his rarely performed Oboe Concerto, his two string quartets, his wondrous Mass in G Minor, and a slew of his song settings for chorus, all of which present him, as never before, in the round-a way hitherto undocumented.

If you're already a lover of Vaughan Williams, the inclusion on this release of such works as his Mass in G Minor, his Three Shakespeare Songs and his as yet virtually unplayed chamber music, make it impossible to pass up.

You need this recording, and at this budget price, and given its fine Nimbus sound, we feel that it's an offer you can't, and ought not, refuse.

-William Zagorski

Quotes

Opening with an exuberant account of The Wasps Overture, this is a very attractive and generous collection of favourite Vaughan Williams orchestral pieces, most sympathetically played under William Boughton and presented amply and atmospherically. -Penguin Guide to Bargain CDs

Contents

Overture, The Wasps; The Lark Ascending; Fantasia on Greensleeves; Oboe Concerto; Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis; Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus; Mass in G Minor; Sacred and Secular Songs: Valiant-for-Truth, The Blessed Son of God, No Sad Thought His Soul Affright, Lord Thou hast been our Refuge, O Taste and See; Three Shakespeare Songs: Full Fathom Five, The Cloud-Capp'd Towers, Over Hill Over Dale; Phantasy Quintet; String Quartets Nos. 1 in G Minor & 2 in A Minor for Jean on her Birthday; An Oxford Elegy; Te Deum; O, Clap Your Hands; The Old Hundreth Psalm Tune.

Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford; English String Orchestra; Medici String Quartet; William Boughton, Stephen Darlington, Conductors.