The BBC Singers are the professional chamber choir of the BBC. As one of six BBC Performing Groups, the 24-voiced choir has been in existence for more than 80 years. The BBC Singers have commissioned and premiered works by the leading composers of the past century, including Benjamin Britten, Sir Michael Tippett, Judith Weir and Sir John Tavener. They regularly perform alongside leading international orchestras and conductors, and make invitational appearances at national events such as the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in Westminster Abbey.

The BBC Singers are based at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios. They perform across the country, tour internationally, and undertake nationwide outreach programmes. They have released several commercial CDs.

Notable former members of the group include the tenor Sir Peter Pears, the mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, the composer Judith Bingham and the conductor Harry Christophers (director of The Sixteen).

History of the BBC Singers[link]

A BBC choir was formed in 1924 for a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah, under the name of the Wireless Chorus. From this group emerged a professional consort, the Wireless Singers. This chamber-sized group would later become the BBC Singers in their current form. Guest conductors during these early years included Sir Edward Elgar, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and a young Sir John Barbirolli.

In 1931 the Wireless Singers were invited to perform at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, the first time this event had been held in Britain. Following the success of the event, they went on to establish themselves as the leading proponents of contemporary music in the UK, a reputation upheld by the BBC Singers today.

The tenor Peter Pears was a member of the Singers when, in 1934, Benjamin Britten composed the cantata A boy was born for the group. After meeting during rehearsals for the cantata, the pair became lifelong partners, with Pears serving as the muse for many of Britten’s compositions.

During the heavy bombing of the Second World War, the Wireless Singers were forced to relocate several times from their base in Maida Vale, briefly taking up residence in Bristol, Bangor and Bedford. Despite the chaos of these years, in 1945 they were able to give the premiere of Francis Poulenc’s wartime cantata La figure humaine from the Concert Hall of Broadcasting House.

From the late 1940s the Wireless Singers began to tour across Europe, appearing under the baton of such musical giants as Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Walter. In England they worked with George Enescu, Sir Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer and Igor Stravinsky. From 1946 they became a staple feature of the new radio arts network, the Third Programme.

The middle years of the twentieth century provided an enormously rich list of new pieces for the Singers, including premieres of major works by Darius Milhaud, Frank Martin, Paul Hindemith, Gerald Finzi, Sir Michael Tippett, Pierre Boulez, Sir Arthur Bliss and Karol Szymanowski. In 1964 composer and conductor Pierre Boulez began an association with the BBC Singers that continues to the present day.

From 1945 to 1962 the group was divided into two octets known as Singers A and Singers B, one specialising in less standard repertoire including Renaissance polyphony and madrigals, the other in light music and revue numbers. Singers A were typically paid £1 per week more than Singers B.

From 1962 these two groups were amalgamated to form a 28-voice group named the BBC Chorus. Finally, in 1989 the 24-voiced BBC Singers was established, under the direction of Simon Joly. The BBC Singers remains the only full-time professional choir in the country and are the only group whose regular repertory spans the history of music, from the earliest chant to the latest vocal techniques.

The appointment of Bo Holten as Guest Conductor in 1991 marked a radical alteration in the group’s approach to Early Music, indicative of the changing musical scene of the day. The BBC Singers now work alongside specialists in the field including Peter Phillips (Tallis Scholars) and Robert Hollingworth (I Fagiolini) giving several broadcasts a year. In addition, the BBC Singers continue to perform large-scale orchestral works with international conductors.

Current conductors[link]

Stephen Cleobury, now Conductor Laureate, was Chief Conductor of the BBC Singers from 1995 to 2007. In addition, he has been Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge for the past 30 years, and has played a pivotal role in supporting contemporary choral composition through his work with both King’s College and the BBC Singers.

Grammy-award winning musician David Hill, current Chief Conductor, trained as an organist before taking up choral direction. As with his predecessor, Stephen Cleobury, Hill has a background in cathedral music. Between them, the pair have directed the choirs of St John’s College, Cambridge, King’s College, Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral and Winchester Cathedral.

Bob Chilcott, one of two Principal Guest Conductors, was a member of the King’s Singers for 12 years and is well known as the composer of music for children’s choirs as well as a large catalogue of works and arrangements for choirs of all sizes.

Paul Brough, appointed Principal Guest Conductor in January 2011, is Director of Music at All Saints, Margaret Street and is a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music. He is respected as an orchestral conductor as well as a choral director, working with groups including the Britten Sinfonia, the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Manchester Camerata.

Commissioned works[link]

Over the past eight decades the BBC Singers have performed and commissioned more than a hundred new works. These include pieces by Michael Berkeley, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, John Casken, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Thea Musgrave, Edmund Rubbra, Robert Saxton, Sir John Tavener, Sir Michael Tippett and Iannis Xenakis.

Select list of commissioned works:

• Judith Bingham – A Winter Walk at Noon - First broadcast 2 March 1986
• Benjamin Britten – A Shepherd’s Carol & Chorale: Our Father Whose Creative Will - First broadcast 24 December 1944
• Sir Peter Maxwell Davies – Apple-Basket: Apple-Blossom - First broadcast 23 December 1990
• James Dillon – Viriditas - First broadcast 24 April 1994
• Nicola LeFanu – The Story of Mary O’Neill - First broadcast 4 January 1989
• Thea Musgrave – For the Time Being: Advent - First broadcast 18 July 1987
• Edmund Rubbra – Veni, Creator Spiritus - First broadcast 5 August 1966
• Sir Michael Tippett – The Weeping Babe - First broadcast 24 December 1944
• Iannis Xenakis – Sea Nymphs - First broadcast 16 September 1994

In 2002 Edward Cowie became the BBC Singers’ first Associate Composer. In this role, Cowie produced multiple new works each year for performance by the Singers, and took part in workshops with young composers from schools, universities and music colleges.

Judith Bingham was the next to fill this position, in 2004, and was succeeded in 2010 by Gabriel Jackson.

Performances[link]

The BBC Singers can be heard in concert, on the radio, on recordings and in education workshops. They are often invited to perform alongside other BBC Performing Groups, in particular the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and are regular guests at the BBC Proms. Broadcasts are given from locations around the country.

Select discography:

• Judith Bingham - Remoter Worlds - David Hill (conductor) 2008, Catalogue No. Signum Classics SIGCD144
• Judith Weir - The Welcome Arrival of Rain - BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins (conductor) 2008, Catalogue No. NMC D137
• Janacek - The Excursions of Mr Broucek - BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jirí Belohlávek (conductor) 2008
• Elizabeth Maconchy - Music for voices - Odaline de la Martinez (conductor) 2007, Catalogue No. LNT127
• Rachmaninoff - Francesca di Rimini - BBC Philharmonic, Gianandrea Noseda (conductor) 2007, Catalogue No. Chandos 10442
• Bob Chilcott - Man I Sing - Bob Chilcott, (conductor) 2007, Catalogue No. Signum Classics SIGCD100
• Brian Ferneyhough - Choral works - Lontano, Odaline de la Martinez (conductor) 2007, Catalogue No. Metier msv28501
• Michael Tippett - Choral Images - Stephen Cleobury (conductor) 2007 Catalogue No. Signum Classics SIGCD092
• Paul Dukas - Ariane et Barbe-Bleue - BBC Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein (conductor) 2007, Catalogue No. TELARC 80680
• Britten - Death in Venice - City of London Sinfonia, Richard Hickox (conductor) 2005, Chandos 10280(2)
• One Star, At Last - A selection of carols of our time - Stephen Cleobury (conductor) 2005, Catalogue No. Signum Classics SIGCD067
• Alexander Levine - Kolokolà - James Morgan (conductor) 2005, Catalogue No. Albany TROY736

See also[link]

• BBC Orchestras and Singers

References[link]

External links[link]

• BBC Singers official website

Herbert Norman Howells CH (17 October 1892 – 23 February 1983) was an English composer, organist, and teacher, most famous for his large output of Anglican church music.

Life[link]

Background and early education[link]

Howells was born in Lydney, Gloucestershire, the youngest of the six children of Oliver Howells, a plumber, painter, decorator and builder, and his wife Elizabeth^[1]. His father played the organ at the local Baptist church, and Herbert himself showed early musical promise, first deputising for his father, and then moving at the age of eleven to the local Church of England parish church as choirboy and unofficial deputy organist^[2].

The Howells family's financial position was always precarious and at some point in Howells' adolescence his father became bankrupt, a deep humiliation in a small community at the time and one from which Howells never fully recovered^[3]. Financially assisted by a member of the family of Charles Bathurst, 1st Viscount Bledisloe who had taken an interest in the budding musician, Howells began music lessons in 1905 with Herbert Brewer, the organist of Gloucester Cathedral, and at sixteen became his articled pupil at the Cathedral alongside Ivor Novello and Ivor Gurney^[4]. The latter became a close friend, the pair going on long walks through the Gloucestershire countryside discussing their shared love of music and English literature^[5].

Another formative experience for the young Howells was the premiere in September 1910 at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. Howells liked to relate in after years how Vaughan Williams sat next to him for the remainder of the concert and shared his score of Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius with the awestruck aspiring composer^[6]. Both Vaughan Williams and the Tudor composers of which Tallis was one profoundly influenced Howells' later work^[7].

Study at the Royal College of Music[link]

In 1912, following the example of Ivor Gurney^[8], Howells moved to London to study at the Royal College of Music. Here his teachers included Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry and Charles Wood^[9]. Among Howells' contemporaries in the student body were Gurney, Arthur Bliss and Arthur Benjamin.

Howells blossomed in what he considered the "cosy family" atmosphere of the College^[10] and his Mass in the Dorian Mode was performed at Westminster Cathedral under R.R. Terry within weeks of his arrival^[11]. For the most part however his music at this time was orchestral; works included a piano concerto, withdrawn after its first performance^[12], a light orchestral suite, The B's, portraying his friends at the college, and the Three Dances for violin and orchestra^[13]. More typical of the works with which Howells was later to be associated were his earliest important compositions for organ, the first set of Psalm Preludes (1915-16) and the first of the op. 17 Rhapsodies^[14].

Howells' promise seemed likely to be cut short in 1915 when he was diagnosed with Graves' disease and given six months to live. His poor health prevented him from being called to the Front in World War I, arguably preserving him from the worse fate awaiting Gurney and others of his friends and contemporaries. At St Thomas' Hospital he was given the previously untried treatment of radium injections in the neck, administered twice a week over a period of two years^[15]. For much of this time Howells travelled between London for treatment and Lydney where he was nursed by his mother. He was nonetheless still able to compose and in 1916 produced the first work of his maturity^[16]. The Piano Quartet in A minor, dedicated to "the hill at Chosen and Ivor Gurney who knows it" was in the following year one of the first works published under the auspices of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust^[17]. In the following year Howells became assistant organist at Salisbury Cathedral, but only held the post for a few months^[18], finding the repeated journeys to London for treatment too difficult. Friends then arranged for a grant from the Carnegie Trust, which paid for Howells to assist R.R. Terry in editing the voluminous Latin Tudor repertoire that Terry and his choir were reviving at Westminster Cathedral. The work provided Howells with a comfortable income^[19] and enabled him to absorb the English Renaissance style which he loved and would evoke in his own music. His first significant works for choir, the Three Carol-Anthems (Here is the Little Door, A Spotless Rose and Sing Lullaby) were written around this time^[20].

Marriage and teaching[link]

In 1920 Howells married Dorothy Dawe (1891 – 1975)^[21], a singer whom he had met in 1911 when deputizing as her accompanist^[22]. The marriage endured despite Howells' frequent infidelities,^[23] and produced two children, Ursula (1922 – 2005), later an actress, and Michael (1926 – 1935).

In the same year he joined the staff of the Royal College of Music, where he was to remain until 1979^[24]. Among his pupils were Robert Simpson, Gordon Jacob, Paul Spicer and Imogen Holst. The post at the RCM, which from 1925 he combined with the position of Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School,^[25] and frequent work as a competition adjudicator, was to reduce the amount of time he could devote to composition;^[26] but he continued to write orchestral and chamber music, including the string quartet In Gloucestershire (originally written 1916, but rewritten in whole or in part several times and not reaching its final form until the 1930s),^[27] the overture Merry Eye (1920) and the second Piano Concerto (1925). The first performance of the last named work occasioned a demonstration in the concert hall from a hostile critic.^[28] Howells, always over-sensitive to criticism, withdrew the work and produced few significant compositions for several years.^[29] One exception was Lambert's Clavichord (1928), a rare example of a composition by a 20th-century composer for that instrument.^[30] It was inspired by a clavichord lent to Howells by his friend Herbert Lambert, an instrument maker and photographer based in Bath.^[31] Several other major compositions written around this time however remained unperformed, notably an a capella Requiem to English words written in 1932^[32], and a choral work, A Kent Yeoman's Wooing Song, written the following year.

Family tragedy and the war[link]

In September 1935 Howells' placid existence as teacher, adjudicator and occasional composer was abruptly shattered when his nine-year-old son Michael contracted polio during a family holiday, dying in London three days later.^[33] Howells was deeply affected and continued to commemorate the event until the end of his life^[34]. At the suggestion of his daughter Ursula^[35] he sought to channel his grief into music, and over the next three years composed much of the large-scale choral work which was eventually to become Hymnus Paradisi, drawing on material from the unpublished Requiem of 1932. This remained, in Howells' words, "a personal, almost secret document"^[36] until 1950. Other commemorative works written around this time include the slow movement of the Concerto for Strings (in joint memory of Michael and Edward Elgar), the hymn tune Michael (to the words "All My Hope on God is Founded" by Robert Bridges)^[37] and the unfinished Cello Concerto, on which Howells had been working at the time of the boy's death and which he found himself unable to complete^[38]. To a greater or lesser extent, however, much of Howells' subsequent music shows the influence of this loss^[39].

From the late 1930s Howells turned increasingly to choral and organ music, composing a second series of Psalm Preludes followed by a set of Six Pieces (begun 1939), of which the third, Master Tallis's Testament, a particular favorite of the composer's, recalled his formative experience of Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia^[40]. A set of Four Anthems, originally titled In Time of War and including the popular O Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem and Like as the Hart^[41], followed in early 1941. In August of that year, Howells was invited to serve as acting organist of St John's College, Cambridge, replacing Robin Orr who was away on active service in World War II. Howells' association with Cambridge, which lasted until the end of the war in 1945, was a productive and happy period for him^[42], and led directly to the works for which he is most remembered. He later recalled^[43] being challenged by the Dean of King's College, Eric Milner-White, to write a set of canticles for the choir. The result was the Te Deum and Jubilate of the service known as Collegium Regale, performed in 1944, followed the following year by the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, and completed in 1956 by the Office of Holy Communion. Collegium Regale and the evening services for Gloucester and St Paul's Cathedrals which followed it in 1946 and 1951 respectively remain the best known and most admired of the many settings of the Anglican liturgy written by Howells for particular choirs and buildings over the next thirty years^[44].

[edit] Hymnus Paradisi and after

In 1949, fourteen years after Michael Howells' death, the organist Herbert Sumsion asked Howells if he had anything that could be performed at the 1950 Three Choirs Festival to be held at Gloucester. Howells decided to bring out the incomplete choral work he had written in his son's memory between 1936 and 1938. (In later years Howells claimed it was at the urging of Vaughan Williams that the piece was disinterred).^[45]. The work, retitled Hymnus Paradisi at Sumsion's suggestion^[46], was completed and orchestrated in time for its first performance on 7 September 1950, the day after Michael's 15th anniversary. It was Howells' greatest public and critical success, and for many years was his best known work ^[47]. Shorter choral works written around this time include the carol-anthem Long long ago (1951), the introit Behold O God our Defender for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and The House of the Mind (1954) for chorus and strings.

Though not an orthodox Christian^[48], Howells was now chiefly identified with the composition of religious music. His follow-up work to the Hymnus Paradisi was an extended setting of the Latin Mass for soloists, chorus and orchestra, named Missa Sabrinensis after the River Severn and first performed in Worcester Cathedral as part of the Three Choirs Festival in 1954. It was considered a disappointment after the success of the earlier work^[49], and its extreme complexity and difficulty has prevented it becoming widely known^[50]. The critic Michael Kennedy, however, considers it one of Howells' finest works^[30]. Howells followed it with An English Mass (1956), a smaller-scale setting to English words for chorus, strings and organ. His final large scale choral work was the Stabat Mater, setting a text whose subsidiary theme of a parent mourning a child had obvious personal significance^[51]. He began it in 1959 but found it difficult to complete; it was not performed until 1965. In the meantime Howells had been commissioned to write a motet for the memorial service of John F. Kennedy. He chose to set Helen Waddell's translation of Prudentius' Hymnus circa Exsequias Defuncti, the first two lines of which had served as epigraph to Hymnus Paradisi. The resulting work, Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing (1963), linking the loss of Kennedy with Howells' loss of his son, is described by Howells' pupil Paul Spicer as "a classic of twentieth century choral music" and "an undoubted masterpiece"^[52].

Howells continued to compose until his late 80s, but wrote nothing further on the scale of the Stabat Mater. One of the last works to appear in his lifetime was the Requiem, edited for performance from his manuscripts in 1980 and published the following year, almost fifty years after its composition^[53]. He died on 23 February 1983 in a nursing home in Putney and his ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey^[54].

Howells was appointed CBE in 1953 and Companion of Honour in 1972. His academic awards included an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge, awarded in 1961^[55]. A "Herbert Howells Society", started by his daughter Ursula in 1987, and a "Herbert Howells Trust", founded after her death in 2005, exist to promote his works^[56].

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Andrews, Paul. "Howells, Herbert". Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/13436. Retrieved 28 November 2011. 
• Holland, Henry (June-July 2011). "Michael's Tune". Polio Deja View: 2–5. http://www.cvppsg.org/newsletter/2011-06-07.pdf. Retrieved December 3, 2011. 
• Kennedy, Michael (1985). "Howells, Herbert". The Oxford Dictionary of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 343. ISBN 0-19-311333-3. 
• Palmer, Christopher (1992). Herbert Howells: a centenary celebration. London: Thames. ISBN 0-905210-86-7. 
• Regan, Susan (March 1971). "Herbert Howells and his Hymnus Paradisi". The Gramophone: 33–34. http://www.gramophone.net/Issue/Page/March%201971/33/754543/HERBERT+HOWELLS+AND+HIS+1IYMNUS+PARADISI. Retrieved 29 November 2011. 
• Spicer, Paul (1998). Herbert Howells. Bridgend: Seren. ISBN 1-85411-233-3. 
• Spicer, Paul (2004). "Howells, Herbert Norman (1892–1983)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31257. Retrieved 27 November 2011. 

External links[link]

• Herbert Howells Trust

Judith Weir CBE, (born 11 May 1954 in Cambridge, England of Scottish parents) is a British composer.

Biography[link]

Weir trained with John Tavener while still at school (North London Collegiate School)^[1] and subsequently with Robin Holloway at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1976. Her music often draws on sources from medieval history, as well as the traditional stories and music of her native Scotland. She is best known for her operas and theatrical works, although she has also achieved international recognition for her orchestral and chamber works. From 1995 to 2000, she was the Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival in London. She held the post of Composer in Association for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from 1995 to 1998. She received the Lincoln Center's Stoeger Prize in 1997 and in 2001 the South Bank Show music award.

Music[link]

Weir's musical language is fairly conservative in its mechanic, with a "knack of making simple musical ideas appear freshly mysterious."^[2] Her operatic musical writing is sometimes compared to Britten's, and has been described as alternating "twee rhyming couplets and inert blank verse" ^[3]. Her first stage work, The Black Spider, was a one act opera which premiered in Canterbury in 1985 loosely based on the short novel of the same name by Jeremias Gotthelf. She has subsequently written one more "micro-operas", three full length operas, and an opera for television. In 1987, her first half length opera, A Night at the Chinese Opera, premiered at Kent Opera. This was followed by her other two full length operas The Vanishing Bridegroom (1990) and Blond Eckbert (1994), the latter commissioned by the English National Opera.^[4] In 2005 her opera Armida, an opera for television, premiered on Channel Four in the United Kingdom). The work was made in co-operation with Margaret Williams.^[5] Weir's commissioned works most notably include woman.life.song (2000) for Jessye Norman and We are Shadows (1999) for Simon Rattle. In January 2008, Weir was the focus of the BBC's annual composer weekend at the Barbican Centre in London. The four days of programmes ended with a first performance of her new commission, CONCRETE, a choral motet. The subject of this piece was inspired by the Barbican building itself - she describes it as ‘an imaginary excavation of the Barbican Centre, burrowing through 2,500 years of historical rubble’.

Operas[link]

• The Black Spider (6 March 1985, Canterbury)
• The Consolations of Scholarship (5 May 1985, Durham)
• A Night at the Chinese Opera (8 July 1987, Cheltenham)
• The Vanishing Bridegroom (1990, Glasgow)
• Blond Eckbert (20 April 1994, London)
• Armida (2005, television broadcast for Channel Four in the United Kingdom)
• Miss Fortune (Achterbahn) (21 July 2011, Bregenzer Festspiele, in a co-production with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, London; English language with German surtitles)

[edit] Miss Fortune (Achterbahn)

On 21st July, 2011, her first opera for 17 years, Miss Fortune (Achterbahn), premiered at the Bregenz Festival in Austria. The opera reworks a Sicilian folktale as a contemporary parable.^[6] Gerhard R. Koch, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper on 25 July, had these observations: "The music of Judith Weir, who also wrote the libretto for her opera, is neither avant-garde nor experimental but has a highly distilled folkloric style with cantabile voices similar to that of Britten without becoming retrospective. Tonality and atonality are not applied in a strictly antithetical manner, therefore the ideas of the American minimalists Reich and Riley are very present. This music has colour and a rhythmic pulse; it creates characteristic sounds without losing itself in descriptive patterns." Being a co-production with the Royal Opera House, Miss Fortune moved to London in March 2012, garnering at least two negative reviews. Edward Seckerson in The Independent wrote of "Miss Fortune in name and deed" and described the opera as "silly and naive" and "a waste of talent and resources," with a libretto that "vacillates between the banal and the unintentionally comedic (or is that irony?), full of truisms and clunky metaphors" and "about as streetwise as a visitor from Venus."^[7] Andrew Clements wrote in the Guardian of "a long two hours in the opera house" with scenes that "follow like cartoonish tableaux, without real characterisation, or confrontation, and without suggesting a dramatic shape."^[8]

Other key works[link]

• King Harald’s Saga (1979; soprano, singing eight roles)
• Piano Concerto (1997)
• We Are Shadows (1999; choir, orchestra)
• woman.life.song (2000; premiered at Carnegie Hall and performed by Jessye Norman)
• The welcome arrival of rain (2001; orchestra)
• Tiger Under the Table (2002; chamber ensemble)
• Piano Trio Two (2003-200])

Selected recordings[link]

• Judith Weir: Discography
• A Night at the Chinese Opera - NMC D060
• King Harald’s Saga - Cala CACD88040
• Piano Concerto; Distance and Enchantment; various other chamber works - NMC D090
• Blond Eckbert Nicholas Folwell (baritone), Blond Eckbert; Anne-Marie Owens (mezzo soprano), Berthe; Christopher Ventris (tenor), Walther / Hugo / An Old Woman; Nerys Jones (soprano), A bird; Chorus and Orchestra of English National Opera; Siân Edwards (conductor) Collins Classics: CD14612 / NMC: NMC D106
• On Buying a Horse: The songs of Judith Weir On Buying a Horse; Ox Mountain Was Covered by Trees; Songs from the Exotic; Scotch Minstrelsy; The Voice of Desire; A Spanish Liederbooklet; King Harald's Saga; Ständchen. Susan Bickley] (mezzo soprano), Andrew Kennedy (tenor), Ailish Tynan (soprano), Ian Burnside (piano) Signum SIGCD087

External links[link]

• Achterbahn Bregenz 2011

References[link]

• Warrack, John and West, Ewan (1992), The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5

Ralph Vaughan Williams OM ( /ˌreɪf ˌvɔːn ˈwɪliəmz/;^[1] 12 October 1872 – 26 August 1958) was an English composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores. He was also a collector of English folk music and song: this activity both influenced his editorial approach to the English Hymnal, beginning in 1904, in which he included many folk song arrangements set as hymn tunes, and also influenced several of his own original compositions.

Life[link]

Early years[link]

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on 12 October 1872 in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, where his father, the Reverend Arthur Vaughan Williams (the surname Vaughan Williams is an unhyphenated double-barrelled name of Welsh origin), was vicar. Following his father's death in 1875 he was taken by his mother, Margaret Susan née Wedgwood (1843–1937), the great-granddaughter of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, to live with her family at Leith Hill Place, a Wedgwood family home in the Surrey Hills. He was also related to the Darwins, Charles Darwin being a great-uncle. Though born into the privileged intellectual upper middle class, Vaughan Williams never took it for granted and worked all his life for the democratic and egalitarian ideals in which he believed.^[2]

The Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton family tree, showing Vaughan Williams's relationships to Charles Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood

As a student he had studied piano, "which I never could play, and the violin, which was my musical salvation." After Charterhouse School he attended the Royal College of Music (RCM) under Charles Villiers Stanford. He read history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge,^[3] where his friends and contemporaries included the philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. He then returned to the RCM and studied composition with Hubert Parry, who became a friend. One of his fellow pupils at the RCM was Leopold Stokowski and during 1896 they both studied organ under Sir Walter Parratt. Stokowski later went on to perform six of Vaughan Williams's symphonies for American audiences, making the first recording of the Sixth Symphony in 1949 with the New York Philharmonic, and giving the U.S. premiere of the Ninth Symphony in Carnegie Hall in 1958.

Another friendship made at the RCM, crucial to Vaughan Williams's development as a composer, was with fellow-student Gustav Holst whom he first met in 1895. From that time onwards they spent several 'field days' reading through and offering constructive criticism on each other's works in progress.^[4]

Vaughan Williams's composition developed slowly and it was not until he was 30 that the song "Linden Lea" became his first publication. He mixed composition with conducting, lecturing and editing other music, notably that of Henry Purcell and the English Hymnal. He had already taken lessons with Max Bruch in Berlin in 1897 and in 1907–1908 took a big step forward in his orchestral style when he studied for three months in Paris with Maurice Ravel.^[1]

In 1904, Vaughan Williams discovered English folk songs and carols, which were fast becoming extinct owing to the oral tradition through which they existed being undermined by the increase of literacy and printed music in rural areas. He travelled the countryside, transcribing and preserving many himself. Later he incorporated some songs and melodies into his own music, being fascinated by the beauty of the music and its anonymous history in the working lives of ordinary people. His efforts did much to raise appreciation of traditional English folk song and melody. Later in his life he served as president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), which, in recognition of his early and important work in this field, named its Vaughan Williams Memorial Library after him. During this time he strengthened his links to prominent writers on folk music, including the Reverend George B. Chambers.

In 1905, Vaughan Williams conducted the first concert of the newly founded Leith Hill Music Festival at Dorking which he was to conduct until 1953, when he passed the baton to his successor, William Cole.^[5]

	Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis noicon Performed by the U.S. Army Band Strings.
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In 1909, he composed incidental music for the Cambridge Greek Play, a stage production at Cambridge University of Aristophanes' The Wasps. The next year, he had his first big public successes conducting the premieres of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral) and his choral symphony A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1). He enjoyed a still greater success with A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2) in 1914, conducted by Geoffrey Toye.

Two World Wars[link]

A statue of Ralph Vaughan Williams in Dorking.

Vaughan Williams was 41 when World War I began. Though he could have avoided war service entirely, or tried for a commission, he chose to enlist as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After a gruelling time as a stretcher bearer in France and Salonika,^[6] he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery on 24 December 1917.^[7] On one occasion, though too ill to stand, he continued to direct his battery while lying on the ground.^[8] Prolonged exposure to gunfire began a process of hearing loss which eventually caused severe deafness in old age.^[2] In 1918, he was appointed Director of Music, First Army, and this helped him adjust back into musical life.

After the war, he adopted for a while a somewhat mystical style in Flos Campi, a work for solo viola, small orchestra and wordless chorus, and in A Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3), which draws on his experiences as an ambulance volunteer in that war, including a cadenza for trumpet in the second movement based on a bugler practicing and repeatedly hitting a wrong note, a flattened seventh, which Vaughan Williams alludes to in the symphony. The work was premiered on 26 January, 1922, in London, with Adrian Boult conducting. From 1924 a new phase in his music began, characterised by lively cross-rhythms and clashing harmonies. Key works from this period are Toccata marziale, the ballet Old King Cole, the Piano Concerto, the oratorio Sancta Civitas (his favourite of his choral works) and the ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing, which is drawn not from the Bible but from William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job. He also composed a Te Deum in G for the enthronement of Cosmo Gordon Lang as Archbishop of Canterbury. This period in his music culminated in the Symphony No. 4 in F minor, first played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1935. This symphony contrasts dramatically with the "pastoral" orchestral works with which he is associated; indeed, its almost unrelieved tension, drama, and dissonance have startled listeners since it was premiered. Acknowledging that the Fourth Symphony was different, the composer said, "I don't know if I like it, but it's what I meant." Two years later, Vaughan Williams made a historic recording of the work with the same orchestra for HMV (His Master's Voice), his only commercial recording. During this period, he lectured in America and England, and conducted The Bach Choir. He was President of the City of Bath Bach Choir between 1946 and 1959. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in the King's Birthday Honours of 1935,^[9] having previously declined a knighthood.^[2] He also gave private lessons in London to students including Irish composer Ina Boyle.^[10]

Vaughan Williams was an intimate life long friend of the famous British pianist Harriet Cohen. His letters to her reveal a flirtatious relationship, regularly reminding her of the thousands of kisses that she owed him. Before Cohen's first American tour in 1931 he wrote "I fear the Americans will love you so much that they won't let you come back."^[11] He was a regular visitor to her home and often attended parties there. Cohen premiered Vaughan Williams's "Hymn Tune Prelude" in 1930, which he dedicated to her. She later introduced the piece throughout Europe during her concert tours. In 1933 she premiered his Piano Concerto in C major, a work which was once again dedicated to her. Cohen was given the exclusive right to play the piece for a period of time. Cohen played and promoted Vaughan Williams's work throughout Europe, the USSR, and the United States.

His music now entered a mature lyrical phase, as in the Five Tudor Portraits; the Serenade to Music (a setting of a scene from act five of The Merchant of Venice, for orchestra and sixteen vocal soloists and composed as a tribute to the conductor Sir Henry Wood); and the Symphony No. 5 in D, which he conducted at the Proms in 1943. As he was now 70, many people considered it a swan song, but he renewed himself again and entered yet another period of exploratory harmony and instrumentation. His very successful Symphony No. 6 of 1946 received a hundred performances in the first year. It surprised both admirers and critics, many of whom suggested that this symphony (especially its last movement) was a grim vision of the aftermath of an atomic war: typically, Vaughan Williams himself refused to recognise any programme behind this work.

Later work[link]

Vaughan Williams plaque in Dorking parish church. He founded the Leith Hill Music Festival in 1905, with which he kept a lifelong involvement

Before his death in 1958, he completed three more symphonies. His Seventh, Sinfonia Antartica, which was based on his 1948 film score for Scott of the Antarctic, exhibits his renewed interest in instrumentation and sonority. The Eighth Symphony, first performed in 1956, was followed by the much weightier Symphony No. 9 in E minor of 1956–57. This last symphony was initially given a lukewarm reception after its first performance in May 1958, just three months before his death. But this dark and enigmatic work is now considered by many^[12] to be a fitting conclusion to his sequence of symphonic works.

He also completed a range of instrumental and choral works, including a Tuba Concerto, An Oxford Elegy on texts of Matthew Arnold, and the Christmas cantata Hodie. He also wrote an arrangement of The Old One Hundredth Psalm Tune for the Coronation Service of Queen Elizabeth II. At his death he left an unfinished Cello Concerto, an opera Thomas the Rhymer and music for a Christmas play, The First Nowell, which was completed by his amanuensis Roy Douglas (b. 1907).

Despite his substantial involvement in church music, and the religious subject-matter of many of his works, he was described by his second wife as "an atheist ... [who] later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism."^[13] It is noteworthy that in his opera The Pilgrim's Progress he changed the name of the hero from John Bunyan's Christian to Pilgrim. He also set Bunyan's hymn Who would true valour see to music using the traditional Sussex melody "Monk's Gate". For many church-goers, his most familiar composition may be the hymn tune Sine nomine written for the hymn "For All the Saints" by William Walsham How. The tune he composed for the mediaeval hymn "Come Down, O Love Divine" (Discendi, Amor santo by Bianco of Siena, ca.1434) is entitled "Down Ampney" in honour of his birthplace.

He also worked as a tutor for Birkbeck College.^[14]

In the 1950s, the composer supervised recordings of all but his Ninth Symphony by Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra for Decca.^[15] At the end of the sessions for the mysterious Sixth Symphony, Vaughan Williams gave a short speech, thanking Boult and the orchestra for their performance, "most heartily," and Decca later included this on the LP.^[16] He was to supervise the first recording of the Ninth Symphony (for Everest Records) with Boult; his death on 26 August 1958 the night before the recording sessions were to begin provoked Boult to announce to the musicians that their performance would be a memorial to the composer.^[17] These recordings, including the speeches by the composer and Boult, have all been reissued by Decca on CD.

Vaughan Williams is a central figure in British music because of his long career as teacher, lecturer and friend to so many younger composers and conductors. His writings on music remain thought-provoking, particularly his oft-repeated call for all persons to make their own music, however simple, as long as it is truly their own. Vaughan Williams was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.

Marriages[link]

He was married twice. His first marriage was to Adeline Fisher (daughter of the historian Herbert William Fisher) in 1896. Adeline was cousin of Ruth Fisher de Ropp,^[18] who was the mother of Robert S de Ropp. Robert's father, a semi-destitute European nobleman, was unable to pay for his son's post-secondary education. Consequently, Ralph and Adeline Vaughan Williams paid for Robert’s education at the Royal College of Science, in South Kensington, where he eventually specialised in biology and earned a PhD. De Ropp went on to be a successful research scientist and well-known author of books on human potentials.^[19] Adeline Fisher Vaughan Williams died in 1951 after many years of suffering from crippling arthritis.

Vaughan Williams had an affair with the married poet Ursula Wood beginning in 1938. After Wood's husband died in 1942, Wood became Ralph's literary advisor and personal assistant and moved into his Surrey home, apparently with the tacit approval of Adeline, for whom Wood served as a caretaker until Adeline's death in 1951.^[20] Wood wrote the libretto to his choral work The Sons of Light, and contributed to that of The Pilgrim's Progress and Hodie.^[21] Wood and Vaughan Williams married in 1953 and moved to London and occupied a house at 10 Hanover Terrace, Regents Park until the composer's death five years later. In 1964 Wood published RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. She served as honorary president of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society until her death in 2007.

Style[link]

Vaughan Williams's music has often been said to be characteristically English, in the same way as that of Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, George Butterworth and William Walton.^[22] In Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, Peter Ackroyd writes, "If that Englishness in music can be encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic, melancholic, and nostalgic yet timeless." Ackroyd quotes music critic John Alexander Fuller Maitland, whose distinctions included editing the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the years just before 1911, as having observed that in Vaughan Williams's style "one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new."

His style expresses a deep regard for and fascination with folk tunes, the variations upon which can convey the listener from the down-to-earth (which he always tried to remain in his daily life) to the ethereal. Simultaneously the music shows patriotism toward England in the subtlest form, engendered by a feeling for ancient landscapes and a person's small yet not entirely insignificant place within them.^[2] His earlier works sometimes show the influence of Maurice Ravel, his teacher for three months in Paris in 1908. Ravel described Vaughan Williams as the only one of his pupils who did not write music like Ravel.^[22]

[edit] Works^[23]

Operas[link]

• Hugh the Drover or Love in the Stocks (1910–20). Romantic ballad opera. Libretto: Harold Child
• Sir John in Love (1924–28), from which comes an arrangement by Ralph Greaves of Fantasia on "Greensleeves"
• The Poisoned Kiss (1927–29; revisions 1936–37 and 1956–57). Libretto: Evelyn Sharp (later amended by Ralph and Ursula Vaughan Williams)
• Riders to the Sea (1925–32), from the play by John Millington Synge
• The Pilgrim's Progress (1909–51), based on John Bunyan's allegory

• The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains (1921). Libretto: Ralph Vaughan Williams (from John Bunyan) (Later incorporated, save for the final section, into The Pilgrim's Progress)

Incidental music[link]

• The Wasps (1909; to Aristophanes's play The Wasps; best known as an orchestral suite)
• The Bacchae (1911; to Euripides's tragedy)
• The Death of Tintagiles (1913; to Maurice Maeterlinck's 1894 play)^[24]

Ballets[link]

• Old King Cole (1923)
• On Christmas Night (1926)
• Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930)
• The Running Set (1933)
• The Bridal Day (1938–39)

Orchestral[link]

• Symphonies
  • A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1), a choral symphony on texts by Whitman (1903–1909)
  • A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2) (1913)
  • A Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3) (1921)
  • Symphony No. 4 in F minor (1931–34)
  • Symphony No. 5 in D major (1938–43)
  • Symphony No. 6 in E minor (1944–47, rev. 1950)
  • Sinfonia antartica (Symphony No. 7) (1949–52) (partly based on his music for the film Scott of the Antarctic)
  • Symphony No. 8 in D minor (1953–55)
  • Symphony No. 9 in E minor (1956–57)
• Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue (1900)
• In the Fen Country, for orchestra (1904)
• Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 (1906, rev. 1914))^[25]
• The Wasps, an Aristophanic suite (1909; see Incidental music above)
• Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910, rev. 1913 and 1919)
• March: Sea Songs (1923), arr. for orchestra 1924 by the composer
• Prelude and Fugue in C minor (1930)
• The Running Set (1933)
• Fantasia on "Greensleeves" (1934)^[26]
• Two Hymn Tune Preludes (1936)
• Partita for Strings (1938)
• Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus (1939)
• Household Music (1940)
• Concerto Grosso, for three parts of strings requiring different levels of technical skill (1950)
• Prelude on an Old Carol Tune (1952)
• Flourish for Glorious John (1957)

Concerti[link]

• Violin
  • The Lark Ascending for violin and orchestra (1914)
  • Concerto Accademico for violin and orchestra (1924–25)
• Viola
  • Flos Campi for viola, wordless chorus and small orchestra (1925)
  • Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra (1934)
  • Romance for viola and piano (1925–1934 circa)
• Piano
  • Piano Concerto in C major (1926–31)
  • Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1946; a reworking of Piano Concerto in C)
• Oboe Concerto in A minor, for oboe and strings (1944)
• Fantasia (quasi variazione) on the Old 104th Psalm Tune for piano, chorus, and orchestra (1949)
• Romance in D-flat major for harmonica and orchestra (1951) (written for Larry Adler)
• Tuba Concerto in F minor (1954)

Choral[link]

• The Garden of Proserpine, cantata for soprano, chorus & orchestra, setting of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1899)^[27]
• A Cambridge Mass, Missa brevis for SATB, double chorus & orchestra (1899); Doctoral exercise, first performed 3 March 2011.^{[28][29][30][31]}
• Toward the Unknown Region, song for chorus and orchestra, setting of Walt Whitman (1906)
• Five Mystical Songs for baritone, chorus and orchestra, settings of George Herbert (1911)
• Fantasia on Christmas Carols for baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1912); arranged also for reduced orchestra of organ, strings, percussion)
• Mass in G minor for unaccompanied choir (1922)
• Sancta Civitas (The Holy City) oratorio, text mainly from the Book of Revelation (1923–25)
• Te Deum in G major (1928)
• Benedicite for soprano, chorus, and orchestra (1929)
• In Windsor Forest, adapted from the opera Sir John in Love (1929)
• Three Choral Hymns (1929)
• Magnificat for contralto, women's chorus, and orchestra (1932)
• Five Tudor Portraits for contralto, baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1935)
• Dona nobis pacem, text by Walt Whitman and other sources (1936)
• Festival Te Deum for chorus and orchestra or organ (1937)
• Serenade to Music for sixteen solo voices and orchestra, a setting of Shakespeare, dedicated to Sir Henry Joseph Wood on the occasion of his Jubilee (1938)
• "Six Choral Songs To Be Sung In Time Of War" (1940)
• A Song of Thanksgiving (originally Thanksgiving for Victory) for narrator, soprano solo, children's chorus, mixed chorus, and orchestra (1944)
• An Oxford Elegy for narrator, mixed chorus and small orchestra (1949)
• Three Shakespeare Songs for SATB unaccompanied, composed for The British Federation of Music Festivals National Competitive Festival (1951)
• O Taste and See, a motet setting of Psalm 34:8. The original SATB version was composed for the Coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey in June 1953. (1953)
• Hodie, a Christmas cantata (1954)
• Folk songs of the Four Seasons A Cantata for Women's Voices with Orchestra or pianoforte accompaniment (1950).
• Epithalamion for baritone solo, chorus, flute, piano, and strings (1957)
• A Choral Flourish for unaccompanied SATB chorus, composed for a large choral event in the Royal Albert Hall at the invitation of (and dedicated to) Alan Kirby (c. 1952)
• O How Amiable (1934) An arrangement of a hymn for chorus and organ, originally written for the Abinger Pageant

Arrangements of Christian hymns[link]

Vaughan Williams was the musical editor^[32] of the English Hymnal of 1906, and the co-editor with Martin Shaw of Songs of Praise of 1925 and the Oxford Book of Carols of 1928, all in collaboration with Percy Dearmer.

• A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing^[33]
• All Creatures of Our God and King^[33]
• Alleluia, Sing to Jesus^[33]
• Amid the Thronging Worshippers^[33]
• At the Name of Jesus^[33]
• "Come Down, O Love Divine"^[33] original hymnody by Bianco of Siena (1434)"Discendi, Amor santo"and entitled "Down Ampney" in honour of Vaughan Williams's birthplace
• Come, Let Us with Our Lord Arise^[33] an Easter anthem
• Come Thou Long Expected Jesus^[33] a carol for the season of Advent
• For All the Saints harmonised from "Sine Nomine"
• God Be With You Till We Meet Again^[33]
• I Love You Lord, My Strength, My Rock^[33]
• I Sing the Mighty Power of God^[33]
• Jesus, Lord, Redeemer^[33]
• "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence", text of the Cherubic hymn of Liturgy of St James, harmonised to the French folk tune Picardy (1906)
• Make Room Within My Heart, O God^[33]
• My God, My God, O Why Have You Forsaken Me? a lament for Good Friday services during Passiontide
• O Come to Me, the Master Said^[33]
• "O Little Town of Bethlehem" a popular Christmas Carol penned by the American Phillips Brooks adapted to the English tune "Forest Green"
• O Sing a Song of Bethlehem^[33]
• On Christmas Night All Christians Sing^[33]
• When the Church of Jesus^[33]

Vocal[link]

• "Linden Lea", song (1901)
• The House of Life, six sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, set to music (1904)
• Songs of Travel (1904)
• "The Sky Above The Roof" (1908)
• On Wenlock Edge, song cycle for tenor, piano and string quartet (1909)
• Along the Field, for tenor and violin
• Three Poems by Walt Whitman for baritone and piano (1920)
• Four Poems by Fredegond Shove: for baritone and piano (1922)
• Four Hymns: for tenor, viola obbligato and piano (1914)
• Merciless Beauty for tenor, two violins, and cello
• Four Last Songs to poems of Ursula Vaughan Williams
• Ten Blake songs, song cycle for high voice and oboe (1957)

Chamber and Instrumental[link]

• String Quartet in C minor (1897) (early composition)
• String Quartet No. 1 in G minor (1908)
• String Quartet No. 2 in A minor ("For Jean, on her birthday," 1942–44)
• Phantasy Quintet for 2 violins, 2 violas and cello (1912)
• Piano Quintet in C minor for violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano (1903)
• Sonata in A minor for violin and piano (1952)
• Romance for viola and piano (undated)
• Six Studies in English Folk Song, for violoncello and piano (1926)

Organ[link]

• Three Preludes on Welsh Hymn Tunes (Bryn Calfaria, Rhosymedre, Hyfrydol) (1920)
• Prelude and Fugue in C minor (1921)
• A Wedding Tune for Ann (1943)
• The Old One Hundredth Psalm Tune, harmonisation and arrangement (1953)
• Two Organ Preludes (The White Rock, St. David's Day) (1956)

Film, radio, and TV scores[link]

• 49th Parallel, 1940, his first, talked into it by Muir Mathieson to assuage his guilt at being able to do nothing for the war effort
• Coastal Command, 1942
• BBC adaptation of The Pilgrim's Progress, 1942
• The People's Land, 1943
• The Story of a Flemish Farm, 1943
• Stricken Peninsula, 1945
• The Loves of Joanna Godden, 1946
• Scott of the Antarctic, 1948, partially reused for his Sinfonia antartica (Symphony No. 7)
• The England of Elizabeth
• Bitter Springs, 1950

Band[link]

• Rhosymedre (based on a Welsh hymn tune for organ) for concert band (1920)
• (English) Folk Song Suite for military band (1923)
• Sea Songs (1923)
• Toccata Marziale for military band (1924)
• Overture: Henry V for brass band (1933/34)
• Flourish for Wind Band (1939)
• Prelude on Three Welsh Hymn Tunes arranged from the organ piece for brass band (1955) and published by Salvationist Publishing and Supplies
• Variations for brass band (1957)

Recordings[link]

Vaughan Williams enjoys an extensive recorded legacy. Early recordings of individual symphonies made by Henry Wood (London), John Barbirolli (Fifth), Adrian Boult and Leopold Stokowski (both in the Sixth), and the composer's own recording of the Fourth, preceded several complete cycles. Stokowski's 1943 NBC Symphony broadcast of the Fourth Symphony has also been issued on CD, as has his 1964 Proms performance of the 8th with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Sir Eugene Goossens recorded the 1920 edition of A London Symphony with the Cincinnati Orchestra for RCA Victor in 1941, the only recording of that version of the score ever made. Boult taped the first cycle (Symphonies 1–8) for Decca in the early 1950s, completing it with No. 9 for the Everest label in 1958; he re-recorded all nine for EMI between 1967 and 1972. Other cycles have followed from André Previn, Bernard Haitink, Bryden Thomson, Vernon Handley, Leonard Slatkin and Richard Hickox.

Several other foreign conductors have also recorded individual Vaughan Williams symphonies: Dimitri Mitropoulos and Leonard Bernstein both recorded the Fourth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic, the same orchestra with which Leopold Stokowski had made the first recording of the Sixth Symphony in 1949. This work was also recorded by Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony in 1966. Paavo Berglund also recorded the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies and, among other CD releases, the Portuguese premiere of the Ninth Symphony, with Pedro de Freitas Branco conducting the National Symphony Orchestra of Portugal, has also been issued. Similarly, the US premiere of the Ninth Symphony, given by Leopold Stokowski in Carnegie Hall in 1958 'In Memoriam Vaughan Williams' has also been released on CD by Cala Records.

A first official release of the Symphony No. 5 conducted by the composer in 1952 was recently issued in the U.K. by Somm Recordings.

David Willcocks recorded much of the choral output for EMI in the 1960s and 1970s. Award-winning performances of the string quartets have followed on Naxos, which along with the Hyperion and Chandos labels have recorded much neglected material, including works for brass band and the rarely performed operas.

EMI Classics has issued a budget 30-CD set (34+ hours) with virtually all of Vaughan Williams's works, including alternative settings.

See also[link]

• International Council for Traditional Music
• Music of Sussex

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Vaughan Williams on Music, Ralph Vaughan Williams & David Manning. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-518239-2
• Heirs & Rebels, Ralph Vaughan Williams & Gustav Holst; ed. Ursula Vaughan Williams & Imogen Holst. London, Oxford University Press, 1959.
• Vaughan Williams, Simon Heffer. Northeastern; First American edition (1 March 2001). ISBN 978-1-55553-472-1.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ralph Vaughan Williams

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ralph Vaughan Williams

• Free scores by Ralph Vaughan Williams in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Free scores by Ralph Vaughan Williams at the International Music Score Library Project
• 1956 audio interview with Vaughan Williams on his editing of the English Hymnal (from the BBC)
• The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society
• Vaughan Williams Phantasy Quintet Soundbites and discussion of work
• Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Internet Movie Database
• Ralph Vaughan Williams at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Heffer, Simon (5 December 2007). "Ralph Vaughan Williams: Uneasy listening". The Daily Telegraph. UK. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/12/05/bmwilliams105.xml. "A stunning new film about composer Ralph Vaughan Williams challenges the myths that obscure his legacy – and exposes the darkness that permeates his work."  (on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the composer's death)
• Works by or about Ralph Vaughan Williams in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• "Famous names in the First World War—Ralph Vaughan Williams" from The National Archives, includes extracts from his army service record, and his 1901 Census return.
• Archival material relating to Ralph Vaughan Williams listed at the UK National Register of Archives

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007)

Domenico Scarlatti
1738 portrait by Domingo Antonio Velasco

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757) was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. He is classified as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti he composed in a variety of musical forms, although today he is known mainly for his 555 keyboard sonatas.

Life and career[link]

Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. He was the sixth of ten children and a younger brother to Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, also a musician. He probably first studied under his father, the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti; other composers who may have been his early teachers include Gaetano Greco, Francesco Gasparini, and Bernardo Pasquini, all of whom may have influenced his musical style.

He became a composer and organist at the royal chapel in Naples in 1701. In 1704, he revised Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's opera Irene for performance at Naples. Soon afterwards, his father sent him to Venice. After this, nothing is known of Scarlatti's life until 1709, when he went to Rome in the service of the exiled Polish queen Marie Casimire. He met Thomas Roseingrave there. Scarlatti was already an eminent harpsichordist: there is a story of a trial of skill with George Frideric Handel at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome where he was judged possibly superior to Handel on that instrument, although inferior on the organ. Later in life, he was known to cross himself in veneration when speaking of Handel's skill. In Rome, Scarlatti composed several operas for Queen Casimira's private theatre. He was Maestro Di Cappella at St. Peter's from 1715 to 1719. In 1719 he travelled to London to direct his opera Narciso at the King's Theatre.