Vaughan Williams’s music has been central to British
musical life for as long as anyone alive can remember (for a few years,
about a decade after his death, it seemed to be disappearing from view,
but the upturn began before that happened). Yet have we really got away
from the benign pastoral image, do we really know the composer in the
round, have we tried to identify those works which have a universal
appeal? Of the "big" companies, it is probably EMI which has
done the most for British music in the first half of the 20th
Century, yet the same company has also been the major culprit, for while
other companies include their British music recordings among their international
releases, EMI have kept them for the home market, thus perpetuating
the image of this music as the aural equivalent of the Rural Arts and
Crafts Shop. And here we are again; a double CD pack of which the first
disc is wholly vocal, with notes (good ones) in English only and NO
TEXTS (how many of the choral words are even native speakers really
going to pick up?) is obviously not even trying to reach the export
market.
Yet any foreigner’s verdict would surely be of an uneven
but universal art. If there is a common theme to this odd-looking mixture
of mainly less well-known pieces (with one obvious exception) it is
that of Vaughan Williams the ceaseless experimenter with new forms and
instrumental combinations. Not, perhaps, in "Toward the Unknown
Region", which is the sort of choral cantata in the Stanford-and-Parry
vein which young composers were expected to write as their visiting
card. The originality here lay in the choice of Walt Whitman’s unorthodox
verse. Back in 1884 Stanford himself had created such a furore with
his choice of lines from Whitman’s Abraham Lincoln Burial Ode for his
"Elegiac Ode" that he never again ventured to set such "modern"
verse for choral festival consumption. But, as principal conductor of
the Leeds Festival in 1907, he was clearly sympathetic towards his young
pupil’s Whitman setting since he included it in the festival programme.
By this time the public was ready for the poetry and Vaughan Williams
became a national figure, leading to the even more successful presentation
of his "Sea Symphony" at the next Leeds Festival in 1910.
"Dona nobis pacem" (1936) mingles liturgical
Latin texts with selected poems (mainly by Whitman again) in a way that
seems a blueprint for Benjamin Britten’s "War Requiem", while
the "Magnificat" (1932) represents a harshly troubled, agnostic
humanising of the Annunciation scene, its odd combination of contralto
solo, flute solo, female chorus and small orchestra again a harbinger
of much post-war music. The idea of a Fantasia for piano, chorus and
orchestra (1949) had been tried by Beethoven and found Vaughan Williams
blithely indifferent to the common wisdom that Beethoven’s example only
went to prove that the thing couldn’t work.
Experimentation continues on the second CD. The Partita
began life as a double string trio (in 1938) before reaching the present
form in 1948. It is also notable for its "Homage to Henry Hall",
the conductor of the BBC Dance Orchestra (how many of us grew up on
his record of "Teddy-Bears’ Picnic"?). The Concerto Grosso
(1950) was written for the Rural Music Schools’ Association and provided
a piece in which young hopefuls could join forces with experienced professionals,
each with a part according to his own level. Placed after these two
later string works, we are reminded that the Tallis Fantasia (1910)
itself was of for its date quite unprecedented both in layout and in
musical language, nor does the concentration on pure atmosphere to be
found "The Lark Ascending" have obvious parallels in European
violin and orchestra literature from 1914. In his last years Vaughan
Williams became attracted by the possibilities of "unusual"
instruments (as in the Tuba Concerto). The Romance for Harmonica (1951)
was commissioned by Larry Adler, but what a stroke of genius to include
a piano in the orchestra as well, and to exploit the harmonica’s bittersweet
music-hall possibilities in a way that brings it close to the world
of Poulenc.
So much for the experimentation angle; what of the
actual value of the music? Well, the most European-sounding piece, the
Partita, is maybe the least interesting. Michael Kennedy’s notes hopefully
tell us "there is a Stravinskyan flavour to the rhythmical devices";
what I’m afraid he means is that Vaughan Williams could assemble a well-wrought
bit of "gebrauchsmusik" from thematic sows’ ears as competently
as any Hindemith follower, and all Boult’s conviction (he had conducted
the first performance back in 1948) fails to persuade me there is more
to it than that. The Concerto Grosso is distinctly more attractive,
but the Old 104th impresses more than anything by its disarming
oddity. In humanising the Annunciation scene, Vaughan Williams had a
precedent in his master Stanford’s "spinning-wheel" G major
setting, one of the best-loved pieces in the entire Anglican repertoire.
Vaughan Williams unfortunately created a more centrally "European"
piece of the gritty kind that we may admire but which it is difficult
to love. The attractive qualities of the Romance and "The Lark"
are well-known, and "Toward the Unknown Region" is a decent
early piece, so that leaves two universal masterpieces, the "Tallis
Fantasia", widely recognised as such, and "Dona nobis pacem",
an impassioned and timeless cry for peace which speaks to all nations
and all times. With the inclusion of the immortal line "For my
enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself", the American poet and
the British composer launched a message that should be emblazoned on
the hearts of bomb-happy Presidents and their smarmy Prime Minister
henchmen in all ages.
All Boult performances of Vaughan Williams are historical
documents, but "Toward the Unknown Region" is late Boult and
he seems uninterested in the proceedings during the early stages. The
powerful second part finds him in better form, but choir and orchestra
appear to be scattered around the room and do not coalesce into a convincing
body. I am speaking from memory but, the compilers having made the choice
to double-bill two musical knights in particular, would not Sargent
have been better represented by his recording of this work than the
Tallis Fantasia? Boult does what he can for the Old 104th
and the late string works benefit enormously from the sense of burning
personal commitment he gives them. No complaints about Davies’s performance
of the "Magnificat", either. Sargent’s "Tallis",
taken on its own, is attractive enough, it babbles of green fields but
I don’t think the music meant anything more to him than that. If EMI
still have rights over Westminster recordings (they certainly used to),
then it would have been rather more imaginative to have given us the
version Boult set down in Vienna, also in 1959. Perhaps because the
conductor was having to teach the very responsive Vienna State Opera
Orchestra how the music went, the result is more sharply etched than
usual and emphasises the stark, Hardyesque tragedy latent in the work.
Or they could have used the 1975 version which originally came out with
the Partita and Concerto Grosso, where the same Hardyesque qualities
are revisited as by a time-traveller, Boult evoking a distant (but not
sentimentally ideal) world which he remembered but which had now passed
away. This version also finds Boult vigilant to the end over the letter
of the score: crescendos, accelerandos and the like occur exactly where
they are written, there is no question of a vague expressiveness being
applied haphazardly. Either of these performances contains insights
which begin some way after Sargent’s have ended.
The Adler recording is a historical document (it took
place a month or so after the first British performance at the Proms),
and technically it sounds rather like a film soundtrack. Only a day
after a completely different team were in the same studio to record
Jean Pougnet in "The Lark Ascending". Since Pougnet was a
much-appreciated artist whose principal claim to discographic memory
was his Delius Concerto with Beecham, it would be nice to hail an example
of a foreigner showing us how our music has to go. Truth to tell, he
is fairly prosaically literal, and Boult seems to feel that, under the
circumstances, there is no point in trying to do more himself. Later
he recorded the piece with Hugh Bean, a performance which inhabits a
quite different poetic world in which the performers exchange their
shared experiences.
"Dona nobis pacem" was recorded at the same
sessions as "Toward the Unknown Region", so logically the
recording would have the same defects. Frankly, after a few bars I was
past noticing. This is one of those occasions when composer, conductor
and performers all seem to have gelled into one to make a single, overwhelming
statement. This is what great conducting is all about.
So where does that leave us? "Dona nobis"
is essential and alone worth the price of the set (but, if it is the
visionary Vaughan Williams you’re after, the same series has a coupling
of this with "Sancta Civitas" under Hickox – CDC 7 54788 2).
The rest helps to fill in our picture of a major European composer.
Christopher Howell
Sheila Armstrong (soprano)
(2), Helen Watts (contralto) (4), John Carol Case (baritone) (2), Peter
Katin (pianoforte) (3), Jean Pougnet (9), Christopher Hyde-Smith (flute)
(4), Larry Adler (harmonica) (8), Ambrosian Singers (4), London Philharmonic
Choir (1, 2), BBC Symphony Orchestra (8), London Philharmonic Orchestra
(1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9), Orchestra Nova of London (4), Philharmonia Orchestra
(7)/Sir Adrian Boult (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9), Meredith Davies (4), Sir Malcolm
Sargent (7, 8)