Whilst the world
premiere recording of the cantata Willow-Wood is the
obvious point of interest on this new Naxos disc, it’s fair
to say that none of the works apart, perhaps, from Dives
and Lazarus, are exactly common currency. Willow-Wood
itself strikes me as quintessential VW; it is a setting for
baritone solo, wordless female chorus and orchestra of a sonnet
sequence by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Prior to the Naxos sessions
it had not been heard since its first performance in 1909. Lewis
Foreman’s typically illuminating liner-note tells us that the
composer retained a fondness for it throughout his life, attempting
to get the score republished just three years before his death.
He also opines that it owes much of its impact to the orchestral
writing and the atmosphere associated with the vocalise-like
character of the women’s voices. He is quick to tell us that
similar sounding music by Ravel and Debussy was still not being
played regularly in Britain. Whatever the case, it is an effective
setting that lovers of the composer’s music will want to hear.
Dark modal harmonies and lush orchestral carpet underpin the
richly rhetorical imagery of the words. The superb performance
also helps. Roderick Williams’ splendidly resonant baritone
complements the excellent chorus and impassioned conducting
of David Lloyd-Jones.
The same could be
said of Toward the Unknown Region. I retain a soft spot
for this Whitman setting, having sung in a large-scale performance
at college, and whilst it is fairly common among choral societies,
it doesn’t have too many good modern recordings. It inhabits
a similar sound-world to the Sea Symphony and if you
love that work, you’ll love this. Whitman’s poetry was inspirational
to a number of composers in the early years of the 20th Century,
and VW clearly loved the words he was dealing with. The passage
that starts ‘Then we burst forth, we float, In time and Space
O soul’ still sends shivers down my spine, and it’s great to
hear a crack professional choir and orchestra giving it their
all, with Lloyd-Jones fully alive to the all-important atmosphere
at the start and thrusting momentum as things hot up.
The glorious Five
Variants of Dives and Lazarus seems, like The Lark Ascending,
to exemplify VW’s idealised picture of a countryside battling
with creeping industrialisation. I grew up with Marriner’s ASMF
version on the old Argo label and while there is much competition
here, Lloyd-Jones is as sensitive as any to the beauties of
the piece without any over-sentimentalising.
The 1951 choral
cantata The Sons of Light, with words by the composer’s
future wife Ursula, is another rarity, though it did make it
onto LP. It is certainly new to me, but very enjoyable in all
the right ways. Indeed, Lewis Foreman’s theory is that it has
been unduly neglected because of its original commission from
the Schools Music Association and an unfair connotation as a
‘children’s piece’. There is no way VW makes any concessions
to kids’ abilities and the piece is full of dazzlingly characteristic
touches. I particularly like the brass fanfares and march sections,
rumbustious and invigorating, and at one point detected echoes
of Holst’s Hymn of Jesus (itself dedicated to VW) as
well as the composer’s own masterpiece Job in the central
scherzo ‘Song of the Zodiac’.
Speaking of Job,
the last little rarity here is The Voice of the Whirlwind,
a short choral motet that sets words from the book of Job and
recycles music from the masque, specifically the ‘Galliard of
the Sons of the Morning’ in scene viii. It’s an effective setting
given that the words, as Foreman points out, are set to music
intended as a ballet.
This is a hugely
enjoyable release, intelligently programmed and with high production
values. Singing, playing and conducting could hardly be better
and given the price and the fact that none but the staunchest
aficionados will do any duplicating, is sure to be a success.
Tony Haywood
Christopher Howell has also listened to this
disc:
It can be an interesting
pastime to browse periodically through the work-lists of favourite
composers, just to see what is left of potential importance
that you don’t know. Those who number Vaughan Williams among
their favourites have seen the major gaps filled one by one
over the years, but every now and then their eyes will have
lighted upon an early cantata for baritone, female chorus and
strings, “Willow-Wood”. At last, those who actually have the
power to perform and record such things have noticed the gap
too and, amid a certain publicity, this 14-minute work, unheard
since its first performances in 1903 (of the voice and piano
version) and 1909 (of the fully-scored version performed here),
has joined the RVW discography. To tell the truth, if you don’t
insist on the publicity surrounding a rediscovered work for
full orchestra there are quite a few odds and ends, unison songs,
part-songs and the like, which seem to be still unrecorded,
but this appears to be the last big gap ... but what about “Folk-Songs
of the Four Seasons” for women’s chorus and orchestra (1950),
and what on earth is the “Suite for Pipes” (1947)?
It is clear that
by 1903 RVW was already a thoroughly professional composer.
Certain awkwardnesses (if I may use this word in the plural)
which appeared in his later music and which have sometimes been
adduced as proof that he was not a proper professional, were
actually traits of his own personality which he gradually learnt
to express more fully, and are of course intentional. The music
moves surely to and from climaxes, the orchestration is rich
but not heavy with a vaguely French sound to it, the vocal line
must be grateful to sing, the choral entries are perfectly timed.
I can never forget
the Italian critic who, after a rare outing of the “Sea Symphony”
in Milan - its only one, for all I know - dismissed it as “second-hand
film music”. It’s a pity he didn’t look at the date of the score,
since film soundtracks were as yet in the future in 1910. And
yet, his reaction does point to a defect in the early, Pre-Raphaelite
Vaughan Williams which he was only beginning to address with
the Sea Symphony. In common with many products of the Stanford-and-Parry
RCM (Walford Davies, for example), he could take a fine poem
– some beautiful sonnets from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The
House of Life” in this case – find apt and attractive vocal
phrases with which to illustrate it line by line, then bind
the whole together with an expert symphonic mesh, creating a
work which holds the attention, passes the time agreeably, but
leaves no particular memory behind it. Just as films of famous
books are wont to spend millions on a product which lacks the
emotional force you can experience by reading a paperback copy
of the original book at home, here getting on for a hundred
musicians have been brought together only to dissipate the magical
intensity of lines which are already the purest music in themselves,
beginning thus:
I sat
with Love upon a woodside well,
Leaning
across the water, I and he;
Nor
ever did he speak nor looked at me,
But
touched his lute wherein was audible
The
certain secret thing he had to tell.
In another Rossetti
setting, “Silent Noon” from “The House of Life” (also 1903),
Vaughan Williams showed that it is possible to create
a musical setting of a great poem which has an independent vitality
of its own, on the same exalted plane as the poem itself. Here,
I fear he has not quite succeeded. But he passes the time very
pleasantly for us and a concert program with this and Debussy’s
“La demoiselle élue” in the first half and, say, Mahler 1 in
the second, would throw an interesting slant on turn-of-the-century
art around Europe.
“Toward the Unknown
Region” also provides, here, a warmly sumptuous experience.
I was a bit disconcerted. I had not heard the piece for some
time but I did not remember it as being so comfortably at odds
with Whitman’s strange words. Out came the Boult recording and
all was as I remembered it; the sense of blind groping, fearful
even to move ahead at “No map there, nor guide”, and the touch
of longed-for human warmth at “Nor face with blooming flesh”.
Choral diction and colour were better in those days, too, but
above all this is real conducting, not afraid to adjust the
tempi microscopically but continually to give full character
to each phrase rather than sail blandly through; memory tells
me that the Sargent recording was better still. So maybe there
is more to be said on “Willow-Wood”, too?
When Vaughan Williams
rid himself of the luxuriant Pre-Raphaelite symbolism of his
youth and embraced a Hardy-like unvarnished truthfulness, he
found the way to express the vision that was in him. In short
he became a great composer. This disc has two brief examples
from his finest period. “The Voice out of the Whirlwind” is
actually a reworking of a passage from his great ballet “Job”;
as Lewis Foreman says in his notes, the words fit so well that
it is difficult to believe RVW didn’t have them in mind from
the start. This piece goes with considerable vitality.
Though never as
highly rated as the “Tallis Fantasia”, I always loved the “Dives
and Lazarus” variations in the Barbirolli version I had on LP
as part of the “other side” of Rubbra 5, also under Barbirolli.
The flat, featureless performance here left me wondering why
I (or anybody else) should have found it worth bothering with
at all. So out came Barbirolli and I was caught in its spell
as ever. There’s more variety of expression and shading in the
first two bars than in the whole of the present performance.
Another “coup” of
this disc is the first CD recording of “The Sons of Light”.
This work dates from the beginning of RVW’s last period, when
he set aside his prophet-like stance and experimented restlessly
with new sounds. Though in the last resort these works are more
in the nature of an interesting postscript to a great career,
there is no denying the coursing energy and phenomenal range
of colour to be found in this cantata, which certainly deserves
to be better-known. The performance here is an effective one.
Turning back to the one (so far as I know) previous recording,
part of Lyrita’s buried treasure and conducted by Sir David
Willcocks, there is nonetheless a greater sense of urgency.
This stems not so much from faster tempi, since the overall
timings are practically identical though Willcocks has a greater
range of tempi within this framework, as of clearer choral diction
and colouring. Willcocks was, of course, one of the greatest
British choral trainers of his day, and here he has his own
two choirs: The Bach Choir and that of the RCM. And it shows,
in the characterisation of the crab, and of the “mailed scorpion”,
just to give two examples. The downside of great choral trainers
is often that they are hopeless with orchestras, but this was
never a problem with Willcocks, who got a sizzling response
from the LPO. In short, the present performance - recorded with
more depth but slightly less presence - will do, but the Lyrita
should be reissued, together with its overwhelming coupling
of Parry’s magnificent “Ode on the Nativity”.
I’m sorry to give
this disc only a modified recommendation, but as I say, for
the unrecorded/unavailable works it is a reasonable guide. The
booklet notes on the RLPO, incidentally, tell us that “subsequent
incumbents [following Rignold] have included Efrem Kurtz and
John Pritchard, Walter Weller, David Atherton, Marek Janowski
and Libor Pešek ... followed by Petr Altrichter and Gerard Schwarz
...”. It would be nice to think that Sir Charles Groves’s sterling
work - and many fine recordings - with the orchestra from 1963
to 1977 was still remembered, but human gratitude was ever thus.
Christopher
Howell
Roderick Williams (baritone)
