Flights of Fancy

Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending 

One of the best loved of all Vaughan Williams’ works, this glorious piece was first started in 1914. It took its inspiration from a poem of George Meredith, an extract from which is inscribed on the score.

He rises and begins to round

He drops the silver chain of sound,

Of many links without a break,

In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake….

For singing till his heaven fills,

‘Tis love of earth that he instills

And ever swinging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup

And he the wine which overflows

To lift us with him as he goes…

Till lost on his aerial rings

In light, and then the fancy sings.

Vaughan Williams put the work to one side at the outbreak of war (in which he served with a military ambulance unit in France) but resumed work on it in 1920. The first performances were given by its dedicatee, Marie Hall, that for violin and piano at a concert of the Avonmouth and Shirehampton Choral Society on 15 December 1920, and that for violin and orchestra at the Queen’s Hall with the British Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult on 14 June 1921.

It is a meltingly beautiful piece, with instant appeal. (It achieved the ultimate accolade in 2008 when it was voted the nation’s favourite piece of music in Classic FM’s Hall of Fame…… ). The violin, depicting the lark, rises and soars aloft, wending its way through the sky in “rapt contemplation” and accompanied by quiet, hazy harmonies from the orchestra.  There is a short, folk-song like middle section, though like many of VW’s “folk song” moments the music is the composer’s own. The soloist then again takes wing and eventually soars away, beyond our sight and hearing. The piece ends in an infinity of space, with the violin climbing ever higher until all sound ceases.

To many, this music typifies a vision of a beautiful English scene, a picture of a Cotswold landscape, with the idea of a lark somehow relating to the fields below and sharing “a love of earth” with the listener. Some, though, have heard sadness as well as joy in the music. It was originally composed, we remember, in 1914, the fateful year, and completed in 1920. It could be that the composer’s finished thoughts are reflecting on a way of life that could never quite return. Churches in villages  all over England were erecting memorials to their young men, the loss of whom could be seen as hastening the end of the sort of rural life with its folksongs and other traditions that had held sway in the land for centuries.  A celebration of the English countryside, indeed, but perhaps also an elegy for a lost England.

© Richard Butler

Dvořák Serenade for Strings in E Major, Op.22

Joanna Marsh In Winter’s House

In Winter’s House by Joanna Marsh, originally a choral setting of a poem by Oxford-based poet Jane Draycott, has been reimagined for strings alone by Julian Azkoul. Initially commissioned for the tenors and basses of Tenebrae, the piece was premiered at Wigmore Hall on December 1st, 2019, fittingly situated within a program reflecting on the summer and winter solstices. There are many works for instruments that have been given words and then recreated for choir, but fewer the other way around. This is usually because the words play an important part in giving meaning to the music, with text influencing the structure. The music captures the fairy-tale landscape evoked by the interplay of darkness and light, renewal and rebirth so the essence of Jane Draycott’s poetic imagery is retained.

© Joanna Marsh

Coleridge-Taylor Two Noveletten for Strings from Opus. 52

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was just 27 when he completed his Four Novelletten (two of which you hear in this performance) in 1902, though he would die only a decade later from pneumonia. Nonetheless, he was a widely celebrated figure in his lifetime. Born in London to an English mother and a father from Sierra Leone, he gained his unusual name because of his mother’s love for the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and entered the Royal College of Music at the age of just 15, where he studied composition under Stanford. He was greatly admired by Elgar, and celebrated by Elgar’s editor August Jaeger (immortalised as ‘Nimrod’ in Elgar’s Enigma Variations), who called Coleridge-Taylor ‘a genius’. His huge trilogy of cantatas The Song of Hiawatha packed out the Royal Albert Hall for ten seasons in extravagant ballet versions conducted by Malcolm Sargent, though Coleridge-Taylor suffered, too, from significant racial discrimination, and his music was allowed to slip quietly from public consciousness after his death. It’s only in far more recent years that it’s undergone a major reappraisal.

His Novelletten may have been inspired by Schumann’s piano miniatures of the same name, but they were surely influenced, too, by Coleridge-Taylor’s own prowess as a concert violinist, expertise that he puts to good use in No. 3. The pieces’ lyrical, somewhat sentimental style nonetheless conceals quite a remarkable exploration of the sonic possibilities of a string orchestra, to which Coleridge-Taylor adds a tambourine and triangle. These contribute greatly to the Spanish-sounding exoticism of No. 1’s opening, before the piece moves on to an elegant, soaring melody for violins, and a lighter central section with a flavour of Mendelssohn’s fairy music about it. Though titled ‘Valse’, No. 3 feels rather too slow to be danced to. It features a solo violin from the start, whose lofty melody slowly drifts back down to earth, and, following a livelier, brighter central section, returns to bring the piece to a wistful close.

© David Kettle