Release Date: 09 January 2005
Label: Naxos - Ex Select Products / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 747313264322
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Description
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)Songs of Travel The House of Life Four Poems by Fredegond ShoveRalph Vaughan Williams was born in theGloucestershire village of Down Ampney in 1872, theson of a clergyman. His ancestry on both his father's andmother's side was of some intellectual distinction. Hisfather was descended from a family eminent in the law,while his maternal grandfather was a Wedgwood and hisgrandmother a Darwin. On the death of his father in1875 the family moved to live with his mother's fatherat Leith Hill Place in Surrey. As a child VaughanWilliams learned the piano and the violin and received aconventional upper middle class education atCharterhouse, after which he delayed entry toCambridge, preferring instead to study at the RoyalCollege of Music, where his teachers included HubertParry and Walter Parratt, later Master of the Queen'sMusick, both soon to be knighted. In 1892 he took up hisplace at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he readHistory, but took composition lessons from CharlesWood. After graduation in both History and Music, hereturned to the Royal College, where he studiedcomposition with Stanford, and, perhaps moresignificantly, became a friend of a fellow-student,Gustav Holst. The friendship with Holst was to prove ofgreat importance in frank exchanges of views on oneanother's compositions in the years that followed.In 1897 Vaughan Williams married and took theopportunity to visit Berlin, where he had lessons fromMax Bruch and widened his musical experience. InEngland he turned his attention to the collection of folkmusicin various regions of the country, an interest thatmaterially influenced the shape of his musical language.In 1908 he went to Paris to take lessons, particularly inorchestration, from Ravel. By now he had begun tomake a reputation for himself as a composer, not leastwith the first performance in 1910 of A Sea Symphony,setting words by Walt Whitman, and his Fantasia on aTheme of Thomas Tallis in the same year. At theoutbreak of war in 1914 he enlisted at once in the RoyalArmy Medical Corps as a private. This was also the yearof the London Symphony and of his rhapsodic work forviolin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending. Three yearslater, after service in Salonica that seemed to himineffective, he took a commission in the Royal GarrisonArtillery and was posted to France. There he was alsoable to make some use of his abilities as a musician.After the war Vaughan Williams returned to theRoyal College of Music, now as a professor ofcomposition, a position he retained until 1938. In theseyears he came to occupy a commanding place in themusical life of the country, with a series of compositionsthat seemed essentially English, the apparent successorof Elgar, although his musical language was markedlydifferent. The war of 1939 brought the challenge ofcomposition for the cinema, with notable scores for The49th Parallel in 1940 and a number of other films,culminating in 1949 in his music for the film Scott of theA
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Yaqi Yang; Margarita Parsamyan; Robynne Redmon; Minghao Liu; Frank Ragsdale; Kim Josephson; Kevin S
Vilmos Csikos; Olivier Lechardeur; Manon Lamaison
Tomas Cotik; Martingale Ensemble; Ken Selden
