Release Date: 05 January 2003
Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 747313586721
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Description
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)Fantasia on Greensleeves Fantasia on a Theme of ThomasTallisRalph Vaughan Williams was born in the Gloucestershirevillage of Down Ampney in 1872, the son of a clergyman. His ancestry on bothhis father's and mother's side was of some intellectual distinction. His fatherwas descended from a family eminent in the law, while his maternal grandfatherwas a Wedgwood and his grandmother a Darwin. On the death of his father in 1875the family moved to live with his mother's father at Leith Hill Place inSurrey. As a child Vaughan Williams learned the piano and the violin, andreceived a conventional upper middle class education at Charterhouse, afterwhich he delayed entry to Cambridge, preferring instead to study at the RoyalCollege of Music, where his teachers included Hubert Parry and Walter Parratt,later Master of the Queen's Musick, both soon to be knighted. In 1892 he tookup his place at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read History, but tookcomposition lessons from Charles Wood. After graduation in both History andMusic, he returned to the Royal College, where he studied composition withStanford, and, perhaps more significant, became a friend of a fellow-student,Gustav Holst. The friendship with Holst was to prove of great importance infrank exchanges of views on one another's compositions in the years thatfollowed. In1897 Vaughan Williams married and took the opportunity to visit Berlin, wherehe had lessons from Max Bruch and widened his musical experience. In England heturned his attention to the collection of folk-music in various regions of the country,an interest that materially influenced the shape of his musical language. In1908 he went to Paris to take lessons, particularly in orchestration, fromRavel, and had by now begun to make a reputation for himself as a composer, notleast with the first performance in 1910 of his first symphony, A Sea Symphony,setting words by Walt Whitman, and his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis inthe same year. The even tenor of his life was interrupted by the war, when heenlisted at once in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a private. 1914 was alsothe year of the London Symphony and of his rhapsodic work for violin andorchestra, The Lark Ascending. Three years later, after service in Salonicathat seemed to him ineffective, he took a commission in the Royal GarrisonArtillery and was posted to France. There he was also able to make some use ofhis abilities as a musician. Afterthe war Vaughan Williams returned to the Royal College of Music, now as aprofessor of composition, a position he retained until 1938. In these years hecame to occupy a commanding position in the musical life of the country, with aseries of compositions that seemed essentially English, the apparent successorof Elgar, although his musical language was markedly differe
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
Soloists:New Budapest 4Tet
Soloists:Nancy So
Slovak State Po/Walter
