The English composer Ralph (pronounced "Rafe" by the way) Vaughan Williams is very well known to church choir singers in the Anglican/Episcopal/Church of England tradition. That's due to his work as editor of The English Hymnal and the Oxford Book of Carols, and in particular to the many traditional tunes which he harmonized for both books. Aside from the church connection, his work has been sadly undervalued in North America, although his music is enduringly popular in his homeland. I'm glad to do anything I can to redress the balance.
RVW (handy short form!) was a far more diverse and skilled composer than the foregoing paragraph might suggest. His 9 symphonies are a significant landmark in the history of the form. He composed a significant body of songs, both with piano and with orchestra. His body of major choral works with orchestra is very large, and in quality ranks with the best of the last 2 centuries. He wrote several operas and several ballets, as well as some chamber music. I've mentioned him a few times already in this blog, but now I want to focus right in on some of the rarer pieces he wrote -- works which are every bit as acomplished as the better-known pieces.
I'm listening to a reissue CD in EMI's "British Composers" series, a series which draws heavily on the music of RVW. Out of four works on the disc, only one is at all well-known. The others have been extremely rare birds, both on record and in live performance.
To deal with the well-known one first: Flos Campi is a "suite" for small orchestra, wordless choir, and solo viola. In fact, the wind players in the work are all soloists too, but the viola player is the featured voice. And a voice it certainly is. The six movements are prefaced with quotations from The Song of Solomon, but no words are sung. However, the viola part is so "vocal" in character that any use of a sung text would be superfluous. The music is rapturous, lyrical, passionate -- in short, a musical love song parallel to the written love song of the Bible. Oriental, too, with more than a slight whiff of the Middle East floating through -- especially in the brazen march of the fourth movement.
Now, let's see what other treasures nestle around it. The disc opens with what I think was one of the most beautiful lyrical outpourings of RVW's entire career (and there were many of them!). When the composer set to work on the intensely musical poetry of Matthew Arnold, the result was An Oxford Elegy -- setting words from two Arnold poems, The Scholar-Gypsy and Thyrsis. Rather than try to devise musical equivalents for all of Arnold's soaring phrases, Vaughan Williams opted to use a speaking voice -- sometimes over the music, sometimes in the silence between sections -- as well as a choir singing certain selected passages. This feature has acted as a handicap to some, but I've always felt that the solution could be no other. As for the music, it has a certain autumnal quality that goes well with the tone of regret suffusing the poetry. Yet it remains intensely, visually enchanting from start to finish.
The second piece is a short choral hymn for Whitsuntide (Pentecost) -- recorded at the same time as Flos Campi and An Oxford Elegy (1968) but for some reason never released. It's a simple but effective piece indeed, with the choir's rapturous "Alleluias" punctuating the tenor soloist's phrases.
The final work (also the largest) is Sancta Civitas, described by RVW as an "oratorio". It is that, in the sense that it sets some of the most dramatic scenes in the Bible, from the book of Revelation. However, any resemblance to the traditional oratorio form stops dead right there. The music flows through a series of contrasting sections for 35 minutes without any pause. The narration of the text (the whole book is a narration, of course) is shared between a baritone soloist and no less than three choirs: a large mixed choir, a small semi-chorus, and a distant treble chorus. Each choral body has its own distinctive selection of orchestral sounds supporting it. The treble group, placed apart from the main body, has to come in distantly yet clearly.
Right there, I suppose, is the reason Sancta Civitas has been so rarely performed and recorded. Even if the numbers of performers aren't as great, that plan ranks for sheer complexity right alongside Mahler's 8th Symphony and Britten's War Requiem! Yet, as always when RVW set words to music, every sound is absolutely right in its context.
The whole piece is full of marvellous writing -- the 5/4 time, used so differently from Holst, in the battle scene when heaven opens, the beating drums and wailing cries as the angel standing in the sun summons the birds to feast on the flesh of the dead, the dirge for the fallen glories of Babylon -- each one is clearly drawn with vivid musical detail. The emotional heart of the work is the long, rapturous description of the vision of the new heaven and the new earth -- heightened by RVW's favourite device of a solo violin musing in quasi-recitative over muted strings. Then comes the spectacular hymn of praise to the Almighty, the final key tenor solo, "Behold, I come quickly," and the quiet fading away of the music.
All of the recordings on this CD I'm listening to were conducted by the dean of English choral conductors, Sir David Willcocks -- already in 1968 at the height of his powers. Vocal soloists, speaker (John Westbrook a key part of An Oxford Elegy's success), choirs, orchestras are all in top form, and the sound on the CD release couldn't be bettered. Alternate recordings are available of Flos Campi (several) and of Sancta Civitas (one that I know of, conducted by Richard Hickox) and may be easier to find, but this particular collection is a prize if you can find it.
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