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1958.

As a composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is still one of those constants of
English music, and although he has been dead now for fifty - one years his presence and his magnificent music haunt us still.

I remember, in the late 1970s buying two huge box-sets of his work - one
contained the nine symphonies, plus a collection of smaller orchestral
pieces, with the other a collection of all his choral compositions,

something like twenty LPs in all. The majority of both collections were
recorded in the 1950s and conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, with VW close
at hand throughout the sessions. They are without question definitive
recordings with very few later ones coming anywhere near. These
recordings have real depth as if somehow Vaughan Williams is putting his
musical thoughts and passions (and his music tells us what a passionate
man he was) straight from his heart to the disc, that the orchestras
involved - the London Philharmonic, and the New Philharmonia - were part
of his heart and brain - in other words there is an immediacy. Obviously
it is Sir Adrian Boult's conducting ( and that of David Willcocks on
some of the choral pieces) and his own intuitive scholarship and love of
the music, and great friendship with and love of RVW, that helps bring
out this feeling ( he did the same with Elgar's work), creating a sense
that the music is simply part of the air we breath, and of the pulsing
of our own hearts. It is very very personal music fashioned out of love,
memory, hurt, danger, and the violence of the 20th century which, with
the genius of the man, is writ large for those of us who want to share
not only his music but something that is now as much a part of our
heritage and culture as Shakespeare and Barbara Hepworth. And I use
those two examples because Vaughan Williams was both traditional and
extremely modern, he is a continuation of the emotionality and melodic
orchestrating genius that was Sir Edward Elgar, and one of the
greatest inspirations for the atonal red-bloodedness of Sir Harrison
Birtwistle.

Learn more about this author, Steve Newman.
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