“Dark Pastoral” for Cello and Orchestra: David Matthews’ Completion of a Vaughan Williams Fragment
A four-minute fragment of music, sketched by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1942, is all that exists of a cello concerto the composer intended to write for Pablo Casals. In 2010, contemporary English composer David Matthews (b. 1943) developed the fragment, which would have become the concerto’s slow movement, into the elegiac Dark Pastoral for cello and orchestra. Vaughan Williams’ original two-stave short score set out the movement’s A section, with only a few instrumental …