Vaughan Williams

“Dark Pastoral” for Cello and Orchestra: David Matthews’ Completion of a Vaughan Williams Fragment

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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 …

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Vaughan Williams’ Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra: An Homage to Bach and the Country Fiddler

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In Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra (“Concerto Accademico”), vibrant neoclassical counterpoint meets the sunny strains of an English country fiddler. Completed in 1925, the Concerto was dedicated to the Hungarian violinist, Jelly d’Aranyi, who gave the premiere with Anthony Bernard and the London Chamber Orchestra on November 6, 1925. Initially, the work was called “Concerto Accademico,” but Vaughan Williams came to dislike the title and withdrew it prior …

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Remembering Norman Carol

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Norman Carol, the legendary American violinist and concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1966 to 1994, passed away on April 28 in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. He was 95. Born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant parents, Carol began playing the violin at age six, and performed his first concert at nine. Following initial studies with Sascha Jacobinoff, he entered the Curtis Institute of Music at 13, where he was a student of Efrem Zimbalist. …

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Remembering Sir Andrew Davis

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Sir Andrew Davis, the renowned English conductor, passed away on April 20 following a brief battle with leukemia. He was 80. Davis served as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1975 to 1988, and later as chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (2013–2019). From 1989 until 2000, he led the BBC Symphony Orchestra, becoming the longest-serving chief conductor of that ensemble since Adrian Boult. As an opera conductor, Davis …

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Vaughan Williams’ “Whither Must I Wander?”: Bryn Terfel

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The twentieth century brought a revival of the English art song, which had fallen fallow after the death of Henry Purcell in 1695. (William M. Adams) Central to this revival was Ralph Vaughan Williams, a composer who drew inspiration frequently from England’s distant musical past. First published in the magazine, The Vocalist, in 1902, Whither Must I Wander? became part of Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel. The cycle of nine songs, originally written …

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The Bells of Vienna/Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on Christmas Carols”

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Today’s post celebrates the memory of Karl Haas, the German-American musicologist and host of the long-running radio program, Adventures in Good Music. One of the program’s most popular episodes, The Story of the Bells, aired for many years on Christmas Eve. It documented the varied sounds of church bells across Europe and the Middle East. In Haas’ words, “It’s an awesome sound…a sound which leaves no room for human voices.” To continue this tradition, …

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Vaughan Williams’ “Sancta Civitas”: An Oratorio of Revelation

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In a 1988 biography, Ursula Vaughan Williams wrote that her husband “was an atheist during his later years at Charterhouse and at Cambridge, though he later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism: he was never a professing Christian.” Ironically, it was Ralph Vaughan Williams who helped the Anglican Church to compile, through the The English Hymnal of 1906, “a collection of the best hymns in the English language.” For Vaughan Williams, music inhabited the …

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