Continue the journey…
We suggest works to explore a er VW’S A Pastoral Symphony
WNo work sounds as eerily prescient as Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad
hen Vaughan Williams wrote his three Norfolk Rhapsodies in the first decade of the 20th century, he initially had a larger-scale Norfolk Symphony in mind. The symphony never materialised and the score of the Third Rhapsody has since been lost. Elements of the First, however, give an inkling of what would come in A Pastoral Symphony, from the broad orchestral landscapes to the haunting trumpet solo towards the end of the piece.
(Lso/richard Hickox Chandos CHAN 10001)
Arthur Bliss was greatly affected by World War I – as well as doing service himself, he also suffered the loss of his brother, Kennard. Bliss would later reflect his wartime experiences in works such as Morning Heroes, but a closer contemporary of VW’S A Pastoral Symphony is his A Colour Symphony, written for the Three Choirs Festival in 1922. Proms fans may recognise the jaunty fanfare at the end of the second movement – it was used to introduce BBC TV coverage until 2011 – but it is the brooding first and third movements that are closer in character to VW’S work. (English Northern Philarmonia/ David Lloyd-jones Naxos 8.553460) You can’t miss the influence of Vaughan Williams on the work of
EJ Moeran, another composer who fought in World War I. Both were avid collectors of folk music, though it is also the beaches of Norfolk and hills of County Kerry that dominate the musical landscape of Moeran’s 1934 Symphony in G. (Ulster Orchestra/ Vernon Handley Chandos CHAN 10169X) No work sounds more eerily prescient than A Shropshire Lad – Rhapsody by George Butterworth, Vaughan Williams’s great friend who was killed at the Somme. The Housman poetry that inspired Butterworth to write his song cycle and subsequent orchestral rhapsody in fact tells of the Boer War, but this already bleak work is given an added edge by the fate of its composer. (Hallé/mark
Elder Hallé CDHLL7503)
Reflections on the US Civil War are heard in John Adams’s The Wound Dresser, which sets Walt Whitman’s poetry about serving as a hospital volunteer. Though it is a relatively recent work, much of the soundworld harks back to what Vaughan Williams and his peers might have conjured up. (Nathan Gunn et al Naxos 8.559031)