British composer R. Vaughan Williams

Namely disc 13, with the Violin Sonata, the Phantasy Quintet, 6 Studies in English Folksong (cello and piano version), and the String Quartet No. 2.

The Tallis Fantasia is monolithic BTW - revisit it!

That EMI box is a great deal. I have a lot of the single releases from it so I can't really justify, but a great deal.

I have only listened to his chamber music off and on because I keep coming back to Dona Nobis Pacem, the Five Tudor Songs, On Wenlock Edge, Flos Campi and ~especially~ over and over again the incredible run of symphonies 4 through 6. Violent rage (4), transcendence of spirit (5), and a bizarre post-everything desolation (6).

In the big EMI box, did they use their Paavo Berglund versions of syms 4 and 6 and the Alexander Gibson of sym 5, or do they just use the Boult symphony cycle? The former, I hope-- those are top-notch performances. Boult is soft for me in this uncompromising music.

Actually neither: Vernon Handley and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. I might have to diversify as per your instructions. BTW sorry to harass but did you receive my mails re: Debussy?

Lol synergies; I'm singing a couple of solos from "Five Mystical Songs" in a concert next week ("Love Gave Me Flowers" and the second verse of "The Call"). We're also doing "Antiphon" and "Bitter-Sweet".

Dude is a choral master IMO.

Ah-- well I have Handley in the 6th and 9th and those are both excellent performances. I'll bet that's a worthwhile cycle.

The Berglund/Gibson sym 4-6 trilogy is on a cheapo EMI double with Silvestri's renditions of Tallis and The Wasps as filler.

LOL I really need to change my ILX email from my yahoo to my gmail. I'll go check the yahoo now to see what you wrote me abt Debussy!

DJP that's awesome, 5 Mystical Songs is great. Same concert as the Bach cantata?

OK I replied!

No, the cantata was today as prelude to the church service.

I'm tempted to poll his symphonies but I doubt anyone would participate.

I think I've finally made peace with his music after many years of relative bafflement due to his inflated reputation in the UK (which is perfectly understandable btw). So I would now argue that his output is generally quite strong and considerably more imaginative than I would acknowledge in my arch-modernist moments of yore. Re-acquainting myself with the symphonies over a period of several months via Andrew Davis's cycle at the helm of the BBC Symphony Orchestra has likely made a difference insofar as he takes a cooler, less jingoistic and heart-on-sleeve view of the music, and I generally trust Davis's credentials more than those of his peers since he is a noted conductor of late 20th century music (Birtwistle and Takemitsu, among others) in addition to excelling in the traditional British repertoire (his Elgar is wonderful as well, and I dislike Elgar).

I doubt I'll ever fully crack the choral Sea Symphony, which smacks of Victorianism despite it being a Walt Whitman setting, the London Symphony sounds lopsided even in its revised version, and the Sinfonia antartica does unfortunately come across as a series of episodic fragments when divorced from the accompanying film, but the less immediately programmatic works are all excellent: the 3rd is far less pastoral than its ostensible title might indicate (ghosts of the trenches linger between its melodic lines), the 4th is positively seething, a battering ram, and the 5th is fully deserving of its plaudits as a moving homage to Sibelius. The quasi inaudible final movement of the 6th is borderline Cageian in its conceptual daring, and the timbral experiments of his final two symphonies, while mild in comparison with what some of his contemporaries were attempting at the time (and even late Nielsen tbh), are lovely nonetheless and I'd frankly take them over most of Shostakovich's weaker symphonies. Job: A Masque for Dancing makes for a wonderful addition to Davis's set, deploying a more acerbic musical language, in line with the 4th Symphony, and both The Lark Ascending and the Tallis Fantasia leave me as wide-eyed as ever, overplayed though they may be.

I'm still waiting for a definitive cycle, though. Aside from the Davis, I liked Haitink's and Boult's, but all three have significant flaws (to varying degrees).

that seems like a very fair summation, i've been listening to him a fair bit this summer, and tho of course it's not High Modernism there is a definite strand of modernist and 20th century music running thru him, from the engagement with folk music to the uses of texture and volume and "drift" for want of a better word. it might say something that he's never been fully swallowed by the flag-waving crowd in the way poor undeserving Elgar has been

I like his folky stuff the best but that's predominantly the source material - the rest of his stuff I can take or leave. Sinfonia Antarctica probably the most tedious thing I have ever sat through in a concert environment.

pom is right the 4th bangs and "Lark Ascending" is key small m modernism

I adore him...’The Lark Ascending’ is stunning but his 5th Symphony brings me to tears...

he's never been fully swallowed by the flag-waving crowd in the way poor undeserving Elgar has been

That's quite interesting. He did study with Bruch and Ravel, and was more cosmopolitan in his outlook than most of his peers. So while he clearly drew on a distinctly English musical unconscious via folk song, I never get the sense, as a (foreign) listener, that he's using it as an imperialistic cudgel to demonstrate the purported superiority of British culture or some such – it's mainly a matter of writing what one (thinks one) knows, especially when there are unsuspected riches still waiting to be plumbed in one's own backyard. The same can incidentally be said for his near-contemporaries Béla Bartók and George Enescu, both of whom viewed the folk music of their respective countries (which have historically overlapped a great deal) as a means of shaking up the primarily Austro-Germanic academic tradition that makes up the core classical repertoire, and therefore as one musical idiom among many (albeit an audibly prominent one). Exit aesthetic zero-sum games whereby to write in one language is necessarily to belittle another national tradition (see: Wagner, Debussy), which makes for a better use of post-Romantic ideology than resentful isolationism.

In terms of his private feelings, however, Vaughan Williams appears to have been a bit of a two-faced figure: quite progressive for his time, certainly more left than right-leaning, but not up to par with what we would expect of a composer committed to those descriptors today:

https://unherd.com/2019/01/vaughan-williams-not-simply-a-nostalgic-nationalist/#en-18184-1

I did lol @ the line about how an influx of Austrian refugees/immigrants risks dislodging British culture, although to be perfectly fair, non-openly fash European countries had their reasons for thinking Austria was a wee bit problematic (and it still kind of is…).

As for The Lark Ascending's small m modernism, yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I watched a cute little stop-motion animation video by a duo of French YouTubers who specialize in popularizing classical music (aka vulgarisation, heh) and they do a good job of pointing out just how revolutionary that kind of overt simplicity was in 1914, relating it to Satie – which I hadn't thought of, but it makes perfect sense.

it becomes a current in what we could very loosely call postmodernism i guess, by which all i mean is directions explored by 20th century music once serialism fell off

I've repped for him elsewhere, but among younger British composers, the most VW-ian of the lot has got to be Edmund Finnis, who achieves a similar sense of quasi mystical stasis rooted in English pastoralism without falling prey to parochialism. His harmonic language also happens to be richer than that of Tavener and other pomo Western 'holy minimalism' imitators. The Air, Turning, his sole widely distributed monograph (for NMC), is an excellent starting point if you're curious.

thank you pom for these thoughtful posts, which i’ll surely return to if i ever decide to explore the work of VW.

My pleasure, budo!