Iola Fantasia
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Page 2 l l u B r e t e The P © h p a ALBION RECORDS r g o ALPH AUGHAN t R V o h WILLIAMS SOCIETY P Ralph Vaughan Williams Dedicated to widening the knowledge, understanding and appreciation of Ralph Vaughan Williams V IOLA FANTASIA President SIR ANDREW DAVIS CBE Vice Presidents STEPHEN CONNOCK MBE, DR JOYCE KENNEDY Chairman SIMON COOMBS FOR FURTHER INFORMATION Mark Hammett (Membership Secretary) 27 Landsdowne Way, Bexhill-on-Sea, GHAN East Sussex, TN40 2UJ U W A I V L Email: [email protected] L H I A www.rvwsociety.com P M L A S Martin Outram viola Julian Rolton piano Mark Padmore tenor R Registered Charity no: 1156614 S O C I E T Y RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 1872-1958 Suite for Viola and Pianoforte 16 Fantasia on Greensleeves 4’39 1 Prelude 2’43 arrangedforViolaandPianobyWatsonForbes 2 Carol 2’15 17 10’34 3 Christmas Dance 2’06 Fantasia on Sussex Folk Tunes PianoreductionbyJohnLenehan 4 Ballad 6’03 VioloncellopartarrangedforViolabyMartinOutram 5 Moto perpetuo 3’29 6 Musette 3’09 Four Hymns 7 Polka Mélancholique 2’57 ForTenorvoice,PianoandViolaobbligato 8 Galop 2’00 18 Lord! Come Away 3’36 9 Romance for Viola and Pianoforte 6’29 19 Who is This Fair one? 3’47 20 Come Love, Come Lord 3’12 Six Studies in English Folk Song 21 Evening Hymn 3’26 versionforViolaandPianoforte 10 Adagio (Lovely on the Water) 1’31 11 Andante sostenuto (Spurn Point) 1’13 Total recording time: 68’10 12 Larghetto (Van Diemen’s Land) 1’12 13 Lento (She Borrowed Some of her Mother’s Gold) 1’13 14 Andante tranquillo (The Lady and the Dragoon) 1’21 15 Allegro vivace (As I Walked Over London Bridge) 0’55 Martin Outram ~ Viola Julian Rolton ~ Piano Mark Padmore ~ Tenor (tracks18-21) Vaughan Williams and the viola Ralph Vaughan Williams was born into an affluent and well-connected family on 12 Hugely significant in Vaughan Williams’s development was his collecting of folk-songs, October 1872. His great, great grandfather on his mother’s side was the celebrated which he began in Ingrave in the Essex countryside in December 1903. Here he tapped potter Josiah Wedgwood and his great uncle was the evolutionist Charles Darwin. His into music which had seemed to emanate from the English soil and had matured over father, who came from a family of eminent lawyers and clergymen and was himself a many centuries. His love of this repertory led to him integrating whole folk-songs and vicar, died suddenly when Ralph was only two years of age. Ralph’s mother took him tunes into many works. However, such was his internalisation of this music, he was and his brother and sister to live in her family home, Leith Hill Place in Wotton, able to combine its spirit and contours with the deep feelings he had for the great Surrey. From there he spent periods away at boarding schools at Rottingdean and tradition of English choral music to produce his own strikingly original language. As Charterhouse. It was at the latter that, in addition to playing the violin, he also took Vaughan Williams himself put it: ‘The art of music above all arts is the expression of to the viola, which he continued to enjoy playing as an amateur for much of the rest the soul of the nation’. Also highly important was his editorship of the English Hymnal of his life. from 1904-06 and his studies with Maurice Ravel, with whom Vaughan Williams had Only four years younger, the great viola virtuoso Lionel Tertis (1876-1975) , was to play lessons for three months in the winter of 1907-08. Ravel claimed that he was his only a central role in Vaughan Williams’s relationship with the instrument, being the pupil who ‘n’écrit pas de ma musique’ and was ‘proud’ to promote a Paris performance inspiration for two of the works presented here ( Romance and the Suite ). The of the Englishman’s masterly OnWenlockEdge . magnificent and highly original FlosCampi of 1925, a work for solo viola, wordless Equally crucial throughout Vaughan Williams’s life was his love of literature. Particular choir and chamber orchestra was also dedicated to Tertis and premiered by him the favourites included the Bible, Housman, Blake, Whitman, Synge, Bunyan, Shakespeare same year at the Queen’s Hall under the direction of Sir Henry Wood. and Hardy. He also loved to be read to. This facet of Vaughan Williams’s personality is Following Charterhouse, Vaughan Williams spent periods studying at the Royal clearly represented here especially in the FourHymns , with his eclectic choice of College of Music and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history and music. authors, though his fascination with folk songs and other vocal forms could easily lead At the RCM, he studied with Hubert Parry (who seemed to represent a link back to to instrumental manifestations of this music, as in the SixStudiesinEnglishFolkSong the great Tudor choral music tradition which Vaughan Williams so loved) and Charles and the Carol in the Suite . Villiers Stanford. He idolised the former but, from statements made at different times The SuiteforViolaandSmallOrchestra dates from 1934 and was first performed by throughout his life, it is clear that Vaughan Williams developed a deep, if cautious, Lionel Tertis and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dr Malcolm respect for the latter, feeling that he and Stanford were artistically ‘poles apart’, finally Sargent at the Queen’s Hall, London on 12 November (and again the following day). concluding that he was a ‘lovable, quarrelsome and generous man’. He struck up a Tertis gave further performances during the next year, in April (again with Sargent and close friendship with his fellow student Gustav von Holst, who was to remain a the LPO), the Proms in September and in the winter series of symphony concerts in powerful influence until his death in 1934. Bournemouth. 1936 saw the publication of Vaughan Williams’s reduction for viola and piano. Ursula Vaughan Williams stated that it ‘was a work he had found difficult to Concert in London on 19 January 1962 and the work was published later the same write’ and in her biography quoted the composer from a letter written in 1933: ‘...my year. Vaughan Williams draws an exquisite line which develops from a sense of viola suite is not finished – I do not know if it ever will be’. The eight movements, dreamy reverie to intense passion and restlessness. This beautiful short work closes in unusually sub-divided into three groups, were described by the MusicalTimes after a mood of reflective calm. the premiere as ‘lively, peaceful, jocular, wistful – anything but portentous – with the The SixStudiesinEnglishFolkSong date from 1926 and were first performed on 4 voice of folk-song slipping in, as if by right, at every other breath...Vaughan Williams June that year by the dedicatee May Mukle playing the cello, accompanied by her has written a work...crowded with points of musical interest, sudden gleams of beauty, sister Anne on the piano. Vaughan Williams produced alternative versions for viola, inspired simplicities, and telling subtleties.’ When the Strad magazine reviewed the violin and clarinet. The Studies are not exact transcriptions of folk songs, but are publication of the viola and piano version in its August 1937 edition, it remarked on based on the following: 1) LovelyontheWater (TheSpringtimeoftheYear ); 2) Spurn the arrangement being ‘a model of skill’. It added that this was an ‘important addition Point ; 3) VanDiemen’sLand ; 4) SheBorrowedSomeofherMother’sGold ; 5) TheLady to the viola repertoire’ in which the ‘strong personality of the composer shows itself andtheDragoon ; 6) AsIwalkedoverLondonBridge . According to Michael Kennedy, it throughout the work’. The composer Gordon Jacob (who had produced the piano was his work on this set that prompted Vaughan Williams to consider a larger work reduction of FlosCampi ) related in the Easter 1959 Royal College of Music Magazine for cello and orchestra, which became the Fantasiaon SussexFolkTunes . how Vaughan Williams (his former teacher) had shown him the MotoPerpetuo and Taking the SixStudies in order, TheSpringtimeoftheYear was first set by Vaughan played it through, suggesting the solo viola part ‘by a continuous buzzing through his Williams for SATB in 1913 as part of his FiveEnglishFolkSongs . He had heard it in a teeth whilst he played the irregularly rhythmed chords of the accompaniment not version known as LovelyontheWater sung by a Mr Hilton in South Walsham, Norfolk always with complete accuracy’! In its orchestral form, the score asks for celesta and in April 1908. SpurnPoint appears in the NorfolkRhapsodyno2 (1906) and was first harp and there is much particularly beautiful writing for the woodwind instruments; collected by Vaughan Williams in 1905; he heard it again in Norfolk in 1908 sung in these are transferred to the piano with imagination and great accomplishment by an inn in Hickling, by a Mr Knight. The third study is based on VanDiemen’sLand , Vaughan Williams. first collected by Vaughan Williams in Essex in 1904. Van Diemen’s Land was an early The Romance is thought to have been written for Lionel Tertis at approximately the name for modern-day Tasmania and the song tells of a poacher who as a punishment time of the First World War.