VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Pan's Anniversary
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Genre:
Vocal
Label: Albion
Magazine Review Date: 09/2022
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 72
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: ALBCD054
Author: Andrew Achenbach
In a letter dated March 6, 1905, Ralph Vaughan Williams accepted a commission from Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Club to supply the music for a revival of Ben Jonson’s masque Pan’s Anniversary (first staged in January 1621 at the Court of King James I, with designs by Inigo Jones). The event was to take place in Stratford’s Bancroft Gardens a mere six weeks later (on April 24, Shakespeare’s birthday) and the deadline proved so tight that he drafted in his dear friend, Gustav Holst, to help with arranging a number of familiar folk tunes and 16th-century dance numbers that punctuate the action.
By far the bulk of RVW’s own music can be found in the four Hymns to Pan, the second of which (‘Pan is our all’) will have your ears pricking as it is none other than an early iteration of the tune for For all the saints (remember that, at this time, he was also hard at work on assembling The English Hymnal). Both this and the succeeding Hymn III (‘If yet, if yet’) contain some agreeable enough invention (the latter has some deft, subtly Mendelssohnian touches) – and narrators, vocalists, choir and orchestra alike throw themselves into proceedings with commendable skill and gusto – but, musically speaking, it’s no great shakes overall.
Altogether more rewarding, to my mind, is the exquisite setting for baritone, chorus and orchestra of Margery Wentworth (the second of 11 poems from John Skelton’s The Garland of Laurel from 1523). Roy Douglas and others have conjectured (not unreasonably) that RVW originally intended it for inclusion in his dazzling Five Tudor Portraits, but Christopher Gordon (who has tastefully orchestrated it from the manuscript sketches) suggests the composer may also have been contemplating a separate work based purely on The Garland of Laurel (no texts from which appear in the Five Tudor Portraits). Johnny Herford sings it beautifully. Gordon has also done a lovely job of scoring and editing two very early – and really most beguiling – Tennyson settings from the period of RVW’s tutelage under Stanford at the Royal College of Music: Peace, come away (to words from Canto LVII of In memoriam) exists in two incomplete manuscripts housed in the British Library, the first draft being dated September 27, 1895; To sleep! To sleep! for choir and orchestra (to a text from Act 1 scene 3 of the 1892 play The Foresters) most likely dates from the following year and represents the budding composer’s very first work with orchestra (his even earlier Five Valses for orchestra were never completed).
The vocal arrangement of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis grew out of a lockdown project in 2020 masterminded by Timothy Burke, director of the Chorus of Royal Northern Sinfonia. As he explains in the booklet: ‘Knowing that the project would have to be digital, with any singing recorded on mobile phones, we tried to make this a virtue rather than a necessity.’ In the event some 650 recordings from 130 different singers were layered to accompany a 15-minute film, The World How Wide, and that soundtrack has now been reworked for voices and string octet. William Vann secures a fervent account of what is a refreshing new take on an old friend, and it’s preceded here by a rendering of Tallis’s Why fum’th in fight, one of his nine Tunes from Archbishop Parker’s Psalter (published in 1567) that sparked the original.
Exemplary production and presentation, as is customary from this source. RVW mavens will surely want to investigate.
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