Cover of the latest Vaughan Williams Live album (courtesy of Naxos of America)
This morning I discovered that there will be yet another new Vaughan Williams Live release coming out this Friday. I also discovered that my assertion this past November that the third volume in the series, released by SOMM Records, was premature. The new release this Friday will be the fourth volume. As is usually the case, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders of for this CD.
This new volume should probably be considered in the context of its predecessors. Each of the first three albums presented a single conductor leading all of the tracks. Those conductors were, in “order of appearance,” Malcolm Sargent (Volume 1), Adrian Boult (Volume 2), and Ralph Vaughan Williams himself (Volume 3).
The fourth volume presents two different performances by conductors of two different ensembles. The first two selections are the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and the C major concerto for two pianos. They are performed by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Dmitri Mitropoulos in Carnegie Hall, the first on August 29, 1943, and the second on February 17, 1952. The members of the string quartet that perform the fantasia along with a full string ensemble are not identified by name. Presumably, they are the section leaders for First Violin, Second Violin, Viola, and Cello. (This was the way I heard the work performed by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Sadly, that event predated my personal archives; and SFS has yet to set up its own archives on a par with the archives maintained by the San Francisco Opera!) The concerto soloists for Mitropoulos were the duo of Arthur Austin Whittemore and Jack Lowe.
The remainder of the album, the eighth symphony in D minor, was performed at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on May 15, 1964. The conductor was John Barbirolli. He would subsequently perform the symphony for a stereo recording on June 19, 1956 at the same venue. Mitropoulos would later record the Tallis fantasia for stereo release at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn on March 3, 1958.
Sadly, the Vaughan William canon does not enjoy the attention it received (and justly deserved) during the twentieth century. Of the three selections on the album, the fantasia is the only one to have surfaced in the Bay Area in recent times. Neither the concerto nor the symphony follow the usual “classical” forms; but, in both cases, I take that to be an asset, rather than a liability. Mind you, having two pianos share the stage with the orchestra seldom occurs. On the more positive side, Wikipedia maintains a “List of classical piano duos” Web page; but that list does not include any dates. So it would take more than a little digging to determine which of those duos are currently active.
To the best of my knowledge, I know the eighth symphony only through recordings. Unless I am mistaken, my only encounter with any symphony performance took place in April of 2011, when Osmo Vänskä prepared a program for SFS that included his second symphony, given the title “A London Symphony.” Mind you, thanks to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I have encountered two performances of the Vaughan William tuba concerto; but the accompaniment for both of them was a piano, rather than the orchestra resources specified in the score.
On the other hand an Amazon.com search for “Vaughan Williams symphony” will turn up a rather impressive number of conductors. Most (if not all) of these recordings were made in the United Kingdom. Could it be that American conductors are reluctant to program Vaughan Williams symphonies due to “creeping jingoism?” Enquiring minds want to know!
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