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Missing Vaughan Williams
Posted by Michael Bullivant, Bulawayo on April 14, 2024, 8:44 pm
I see more Vaughan Williams completions (‘The Steersman’ and ‘The Future’) have just been released on CD. Wonderful, and I can’t wait to hear them, but there's one big work he DID complete that still awaits a modern recording. When, oh when will someone give us a recording of the grandiose ‘Flourish for a Coronation’? – no small fanfare but a three movement, thirteen-minute choral and orchestral work for probably the largest forces VW ever used including eight horns and six trumpets!
Re: Missing Vaughan Williams
Posted by Nick Barnard on April 15, 2024, 8:11 am, in reply to "Missing Vaughan Williams" Edited by board administrator April 15, 2024, 4:55 pm
Michael - that's a very good call regarding the Coronation Flourish. I'm not sure his two Te Deum settings have been recorded in the orchestral versions either??
I've heard the new Dutton disc which includes the completions you mention. I found myself caught between two stools. Well played and sung, well engineered and no-one can write as effective completions as Martin Yates. For me the big big "BUT" is whether the project should be done in the first place. The Steersman is a movement RVW wrote for A Sea Symphony and rightly realised it did not need. So as a kind of "appendix" to that work it is certainly of interest to RVW completists (like me!). His realisation occured after writing the short score but before orchestration so Yates' work is really just about writing in the orchestral idiom of the symphony which he does very well.
The Future is a knottier question for me. The work itself is another of RVW's aspirational/visionary "Unknown Region" type works. From the state of the original manuscripts - incomplete/unscored/missing whole sections I get the sense that RVW realised relatively early on that either he was going down an already well-trodden path or he'd already done much the same thing before but better. Hence he set the score aside. This is NOT a Mahler 10 or Bruckner 9 or even Elgar 3 where the composer desperately wanted to complete the work but death intervened. Whether you like the completions of those 3 works or not it can be argued that the composers desire to complete the work is being respected. Here there is no evidence that RVW wanted the work completed. But to reiterate Yates and all the performers do really well. The last nail in this completing coffin for me was when, by chance, I listened to a recording of the Five Tudor Portraits straight after my first listen to The Future. As it happens, the Portraits have never been a particular favourite of mine but in this context the brilliance and novelty of RVW's settings sprang out at me against which the Future sounded like a backward-looking retread of some kind of worthy Victorian cantata - lots of worthy intent and not that much inspiration. It does continue to surprise me a little that the RVW estate seems so willing to allow just about anything by him to be resurrected. Clearly some works like the original London Symphony do deserve to be heard and I personally love the early orchestral works such as the Three Impressions (and especially The Solent) but just because a great composer wrote something does not make it by extension great......
Thanks, Nick, and I think you’re right about the Te Deums – an opportunity missed last year!
Your main point is entirely valid, I can’t argue, but, as a fellow-RVW completist, I simply want to hear anything he wrote – or might have written! The fact that ‘The Future’ might (ironically!) be backward-looking is neither here nor there, and there’s a good deal of less than great music by undoubtedly great composers that is still well worth hearing. Don’t forget either that there were nearly thirty years between ‘The Future’ and ‘Five Tudor Portraits'.
Thinking of works that composers intended to complete, I’ve often wondered just how much of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ survives as accounts seem to vary.
Re: Missing Vaughan Williams
Posted by Nick Barnard on April 15, 2024, 11:54 am, in reply to "Re: Missing Vaughan Williams" Edited by board administrator April 15, 2024, 4:56 pm
I agree with all you say.... but then again your point about the Choral Flourish suggests to me that that should have been recorded before speculative completions. My reason for mentioning the early 3 Impressions was to make the point that even in these early works the seed of the mature composer is very evident. Work in progress to be sure but something is afoot!
The liner to this new Dutton disc does not relate why RVW started writing "The Future" and it speculates that he laid it aside to focus on The Sea Symphony. My sense is that they share a similar spiritual goal and that RVW realised he would more fully achieve that in the symphony. Of course there are huge technical strides made between 1908 and the 5 Tudor Portraits but for me one of the reasons the Sea Symphony is a triumph is precisely the way it reaches beyond any technical shortcomings to transcend the technique and embody the message with such visionary fervour.
I take your point about lesser RVW still being well worth hearing - my purchase of the disc proves that(!) but I feel a degree of objective assessment is important too. Anyway - I'll be interested to hear your opinion on the disc/music as and when you hear it.
Re: Missing Vaughan Williams
Posted by John Francis on April 15, 2024, 11:25 am, in reply to "Missing Vaughan Williams" Edited by board administrator April 15, 2024, 4:54 pm
Thank you Michael and Nick
I, too, was surprised that the VW Foundation allowed The Steersman to go ahead, having resisted it for a very long time. There was a legitimate concern that someone might try to inveigle it into the Sea Symphony. Now that we can hear Martin Yates's excellent realisation (I'm listening to it now), it is so obviously not part of A Sea Symphony that any danger is averted. I'm pleased to have the opportunity to hear it, after so many years of reading about it. Like all early RVW pieces, there is greatness within it, and some of it is lovely. I wasn't expecting a desert island piece, but my life is richer for hearing it.
Similarly with The Future. I had photographed the MS in the British Library, and photographed it, with permission from what was then the VW Charitable Trust. Simon Coombs and I introduced Martin Yates to it over tea at Dorchester Abbey at the EMF, and Martin went on to make it into something. As found, it's a sketchy outline, ending mid-sentence on page 32 of a 32 page MS book; my suspicion is that the sketch was once more complete, and the final pages were lost. There were cuts in the poem leading up to that point, and what further cuts would have been made is a matter for speculation (though you can see where the composer's mind was leading, up to a point). There were some great ideas then, but I was surprised (at the Edinburgh premiere) that Yates had built it up on such a big scale - effectively taking the Sea Symphony as a model. Perhaps the nature of the poem (ideas not so far apart from Whitman) determined a similar evocation of time and space:
As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been. Whether he wakes, Where the snowy mountainous pass, Echoing the screams of the eagles, Hems in its gorges the bed Of the new-born clear-flowing stream; Whether he first sees light Where the river in gleaming rings Sluggishly winds through the plain; Whether in sound of the swallowing sea As is the world on the banks, So is the mind of the man.
Again, this is an abandoned work. Vaughan Williams was a composer who constantly moved on. Every major work was a new exploration, and he never returned (except for repeated revision of the original). It is not surprising that, during the long gestation of the Sea Symphony (sketches from 1903) he made the decision that he was going to focus his attention on that, while abandoning a might-have-been alternative based on another poet. His early sketch for Dover Beach was lost, and he was only to realise a setting of Matthew Arnold with An Oxford Elegy in 1949 - though surely inspired by his nocturnal walk with Henry Ley through many of the places named in the poems 35 years or so earlier.
The new realisation of The Future is a single movement of 33 minutes. That's rather long - I'm not sure that VW completed any movement quite as long as that; even Bruckner would surely have been proud. Just checking my collection, I see that Havergal Brian passed the 35 minute mark in the penultimate movement of the Gothic Symphony. The Future, however, occasionally sounds like VW at his most magnificent, and the length doesn't matter.
On behalf of Albion Records, I plead guilty to many first recordings of RVW works. Of course that includes the Three Impressions referred to in this thread. We recorded Margery Wentworth, which is emphatically not a missing sixth Tudor Portrait, but a completed movement which I think was for a cycle that was planned and then abandoned - A Garland of Laurels. I can see why RVW moved on - the language of that cycle of Skelton's poems is generally rather courtly, and we could have ended up with something like John Cleese's British Leyland Violin Concerto - four movements, all of them slow, with a two hour tea-break in-between. However, I think that one surviving movement is a gem, just perfect, and I'm pleased to have been responsible for realising it.
That was on the same album as Pan's Anniversary - another completed work, written in a hurry and performed just once, but a fascinating insight into the composer's development in 1905, a formative period, with 'Unknown Region' imminent and the Sea Symphony itself in the melting pot. Neither do I need to apologise for the two Tennyson settings on that album, at least one of which is just gorgeous.
I could go on about past triumphs (and I don't need a lot of persuading to do so), but you really want to talk about a couple of big works from 1937, both only available with full orchestra in recordings from that era. I heard somewhere that VW wrote the Coronation Te Deum for enormous forces so that they had to pay more musicians, but I don't know the origin of that story; it may be scurrilous.
What I do know is that these things cost more money than I can currently manage. Every Albion recording loses money, and hiring the sort of forces required for the Coronation Flourish and the Te Deum is going to cost lots and lots. Now and then, a little serendipity happens, making possible something that might otherwise be very difficult. This one needs quite a lot of serendipity. I promise to keep my eyes open, and if anybody reading this thread decides that the cause is deserving of their financial support, then I am most certainly open to offers.
Musicweb is telling me that I have only 44,620 characters remaining, so I had better stop.
Re: Missing Vaughan Williams
Posted by Nick Barnard on April 15, 2024, 2:53 pm, in reply to "Re: Missing Vaughan Williams" Edited by board administrator April 15, 2024, 4:56 pm
John - thankyou as always for your passion and insight. ALL RVW admirers are forever in Albion and your debt. Thankyou too for the insights into how this recording of "The Future" came to be. I always catch myself thinking that before any critiquing or any such major effort of discovery/restoration/promotion of these works one must give a mighty cheer of thanks that we the listeners have an opportunity to hear it AT ALL! Even compared to just 40 years ago the vast wealth of previously unknown RVW that can now be heard and enjoyed in fine new performances is astounding!
What do you think Adrian Boult would have made of these works......?!?!
Thank you, John and Nick. I’m afraid I shall have to wait a few weeks before I’m able to hear ‘The Steersman’ or ‘The Future’ but the disc is on order and will make it eventually - along with a few others including the Vaughan Williams Retrospect and 'Shamus O’Brien'! John’s background to ‘The Future’ adds to the interest and his comment that it ‘occasionally sounds like VW at his most magnificent’ even more so!
As for Albion Records, I yield to none in my admiration for their achievement and have never thought that they could cope with the ‘Flourish for a Coronation’ (or the orchestrated Te Deums) given the vast forces employed – I love the thought, incidentally, of VW deliberately using such numbers to give more musicians a pay packet! I hadn’t heard that before.
What I’ve hoped might happen is that companies recording a big English work might use it as a ‘filler’ – it might just fit with the Sea Symphony and there are several other possible candidates, the recent Parry ‘Prometheus’ for one, though admittedly the orchestral demands are a good deal more extravagant. (Disappointing that the fill-up there is a too speedy ‘Blest Pair’ however good a piece it is.)
Albion has some remarkable achievments (even if one of my favourite items is not pure VW - Adrian Williams’ ‘A Road All Paved with Stars’!) and my initial comment was in no way intended as a reflection on that – I completely endorse Nick’s encomium!
Last thing (for now, anyway!): how much of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ survives and is any of it performable?